Everytime you think of Java you may think about types as of classes and primitive types. Not many, right? Well, there’s a major difference between the thing and handling it. The latter brings a lot of corner cases.

This is Serializing Java - a series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

Serializer can detect cyclic dependencies in two essential phases:

1. inspection of data structure
2. data serialization

Let’s dig into both of them.

This is Serializing Java - emerging series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

A collection usually contains multiple elements. Let’s pick one element to observe it. What happens if it moves inside the collection? Or disappears from it?

This is Serializing Java - emerging series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

Every deserializer needs information about types - the data structure. In my serialization the deserializer can work behind network connection so it can’t count on Reflection mechanism. That’s why the serializer has to discover and serialize data structure that could be sent over the network and understood by deserializer.

This is Serializing Java - emerging series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

Why reinventing the wheel again? Why popular serializers are useless to my project - Entity Tracker?

This is Serializing Java - emerging series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

In previous week I had to resign from using Kotlin in one of my game projects. By porting the code manually I can point out what I didn’t like about Kotlin. Let’s see few differences between Kotlin and Java.

All your Java fields belong to us. Reflection is powerful but you have to remember a few rules before dealing with class fields.

This is Serializing Java - emerging series about writing your own serializer in case you didn’t like other serializers.

As nature of a programmer calls I need to express myself about Xtend. During development of The Console I have almost smashed my face a few times by gesture flying straight from internal cent****re of disbeliefs.

The Console is an app which typical usecase fits within running a single instance. That’s by design. However, we sometimes forget to check whether some the app is waiting for us in the background and try to launch them. That’s when disaster happens. Two consoles placed on top of window and reacting to same hotkey? Cannot be!

Here’s a short story about preventing from having multiple instances of same app made in Java. There’s a note about communication, too.

JavaFX punched me in the face with a feature which I consider as a kind of general over-assumption and as a bug in The Console. When TextField is refocused through other event than click then it auto selects it’s whole content. I want my previous selection or caret position.

A workaround/hack/fix is introduced in this post. Oh, by the way, there’s a bug report.

In The Console I primarily use JavaFX for UI. Nonetheless, due to problem with having undecorated taskbar-less always-on-top window I use JFrame from Java Swing to solve it. And here appears a new issue with Swing - how to regain once lost window focus in JFrame?

The biggest feature of my console software is ability to code own “commands” - scripts. It’s supposed to be easy and quick for programmers. I’m not trying to design my own DSL language or make users install some weird packages into system. JavaScript and console API is all you need to know to code your custom scripts.

If one of goals of The Console project is to make easy custom scripting then it’s logical that you need some way to manage your scripts. Putting all scripts in one file or even all scripts in one folder would be a mess. So, how to manage those files? How The Console deals with it?

Today I present a few snippets around JavaFX WebView that I use in The Console:

• load style sheet
• set style or class of element
• scroll page to the bottom
• check whether the page is scrolled down to the bottom
• handle adding DOM elements while web engine loads
• remove some elements from document
• style scrollbar in the document

Rich text component is a user interface component that displays text by styling various parts of it differently. Very often Rich Text components are used for editors. An example may be any code editor that supports highlighting. I needed such UI component for my latest application - The Console so now I’ll shortly discuss a comparison between few options:

• e(fx)clipse Runtime StyledTextArea
• RichTextFX
• JavaFX built-in TextFlow
• JavaFX built-in WebView

Applications that are launched in Windows OS are by default listed on taskbar. For a utility software like The Console it is not the case. It shouldn’t pollute our task bar or even tray. It should be available under hotkey and that’s it.

Problem is, JavaFX won’t allow us. Previously presented line stage.initStyle(StageStyle.UNDECORATED)  gives us undecorated window but collides with stage.initStyle(StageStyle.UTILITY) which makes window’s task not visible in taskbar but window itself is then decorated.

Between workarounds I’ve found a solution. TL;DR initialize window using Swing.

Some time ago I made this project https://github.com/Namek/TheConsole_POC for Windows OS. It’s usage goes like this: hit CTRL+TILDE and on the top of the screen will open a Quake 3 Arena thingie that’ll enable you to type in some commands. Commands are JavaScript’able and that’s the power of the tool. I did some hacks here and there so I decided to change some techs and remake whole beauty to improve efficiency of use.

As Wiki states

In object-oriented […], an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created.

That totally applies to Java’s Integer. Let’s take a look at the code to talk about:

Integer a = 5;
Integer b = a;
b = b+1;
System.out.println("a = " + a);  // a = 5
System.out.println("b = " + b);  // b = 6

Integer is a class then why variables a and b have different values?