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Columba Developers Interview

Posted by timothy on from the swing-'em-high dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Scott Delap's ClientJava.com has an interview with the developers behind Columba, an open source Java email client. They answer questions about Columba development and general Java/Swing issues desktop Java applications face nowadays."

13 comments

  1. Article text, in case of slashdotting... by Xaroth · · Score: 3, Funny

    Columba - Java Email Client
    This site is temporarily unavailable.
    Please notify the System Administrator

    ...oh, wait.

    --
    That green slime had it coming.
  2. I Hope It's Not Finished by snookerdoodle · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From TFI: "What I'd like to emphasize here is that, compared to Thunderbird for example, we target grown up users or business users. We follow strict user interface guidelines. We have predefined preferences, in comparison to ultimate configurability. Only the most important option can be changed in the UI. More advanced options have to be changed in xml-based configuration files manually. We try hard to make things as easy, yet powerful, as possible."

    Translation: "We'll make the gui so gui wimps can change the more advanced options later", or "what kind of idiot would want to change THAT?", or "It's not a bug, it's a FEATURE!".

    Seriously, I hate to rain on anyone's parade, especially someone offering Truly Free software, but I guess none of us are immune from spin-doctoring...

    Mark

  3. Hey, Columba is on the PMD scoreboard... by tcopeland · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...scoreboard is here, Columba report is here. Not too bad, although there's some room for cleanup...

    Oh, and the duplicate code report is here.

    --
    The Army reading list
  4. And I thought /. articles had bad spelling... by Hakubi_Washu · · Score: 1

    Jeez, I'm used to reading plain out garbled sentences here, but this article (The actual FA, not the submission) does it on purpose (check for "hugh" instead of "huge"... appears at least twice...)

  5. OSX 10.4: platform not supported... by curious.corn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... so long for cross platform compatibility. Had it been SWT based I'd be more forgiving but supposedly it's swing based. Ok, so what was so un-java to require a compiled .so for it? Attachments? Mime helper associations? crypto? S-I-G-H, repeat after me: "Java is not .NET"! I'm still waiting for an email client that manages IMAP ACLs... (and evolution is the only one that does LDAP directory editing... grr!) I was curious to see if this java MUA did but (sigh), I'm a poor soul on a Mac, in a java-cross-platform-except-for-anything-but-M$-Lin ux... go figure...

    --
    Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
    1. Re:OSX 10.4: platform not supported... by Suppafly · · Score: 1

      had you read the article, you'd see that there are good reasons that they didn't go with swt.

    2. Re:OSX 10.4: platform not supported... by Excelsior · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Where do you get off saying "OSX 10.4" isn't supported? Then you bitch about cross-platform claims of Java? You are wrong on both counts. And even worse, someone moderates you up. The FUD around Java spread by the Slashdot crowd is deafening. And I'll likely be moderated down even though I'm giving accurate information in response to your disinformation.

      No, there is no OSX-labeled download. But there is a platform-independent download. There is a Zip file (don't pay attention to the fact that it says "Window ZIP file" - that just refers to the fact that Zip is often considered a Windows file format, even though it really isn't) and a tar.bz2 download (It says "Unix". OSX 10.4 is Unix, though you seem to be unaware). Download either, extract the zip, and run it.

      And when it runs, email an apology to Java for your ignorance.

    3. Re:OSX 10.4: platform not supported... by curious.corn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Excuse me? Let me minimize Eclipse (yeah, fool) for a minute and answer to your jab. I'm a long time Linux tinkerer and cheap sysadmin so bash and tar -xzvf *.tar.gz doesn't scare me at all (that's why I switched to OS X in the first place). I did download the friggin' tarball or zip or whatever and did run the bloody jar... only to get a stupid "Platform not supported!" box. If you had enough neurons to _understand_ what I wrote you'd easily understand I was criticizing the authors of the program for screwing portability with some JNI (Java Native Interface... google it will you?) targeting Windows and Linux. Then I drew the analogy with .NET calls to native Win API that have the same effect on code portability. Do you expect all mac users are drooling fools? Mods, don't nuke his post... it's so ridiculous it's actually funny... so... back to my Java coding...

      --
      Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
    4. Re:OSX 10.4: platform not supported... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hi guys,

      apparently this "platform not supported" message is a bug, which has already been resolved in CVS. Next version will work also on OS X, as everybody would expect from a Java app.

  6. Not finished, but on very good track by Antiocheian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Strict UI guidelines may not be a feature, but is most certainly not a bug. Maybe they shouldn't have said "grown up users", allright. The client looks great and works very well. In its Java context of course which means that there is no really tight integration with the operation system (windows xp in my case) features: rather slow menus, no cleartype, non-standard file open/save dialogs etc). It has potential to surpass thunderbird.

    1. Re:Not finished, but on very good track by snookerdoodle · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I was really referring to the implication that there are things that a user might wish to change that require editing an xml file to accomplish and acting as if that fact was a feature. It's possible, if not likely, that editing those files and making a simple typo could leave one with an unusable installation. Someone Truly Serious about UI Guidelines generally makes their app fit in with the platform. Firefox is an example of having at least some menu items where one expects them on the platform one is using. For example, on Windoze, preferences are under Tools->Options... while, IIRC (I'm at work on my windoze box but use Fedora at home), they're under Edit->Preferences... under Linux.

      A better approach might have been, "Users currently have the ability to configure what we think are the most important things via the form under Preferences. Those who feel confident can configure just about anything by editing the xml configuration files directly but we're working on finishing the preferences forms so that nobody has to do this." Or something to that effect.

      Don't get me wrong: the potential of creating a Truly Platform Independant (TM) application (at least on platforms that have a JVM) is immense, and I feel like the editors were right to post this story.

      Mark