Waba Extras v1.30

Introduction

This is a set of classes that implement some additional functionality to Waba, a small java like language for palm sized devices like the PalmPilot and WinCE. This package was originally called WabaAWT for when Waba had no UI components of it's own but many of the classes in the original package have now been replaced by standard Waba controls so are no longer needed. Those that are left have been converted to be standard subclasses of the Waba Control class.

Features

UI Extras - Layout containers like RelativeContainer and GridContainer which allow you to layout Controls quickly and easily with a lot of flexibility, extra Controls implementing dropdown Lists, Title bars, Pushbuttons, Menus and BigNumbers as well as a replacement MainWindow which automatically uses a RelativeContainer for layout and supports double buffering to avoid flickering.
IO Extras - BufferStream and DataStream which can sit on top of any other stream class (SerialPort, Catalog, File, Socket) to make it easy to read and write standard data types like ints, Strings, and floats. Also classes for accessing the four builtin Palm applications - Datebook, Address, ToDO and Memo as well as ObjectCatalog which allows serialization of objects.
Util Extras - A fairly comprehensive Maths class with all the standard maths functions.
Development Extras - Java versions of warp and exegen with support for adding packages anywhere in your classpath, as opposed to the standard tools where packages must be in the same directory. Also replacements for waba.io.SerialPort, which uses the java comm extensions to talk to the PCs serial port instead of doing nothing and waba.io.Catalog which will save and load catalogs to the current directory.

Usage

Download the zip file wextras130.zip(91k) and extract it to a directory somewhere (eg c:\waba\wextras)
Ensure that your Java VM is set up and working.
Make sure both '.',the waba classes and '(wextras dir)/classes' are in your classpath. I just have a .bat file containing
```
set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;.;c:\waba\wextras\classes;c:\waba\sdk\classes
```
which I run before doing waba work. Note that if you want the replacement SerialPort and Catalog classes to work, you must either place the wextras dir before the waba ones in your classpath, or replace the appropriate files in the waba classes directory.
Run setup.bat (for Windows) or setup.sh (for UNIX) which you should find in the base directory. This will compile the java files and create the javadocs. If any errors come up, check the preceding two steps. The one exception is Package javax.comm not found in import which will appear if the javacomm extensions haven't been installed. The replacement SerialPort will not be used but everything else should work fine.

You should find there are now 4 subdirectories: src, docs, classes, and apps.

src contains the java source code for all the classes in the package. This is useful to see how the components work as well as letting you fix or improve things.
docs contains the javadoc documentation for the packages. Just open the index.html file (or packages.html for JDK1.1) in your browser.
classes contains all the classes used in waba extras. If you decide to use the standard warp and exegen programs instead of the included java versions you will have to copy the 'extra' subdirectory inside this one to the directory your application files are.
apps contains some example programs that use the Waba Extras package. You can compile them by running each of the batch files in this directory.

Java Warp and Exegen

The java versions of warp and exegen can be run with

java wababin.
Warp

and java wababin.Exegen and the parameters are the same as the standard versions but there are a few extra features. Warp will now look through the class files you add and find dependent classes and directly referenced ".bmp" files, which it looks for in the classpath and adds them to the warp file automatically. This means that instead of

  java wababin.Warp c MyApp MyApp.class extra/ui/*.class extra/io/*.class

you can just use

  java wababin.Warp c MyApp MyApp.class

and it will find all those dependent classes. Actually, since the main class has the same name as the warp file, you can leave that off too, which lets you just write

  java wababin.Warp c MyApp

Of course, if you were making a library you'd want to add everything so you do have to do it manually. Also, Warp will warn you if it finds any references to the java heirachy (eg. System.out.println()) which will cause problems on the WabaVM. Another addition is that you can specify a creatorID in Exegen. Details can be found by running either program with no parameters.

Freeware

You are free to do whatever you want with these classes as long as you don't try to pass them off as your own. The source is included and I would appreciate it if you send me a copy of any bugfixes, improvements or additions you make to it so I can include it in this distribution. I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on the package and of anything you create with it.

Rob Nielsen
rob at roblisa dot com
http://roblisa.com/rob
27th March 2000

Thanks to:

Stefan Kellner for the Pushbutton, PushbuttonGroup classes and the initial MenuBar classes.
Joe McDaniel for the new Maths class.

Version History

1.00 27th April 1999
Initial Release
1.01 2nd June 1999
Added double buffering support to ExtraMainWindow
Added Joe McDaniel's Maths class
Improved ObjectCatalog to support less structured data
1.02 20th August 1999
Fixed beta 8 bugs in List, modified exp() method in Math on Steven Rohall's suggestion.
1.10 27th August 1999
Added java versions of warp and exegen and replacements for SerialPort and Catalog
1.11 2nd October 1999
Removed JDK1.2 specific code, added setup.sh for unix platforms (thanks to Alain M. Gaudrault and Mike Chen) and fixed bug in Catalog (thanks to Olaf Merkert)
1.12 4th October 1999
Fixed bug with wababin.Warp not adding files from classpath and added unix 'sh' files for sample programs. (thanks again to Alain)
1.20 19th October 1999
Added BufferStream and DataStream. Moved ObjectCatalog and Storable to extra.io package. Added extra.io.builtin package. Fixed bug with pushbuttons dying if they have no group.
1.21 8th November 1999
Updated to Waba beta9. Modified Warp to parse class files for dependencies.
1.30 27th March 2000
Finally updated to Waba 1.0. Added MenuBar, improved speed of Maths functions, thanks to Jody Nickel.