James Williams' Blog

Part of the fun of working with a language, framework, or cool widget before it hits version 1.0 is that it can and probably will change. It came to my attention that the beginner’s tutorials I posted on groovy.codehaus.org had some obsolete code in them.

Here is an updated copy in Adobe Acrobat format:
Getting Groovy without the bad clothes [Revised for Groovy 1.0]


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Here are the links for the GroovyDesklet binary file and source.

GroovyDesklet.desklet

groovydesklet.groovy


The groovy jar in the maven repo is a barebones version with only the groovy classes so some extra classes are needed. Mavenizing the desklet cuts 2.2MB from the size.

Totally fascinated by AB5k, I ended up working on a Groovy Desklet late into the night. One of the weird spots is that the DeskletContext doesn't obey an explicit

setSize(...)

call. I had to follow the example of the included desklets and use

setPreferredSize(...)

instead.

Another sticking point was the fact that the classes from the groovy embedded jar had to be put into the desklet to run in AB5k. Hopefully in upcoming versions, it will be included in the webstart download.

The desklet doesn't do much at all. It contains a couple labels and a button. One label shows the time the desklet was started or stopped and the other indicates how many times the button was clicked.

Josh Marinacci and Robert Cooper recently released a preview of the Java desklet toolkit, AB5k. A desklet is a Java widget. This is something I've wanted for a while. Despite using a version of my beloved Ubuntu Linux at Google, they never made a timetable for Google Desktop to come to Linux. Now it won't need to. I think this aligns well with Groovy since a desklet can be written in any JVM language. A desklet, a small self-contained component that does a single task well is well suited for the scripty nature of Groovy. Time to port some Apple widgets.