Software Development Work-arounds

The only challenging aspect of client-side Web programming is the long history of bugs, incompatibilities, lack of standards compliance, and all-around poor implementation of many a Web browser.

This is an old problem whose cause is Microsoft Internet Explorer's (at least some versions) inability to process properly HTTP/1.1 keep-alives via SSL. The strange status codes are WinInet error codes, manifesting themselves with values of 12029, 12030, 12031, 12032, 1252, 1259, and possibly others. You can find a list of WinInet error codes in the WinInet API reference documentation. Internet Explorer 7.0 does not appear to have this problem. Therefore, one possible work-around is to detect the user agent on the server. If it's MSIE 6 or less, disable keep-alives. This work-around is simple to implement, but server-specific, so I do not provide example configuration directives.

Note, this work-around is useful only if you are deploying a Web application that must support MSIE 6 and you possess administrative control over the Web server. If you are writing a reusable JavaScript library for consumption by other developers, this work-around will not help you.

One of the first things you try to do when experimenting with JavaFX is to add a JavaFX scene graph to a Swing component. As of JavaFX 1.1, there is no standard API for doing that. This is a class we used at my company to accomplish the task while evaluating JavaFX before deciding against using JavaFX.

/*
 * Copyright 2008 Savarese Software Research Corporation
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.savarese.com/software/ApacheLicense-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package com.savarese.jfx.ext.swing;

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javafx.reflect.FXClassType;
import javafx.reflect.FXContext;
import javafx.reflect.FXLocal;
import javafx.reflect.FXObjectValue;
import javafx.reflect.FXValue;

public class JScene extends JComponent {
  public JScene(Object obj) throws Exception {
    setLayout(new BorderLayout());
    FXClassType sceneImpl =
      FXContext.getInstance().findClass("com.sun.javafx.scene.JSGPanelSceneImpl");
    FXObjectValue scene = sceneImpl.allocate();
    scene.initVar("scene", FXLocal.getContext().mirrorOf(obj));
    scene.initialize();

    FXValue panel = sceneImpl.getVariable("jsgPanel").getValue(scene);
    add((JComponent)((FXLocal.ObjectValue)panel).asObject());
  }
}

Use the class as follows in your JavaFX code:

import javafx.ext.swing.SwingComponent;
import com.savarese.jfx.ext.swing.JScene;
import com.savarese.jfx.ext.swing.SplitPane;
...
  scene: Scene {
    content: [
      ...
      SplitPane {
        left: ...,
        right: SwingComponent.wrap(new JScene(foo_scene))
      }
    ]
  ...
  }
...

You'll notice the use of a custom SplitPane class. We had to implement custom MenuBar, Menu, MenuItem, etc., making JavaFX a waste of time for desktop apps. For interested parties, here's SplitPane:

/*
 * Copyright 2008 Savarese Software Research Corporation
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.savarese.com/software/ApacheLicense-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package com.savarese.jfx.ext.swing;

import javafx.ext.swing.SwingComponent;

import javax.swing.JSplitPane;

public def HorizontalSplit : Integer = JSplitPane.HORIZONTAL_SPLIT;
public def VerticalSplit : Integer = JSplitPane.VERTICAL_SPLIT;

public class SplitPane extends SwingComponent {
  var split_pane: JSplitPane;

  public var orientation: Integer = HorizontalSplit on replace {
    split_pane.setOrientation(orientation);
  }

  public var left: SwingComponent on replace {
    split_pane.setLeftComponent(left.getJComponent());
  }

  public var right: SwingComponent on replace {
    split_pane.setRightComponent(right.getJComponent());
  }

  protected override function createJComponent() {
    split_pane = new JSplitPane();
    return split_pane;
  }
}

Solaris doesn't declare extern char **environ; in <unistd.h>, but does define it in its standard C library. Therefore you can simply add something like the following to your program:

#if defined(HAVE_DECL_ENVIRON) && !HAVE_DECL_ENVIRON
#  ifdef  __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#  endif
  extern char **environ;
#  ifdef  __cplusplus
}
#  endif
#endif

Using autoconf, you can define HAVE_DECL_ENVIRON by placing the following in configure.ac:

AC_CHECK_DECLS_ONCE([environ])