Developers

The Grace Contribution Manager is open source software and participation in the development process is greatly encouraged.

Grace Developer Resources

• Getting Started Guide - A guide to quickly beginning development on Grace
  
• Project Contents - Descriptions of the folders and files within Grace
  
• Project Overview - A "big picture" of what Grace does under the hood
  
• Roadmap of future functionality - Where the project is going next - aka how you can help!
• Developer's Change Log - Changes made under the hood that may scare the users =)
  

How You Can Participate

• Ask questions and give suggestions: Subscribe and post to the daniel-devel mailing list
• Submit bug reports: Submit using the bug report tracker.
• Submit patches: Submit using the patch tracker. A patch should consist of:
  1. An explanation of your patch.
  2. The results of a diff -c or a diff -u run on your modified version and the most recent distributed version of the source code.
  3. Revelant comments in the new code
  4. Changes to documentation that the new code affects
  See Eric Raymond's Good Patching Practice section in the Art of Unix Programming.

Helpful Links

General

• Spring Framework - excellent inversion of control framework
  • Spring Forums
• JFreeReport - report generation based on XML templates, allows conversion to PDF

Native Applications (using SWT and JFace)

• Comparing SWT and Swing (Blog)
• Helpful intro from JavaWorld
• Great pdfs with lots of example code
• Eclipse Programmer's Guide
• Eclipse Articles (go to SWT section)
  • This one was particularly helpful on layouts
  • As well as this one on Wizards
• SWT Wiki
• IBM's DeveloperWorks
  • Article on Developing JFace Wizards
  • Article on Using the Eclipse GUI outside the Eclipse Workbench
  • Article on Create native, cross-platform GUI applications
• Another introductory article on programming in SWT
• If none of these gets you the answer you want, go to the eclipse search page and select "News Archives - news.eclipse.platform" for scope. This searches the archives of the SWT and JFace libraries. (You'll need to first request a free account to access the archives).
• Possibilities for GUI Designers for SWT/JFace (we personally do not use them):
  • Visual Editor Project
  • SWT-Designer (not OSS)

Web Tier

• Sun's Java Web Services Tutorial - learn about JSP, Servlets, etc.
• Velocity Templates
  • User guide
• HTML/Javascript/CSS
  • HTML Reference
  • CSS Reference
  • HTML Help
  • HTML Goodies

Business Tier

• Hibernate Object-Relational Mapper
  • Hibernate Forum

Tools

These are the tools we use and recommend.

• Eclipse - Excellent Open source IDE
• Tomcat - Servlet container
• Apache Ant
  • User manual

Misc.

• Practical UML: A Hands-On Introduction for Developers - A quick introduction to the Unified Modeling Lanuage (UML) for modeling use cases, code structures, data structures, etc.
• The ServerSide