Work in progress

Shortly before christmas I finished the work on the prototype, tagged this version and began a major overhaul of the application structure. I based the application on Swinglab's AppFrame and SwingWorker. This Desktop-Framework allows me to have a unified multithread application with some good application guide lines.

So far I only developed my prototype around an application-structure, that a mix of the basics I learned in Java, some influences from my work with Ruby-on-rails and some evil work arounds to achieve my goals. AppFramework should optimise this and get the application in a better shape.

There are many new things I have to use with AppFramework, for example Introspection or Annotated Object creation for the Actions. So my app is changing alot at the moment.

I'm also thinking how the actual GUI will look like. I'd like to keep it clean and simple, but I have to see what will be used actually.

For another course I'm working on a PacMan-implementation in c++. For the graph realisation we thought about a small java editor to create the necessary XML-files. I spoke with Matthias about this editor and I got a bunch of new ideas and hints for Imageflow.

So today I reworked the Connection-Interface. Actually making it an Interface. The Pins (Inputs and Outputs) now implement the Connectable interface, which requires methods to connect this pins. This refactoring also cleaned alot of the old methods of registering connections using IDs. This is fully object-oriented now, using references.

Actually I found Interfaces are a nice thing once you start to use them. Changed the Parameters-implementation as well.
I wish VisualAp would've used more. I always get back to some small implementatoin issues when I enherite from an VisualAp-object and the variable I need is private and not protected. I did many of this small changes. I hope I find a good way to collect them, sort them, explain them and get them to the author, so he can add them tot he regular visualap version.

I began to work in my code again yesterday. In January and February I will continue to work on it with more time at hand.

I'm working on several problems at the moment.
VisualAp already brought support for Copy-Cut-Paste, which I changed slightly, because there were some problems with my object-cloning. I do deep-copies by hand, so this had to be fixed and checked.
I'm working on some ways to make graph-checks on the fly and to prohibit illegal graphs when they are build. There is also some basic mechanism to show problems in the graph. It doesn't work nice yet, so I skip the screenshots.
I expand my unit-testing with every problem I got. I try to identify the problem, isolate it in tests and this way, my test-environment grows. It's not totally test-driven, but it's a great development support.

I'm still looking for a general programm structure I can work with. I should find one at the beginning of January, so I can really start with the final application then.