You may be interested in checking out Carnegie Mellon's The IrYdium Project, which has been developing a Virtual Laboratory, as a free (with a lowercase "f") simulation of acid base chemistry, including thermodynamics, strong/weak acids, redox, indicator chemistry, solubility, etc. It's currently being used by a number of universities and high schools, and is funded by the NSF.
(Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that I'm the author of said software -- having worked on it for the last six years -- so I may be a little biased.:)
In some ways, I'd tend to agree. And indeed, my girlfriend is a techie. Ironically however, it wasn't until dating me that she became a techie and is now pursuing a career in Information Systems. I guess in hindsight then, I followed Uncle Robin's advice, but she turned into a geek anyway!:)
This bug that you refer to about slow printing is referenced in the Java Developer Connection's Bug Parade. It's apparently due to the fact that all components in Java2 are double-buffered and printing via a paint(Graphics) method call will double buffer the Graphics and spool an image of the size of the page. The easiest workaround is to disable double buffering on the component in question. I've also read that by using a third method to provide the actual painting (and calling that method from both paint and print) you can thereby avoid the system operations (overhead) associated with a call to paint.
In general, I have never found a bug in Java that I could not overcome easily with the assistance of the Bug Database or by looking at the Java/Swing source code.
Concerning your comment about AWT design, I believe that it was Sun's intention to not give one full control over the _exact_ look of a program -- anyone who wishes to create a true cross-platform application would not be so concerned with _exact_ replication of a l&f across platforms. This is also a very hard task to accomplish with native widgets (lowest common denominator). To this end, Sun created Swing. (I do agree with you however that Swing is a bit memory intensive, but it is definitely getting much better).
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You may be interested in checking out Carnegie Mellon's The IrYdium Project, which has been developing a Virtual Laboratory, as a free (with a lowercase "f") simulation of acid base chemistry, including thermodynamics, strong/weak acids, redox, indicator chemistry, solubility, etc. It's currently being used by a number of universities and high schools, and is funded by the NSF.
:)
(Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that I'm the author of said software -- having worked on it for the last six years -- so I may be a little biased.
Someone please Moderate the above post up!
In some ways, I'd tend to agree. And indeed, my girlfriend is a techie. Ironically however, it wasn't until dating me that she became a techie and is now pursuing a career in Information Systems. I guess in hindsight then, I followed Uncle Robin's advice, but she turned into a geek anyway! :)
Sorta makes you wonder...
This bug that you refer to about slow printing is referenced in the Java Developer Connection's Bug Parade. It's apparently due to the fact that all components in Java2 are double-buffered and printing via a paint(Graphics) method call will double buffer the Graphics and spool an image of the size of the page. The easiest workaround is to disable double buffering on the component in question. I've also read that by using a third method to provide the actual painting (and calling that method from both paint and print) you can thereby avoid the system operations (overhead) associated with a call to paint.
In general, I have never found a bug in Java that I could not overcome easily with the assistance of the Bug Database or by looking at the Java/Swing source code.
Concerning your comment about AWT design, I believe that it was Sun's intention to not give one full control over the _exact_ look of a program -- anyone who wishes to create a true cross-platform application would not be so concerned with _exact_ replication of a l&f across platforms. This is also a very hard task to accomplish with native widgets (lowest common denominator). To this end, Sun created Swing. (I do agree with you however that Swing is a bit memory intensive, but it is definitely getting much better).
I hope this helps,
Donovan Lange