devel meetings

[Rob Wehrli]

"der.hans" wrote:
> 
> Am 12. Jul, 2001 schwäzte Carl Parrish so:
> 
> > Just so I can be clear is this a *PLUG* developers group or Jiva's group?
> 
> This is the PLUG devel meetings we've been talking about.
> 
> ciao,
> 
> der.hans


As a note:  I'd be happy to give a 30-60 minute presentation on OO using
Linux and C++ and/or Java.  I've talked to my friends at MicroEdge and
they said that they'd send a few t-shirts and perhaps a copy of their
Visual SlickEdit for Linux as door prizes.  You'll find "vs" on my book
cover:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578200857/

It is very "slick" and is pre-configured for:

C, C++, Java, jsp, ada, asm, asp, awk, bat (DOS batch files),
bourneshell (scripts), COBOL, ColdFusion scripts, CICS (yeah buddy!),
csh scripts, DTDs (for XML), FORTRAN, HTML, IDL, PASCAL, PHP, PERL,
PL-SQL, Python, REXX, SQL, Tcl, VHD/VHDL and XML amoung others.

There isn't a specific "file extension" configured for Makefiles, but it
properly syntax highlights anything ending in .mk just fine.  It is also
very, very cool with regard to API and "tool help" similarly to Windows
IDEs where "auto-completion" is offered based on the context of what
you're doing, for example, when you're typing a package name, it prompts
you for the current package that you're working on so that you can
simply use auto-completion to type the rest of the package name.  For
those of us who can't always remember the API and argument lists of so
many different functions, it shows prototype details for supported
languages including at least C, C++ and Java.  (I don't really use it
for much more than C, C++, Java, XML/DTDs, shell scripts and makefiles.)

You can catch a screen shot at: http://www.azpower.com/files/vse.jpg

Note the "Class Browser" feature.  All of this makes for an incredibly
useful package, but wait, there's more!  You can also use it to produce
VB-like applications using its internal Slick-C Macro language and GUI
form builder.  I used it to produce a GUI front end to an embedded
monitor for MyLinux.

I know that a programmer's IDE is their entire world, but this is much
better than Emacs or Vi(m) IMHO (except for price!).  I think that most
people will find it affordable enough to at least consider it for
serious development work.  $295 for Linux the last time I checked their
web site.

http://www.slickedit.com

...it used to be $99, which was the best price going!  Perhaps one of
the "best" features of it is that you can configure the key bindings for
Windows-like keys, Emacs, Vi and a whole bunch of others.  I tend to
keep the default Windows bindings since I most often develop my Linux
application and embedded code from a Windows NT box using PCXWare to my
Linux box.  A good thing about Visual SlickEdit is that the interface is
the same for all supported OSes.  Get your company to buy you a copy of
it for WinNT and Linux! :)

If more presentations are desired, perhaps I can pffer a presentation on
QT, V, FLTK or some other GUI "widget" set.  I'm not sure how many
people would like to drill into the XLib (how many are going to use
intrinsycs?), but higher level stuff might grab more interest?  Any
suggestions/comments on cool stuff?  I can do AWT or Swing for anyone
who wants to go in that direction...or Beans/EJB, other packages such as
JavaMail, JMF, Java-2D and other Java stuff including JNI, RMI, JDBC and
a ton of other stuff; but I generally find Java more boring than C++. 
Perhaps someone would like me to do a segment on OpenGL?

I think that if I can be of some help kicking off some of the "Westies"
dev meetings, others will step up to the plate when they get tired of
hearing me talk.  When I was the President of the Phoenix Java
Usersgroup, we had vendors paying us $1000 a pop just to present to our
group.  I'm not sure why we couldn't work out something similar where we
do our thing for the first 1.5 hours and let them have the last 45-60
minutes to do their spiel...for picking up the tab.  The vendors were
also responsible for beer and snacks afterwards!


Take Care.

Rob!