Random Fractals» Java http://randomfractals.com/blog Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:57:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc en hourly 1 Back to SVG and a cup of Java ME http://randomfractals.com/blog/2009/02/05/back-to-svg-and-a-cup-of-java-me/ http://randomfractals.com/blog/2009/02/05/back-to-svg-and-a-cup-of-java-me/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:32:02 +0000 Taras http://tarasnovak.com/blog/?p=687 Over the past two weeks I’ve been plowing through tons of SVG code, rereading the good old SVG Essentials reference book and checking out Painting the Web, a more recent title on modern web design and graphics, in preparation for some potential mobile app work with SVG, Java ME, and hopefully some Flex here and there.

Turns out SVG Tiny is the only standard that is supported by most mobile phones to do any decent UI design work for mobile devices. By now all major browsers including WebKit and the clones with their mobile versions support SVG, which is a good choice for mobile devices due to the varying screen sizes, limited bandwidth and memory.

So, I’ve decided to get back to SVG and a cup of Java ME, even though I am still planning to do some Flex dev work.

To refresh my memory on how things work in SVG and speed up UI design I’ll be using Flex with some open source SVG frameworks for prototyping since I am very comfortable in this development environment. Besides, Java ME graphics api is not much different from the core Flash graphics api and should be easy to port to.

After a brief time of setting up my new mobile Java dev. environment, checking out all the emulators, and getting some code moving things, I can tell that I have not missed much in 5 years as far as Java and SVG goes.

A few years ago, I’ve built a full-blown data visualization library in SVG for a corporate portal dashboard solution. This was done back in the days when not many folks knew about SVG, Adobe just released and still supported their IE SVG Viewer browser plugin, and Java portals, XML and XSL were the hottest technologies to use for web apps.

Many things have changed in web application development over the years. Open-source software, virtualization, cloud computing, mobile web, REST, and component-based frameworks are the new norm now.

It’s good to finally see SVG gaining momentum and becoming a standard that is supported and used in web applications and on mobile devices. I think slowly but surely SVG will replace raster images for most web graphics and mobile app UI design needs, as well as enable true scalable GeoWeb that’s beyond raster image tiles backbone.

Expect more posts on Flex, SVG, GeoWeb and mobile Java from now on.

In the meantime, here is a quick Degrafa Tetris game (with source) I hacked last weekend for fun. I came across Mozilla SVG Tetris and just could not resist the temptation.  Tetris running in MS-DOS on UKNC was the first computer game I’ve played back in 1988. And yes, I know Turbo Pascal too, in case you wonder. It was the first programming language most Soviet Computer Science students mastered back then.

Look where we are now.

Related Posts

]]> http://randomfractals.com/blog/2009/02/05/back-to-svg-and-a-cup-of-java-me/feed/ 0