Markus Fischer

“SWT is an open source widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented.” (from http://www.eclipse.org/swt/)

I am thinking of creating the UI for the FO Transformer project with the Eclipse SWT. Because I also do create Eclipse-Plugins I got to know the SWT a little and I decidet to like it. And because I do not realy like SWING I am thinking of changing the UI. Another reason to use the SWT is that the UI does not look so… old! So now I will give it a try and try to recreate the UI as it is with the SWT and hope that it will work. After recreating the UI I will go on implementing new features.

One minor problem is that the project will loos lot of its portability. I have to integrate different librarys for the different systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS…). But before I have to worry about portability, I have to implement.. so lets go to work…

Version 1.1 of the FO Transformer is available now. To see what has changed please visit the change log.

I am not satisfied with my event handling in the FO Formatter Project … So here is still some work to do…

The first verison of the FO Transformer project is now ready for download. You can find the downloads for the executable file and the source code here.

New features for the project are planned and will be implemented later. All information for planned features can be found here. If you have other suggestions what the project needs feel free to contact me.

Because I don’t have enough time (and I have not worked on the projects for month) I decided to freeze the Open Chess and the jRoundtrip project.

The downloads for the Open Chess project are offline since I switched to wordpress. As soon as I find some good plugin I will put them online again.

For administrative reasons I switched to wordpress. I did not want to go on developing an CMS for my website and working on my projects so I switched to an existing CMS. That means that I will have to surrender my freedom in having everithing like i want to have it but developing the page takes too much time. So lets hope for the best.

The show must go on. I have not worked on this project for long time and now I have decided to use the GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) for displaying the UML-Diagrams. So the first step will be to get to know the GEF. So lets start working through some tutorilas

So, there was a big problem in the logic. The games would never stop! I forgot to implement a way of stoping a game. So even if someone was checkmate the other player could go on playing.
In the next few days I hope to find the time to put the download for the Code on the page.

The DBMS for the Open Chess Project will be PostgreSQL. There are two reasons why I want to use it:
First of all: PostgreSQL is OpenSource!
The second reason is more selfish: I always wanted to test PostgreSQL but I could not find the time to do so. So now here is the perfect opportunity for me to use/test PostgreSQL. For planing the database I could not find anything else then the MySQL Workbench. So I will use the Workbench for planing the DB and then I will write the SQL-Script for creating the Tables/Types/… on my own.
BUT: How will I save the data on the user-side of the Project? SQLite? XML? I will have a look at that problem when the time has come…

Last night I think I finished with the Logic for the Chess Project. The last steps were to check if the game is over. So the check for a Stalemate and check if there is a Checkmate.
So now the foundation for the project was laid and I can go on with the next steps. I have no illusions that there is everything correct but so far I am very pleased.
So the features of the logic now are:

• Creating the default formation
• Logic represents a Board
• Men are bound to a single Board
• Provide Information about Men-Advantage
• Events for
  • New Move done
  • Man-Advantage changed
• Ceeping a Move History

For now the Logic contains just 16 Classes and 160 JUnit-Tests. The public SVN-Server is not ready yet so everyone who wants to have a look on the code has to wait a little longer.
For now I am happy that the first step is done. The next step will be to think about how the Database will look like and how to connect Clients with the Server.