On the recommendation of Anthony, who was visiting
late last week, I played around with iRATE a bit. iRATE is a
collaborative music rating program. It plays (freely available) songs
for you and you rate them; over time the music you hear “gets better”
as it tries to pick songs that it thinks you will like. This seems
like a good example of the kinds of user-information-based
applications O’Reilly was talking about last year or so.

iRATE is written in java and uses SWT. It runs fine with gcj.
However, while looking over the web site I noticed that it has a JNLP
launcher, so I spent some time trying to get this to work.

What a pain that turned out to be. First it found some lurking
bugs in our HTTP protocol handler code (and there is at least one
sub-optimality remaining; though it is somewhat tricky to fix well).
But what really stopped this project turned out to be a kind of clash
between our AWT peers (using Gtk) and SWT (also using Gtk). The JNLP
code brings up a window to tell you about the progress it is making
downloading your application. Then once iRATE is available, it starts
SWT. Unfortunately the two, somehow, disagree and the result crashes.
What makes this particularly sad is that it works fine on the
proprietary JDKs simply because they don’t use Gtk and thus there is
no clash 🙁

I’m sure we’ll fix all this somehow. It is a bit
discouraging… but we’re very close to having an actually useful
application web-startable. That is pretty cool.

Jump

A other cool java program I heard about recently: Jump, a big GIS
application.