Java Stuff

As a part of my general interest in learning new things I have picked up Java as a language to add to my repertoire. I thought others might find some of the applets useful so I aim to provide the more useful ones here for people to examine and use. If you want to use them in any non-commercial application then feel free, an email to let me know would be nice though. Commercial use is prohibited and you should talk to me if you want to do that.

WebTag Applet

This is an applet I coded for these web pages to allow people to get around them faster. It offers a heirachical menu read from a textfile that lets you jump directly from page to page. At least that was the original plan but with Java not being quite as backwards compatible as one might like this turned out to be a touch more complicated than I had originally anticipated.

• linklist.txt - the text file used to navigate these pages. It is provided as an example of a menu file.
• SafeTag.java - the tag compatible with Java versions below 1.1. This just displays an image and offers two default buttons for navigation, effectively replicating in Java what the base HTML of these pages does.
• VersionLoader.java - this I didn't write but found on a Java help site. I've modified it a little assume safe defaults as I have found some Java environments have decidedly odd responses to the java.version property.
• WebTag.java - the full and frilly version of the tag with the menu implimented. Because it uses a PopupMenu class it is only compatible with Java enviroments v1.1 or better.

It was a little disappointing, this being my first experience with Java, to find that the language has no clean way of being backwards compatible. From a programming point of view I'd prefer to write the WebTag applet just the once and have it gracefully degrade as features aren't available.

Being able to surround newer sections of code in try ... catch segments would be nice. As would variable/class declarations so that you could quietly switch back to older classes as required. It strikes me as odd that for a language designed for use over the Internet that so little consideration was seemingly given for gracefully handling older runtime environments. I mean the above works but it is something of an ugly hack.