FPUIL: Frog-Parrot User Interface Library

I’ve finished my little library of UI utilities, which you can download here: FPUIL.tar.gz or FPUIL.zip.

Just unzip the directory, placing the WidgetCanvas folder in the apps folder of the WTK, and you can open it as a project.

This set of classes is intended to help with a “managing fragmentation” strategy of type “DERIVE-MULTI > SELECTIVE” (see Device Fragmentation of Mobile Applications for the theory).  As explained on TomSoft, this is a good strategy for one-shot projects, and it’s the strategy I’ll be discussing at Jazoon.

Here are some notes on using this little library:

Going to Jazoon 2008!!!

It’s official. I’ll be giving a talk at Jazoon 2008: the European Conference on Java Technology!

My talk will be on customizing applications for a range of (MIDP) handsets. It builds on some of the ideas from the last chapter of my book, but there’ll be plenty of new stuff. (I spent the holiday weekend madly programming some demos and sample code in preparation, which I plan to post here soon.) For details on my talk, look here.

For those of you who are bored of MIDP and want to live on the not-even-released-yet bleeding edge, my colleague at Greenliff Peter Wlodarczak will be giving a talk on Android.

Some basic STAF, with a simple example program

I’ve been playing with the Software Testing Automation Framework lately, and I thought I’d post some of my notes. This isn’t directly related to mobile games except for the fact that every type of software engineering requires testing. The root of STAF is an application that allows machines to control and monitor processes on other machines across a network (as peers instead of client/server). It has a rich set of features (logging, remote file system control, etc.) as well as APIs in multiple languages to allow you to write your own applications using STAF as a tool. To me it looks like this framework could be applied to lots of different distributed computing applications, but automated testing is what it’s designed and optimized for.

If you’re planning to use STAF but you’ve never used it before, here’s what I’d recommend to get started: Bookmark the documentation page and the User’s Guide. The User’s Guide has extensive helpful explanations on how to install STAF, then it contains some high-level discussion of the concepts followed by a detailed list of all of the commands and their options. To get a basic understanding of how STAF works and how to use it, read Getting Started With STAF V3, which includes some good explanation of how to use STAF as well as going over the demo. This blog post is intended as a supplement to the “Getting Started With STAF” tutorial. Here I’ll present an even simpler code example that shows how to interact with a process from the STAF command line.