Jacob

[Gerhard Paulus]

Hi folks,

I'm new here so I want to say "Hello" to everybody and to Peter Mehlitz
in
particular. I met him at German JAVADAYS and after that decided to give
Kaffe a try. There seem to be some smart people behind Kaffe <g> and I
like
the concept.

I am working on an GNU GPL open source project called Jacob.
It's the prototype for an all Java object oriented database with IDE. I
have
changed the GUI part of Jacob so that it can be put to practical use
with Kaffe/Linux and Sun's VM/Win32. But it proved difficult because
there
are a number of bugs / anomalies in Kaffe.

Please download the sources for Jacob and supporting files from this
location

         Jacob.zip

It's ca. 500 KB and must be decompressed with

        jar xvf Jacob.zip

I listed the bugs in the file Kaffe.bugs which also shows how to
reproduce them.
Please read DBDev.help as a quick start to test the IDE and the database
GUI.
Most GUI windows have a Help button which will display a help text.

Please compile the .java sources with -nowarn flag or you see exactly
100 warnings <g>.
You can start the IDE with

kaffe DBDev       // for command window and editing/compiling .java
files

You can test the database GUI (Browse, Navigator, Edit, Form designer,
Property sheet, Image editor) with

kaffe Suite all   // simple regression test builds small database for
Person class
kaffe Suite 13   // starts Browse of Person objects and leads to all GUI
features

Please keep in mind that I'm working with a German setting (keyboard,
langage)
which might explain some problems I encountered with keyPressed() and
fonts.
I'm also pretty new to Linux <g>. As window manager I used fvwm95. And I
compiled
Kaffe from scratch (no precompiled libaries) with a libc5 system.

Please test the GUI also on a Win32 system with Sun's VM to see the
differences.
You need the pizza compiler classes installed to use the IDE.
And you must recompile DBTextEdit.java with Sun's compiler if you have
compiled
it with pizza. Otherwise Sun's VM will immediately crash when you start
the IDE.

I really would like to see Jacob working properly with Kaffe on Linux.
Right now this is difficult. In particular I had to disable all
ScrollPane
objects where the canvas child components never fire mouse events.
And Kaffe just doesn't accept the .gif files which the image editor
produces.

But then again, I'm optimistic these bugs can be fixed ...

Best wishes,
Gerhard