Hi all together!
This is my first blog entry about my Bachelor Thesis/Praktikum Distributed Clipboard. I´ve already started to implement a rudimentary GUI, and some logic to meet the project´s requirements. In this blogentry I would like to give you a short introduction of my plans.
Since I wanted to try something new regarding GUI programming, I spent a while searching for alternative libraries/frameworks to Swing/AWT. I tried various of them, like GTK, GWT and FengGUI but then I discovered a new public Beta of the JavaFX 2.0 SDK available for download. Compared to the former v.1.3, developers aren´t bound to scripting their GUIs in the JavaFX Scripting Language anymore, but can now freely develop in their native, familiar Java Developing Environment. This example perfectly illustrates how JavaFX 2.0 simplifies our work related to visual output and effects like animations. Not having to adapt to a new scripting language, I decided to use JavaFX 2.0 for coding my GUI.
Regarding the discovery, I decided to write my own UDP-basedand broadcast discovery implementation. Generally speaking, I am going to implement a simple thread-based UDP-discovery, using the familiar classes java.net.DatagramSocket and java.net.DatagramPacket. In addition to that, a java.util.Timer in cominbation with a java.util.TimerTask will be responsible for sending those UDP-packets. Furthermore I´m going to use the java.net.NetworkInterface, java.net.InterfaceAddress and java.net.InetAddress classes to discover the broadcast addresses of the underlying network.
Since the main aim of Distributed Clipboard is to easily share files between users in a LAN, I´m going to use objects of the java.net.Socket, java.net.ServerSocket, java.io.InputStreamReader and java.io.PrintWriter classes to set up TCP connections . I also decided to add some functionality by providing a chat function, maybe also chat rooms with invitations and so on.
Today I discovered the ability of JavaFX to easily playback media like videos and songs or render images. If I feel having enough time, I will probably also implement a built-in media player to easily view shared media inside the application – the following days will show.
Needless to say that I am going to post details and snippets of my approach regularly during the next weeks – stay tuned and thanks for your tuning in! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
