calculator tutorial / new member

Hi Denis, hi Gerald, hi all,

I've tried the calculator tutorial to find the way how to use Luxor.
I've round about 30 years of experience in programming in several 
languages including 3 years oo-development with the database 
Intersystems Caché.

I had some problems to start with Luxor because until now I didn't 
use Java extensively. I didn´t know Ant and found command line 
starts of the compiler in a DOS Box and Classpath settings a big 
step backwards after working in Windows IDEs for several years. 

Also Forte for Java could not become my favorite because it was 
slow did not fit into my screen and I had to restart my Win98 
computer each half hour after hanging up with Java 1.4.0.

An update to 1.4.1-02 helped to eleminate these hangings 
appearing in the Luxor examples too. And your Quick start chapter 
helped a lot to find out the actual way of building JAVA programs. 
Thanks for that.

The second thing Java newbies do not know is how to make and 
how to work with jar files. I think it would help a lot to include this 
step into the tutorial - the way how to pack jars.

It took me some time until the examle was running, because there 
are some errors in the actual version b8 that result in a DOS-
message "OFF" instead of the calculator. After eleminating the 
<@echo off> in run.bat I could see the reason:

Several lines in run.bat are not changed for the actual package 
names:
Luxor-1.0-B5 instead of B8
jaxen.jar instead of jaxen-1.0.jar
saxpath.jar instead of saxpath-1.0.jar
cypress is missing totally

I think you should correct that. Other newbies could give up at this 
time.

Ok, because I'm new here, I'll tell a little bit more about me.
In the last 20 years I've developed and supported a lot of complex 
individual commercial software packages especially for tourism, 
shipping and forwarding, accounting and software tools.  

Separating screen and data description from the hard programming 
is a thing I'm doing with my own tools since 1978. 

Since 5 years I've started with web programming and now I'm 
searching for the future standard for complex internet software 
systems which are independent of a platform and a hardware 
system (the dream we had since tenth of years).

I want to use this for our new touristic information and booking 
system and for a new version of our invoicing and accounting 
system which will include electonic archiving too. And I'll use it for 
other customer systems I can live from meanwhile.

Thats how I came to XML and SOAP and now to LUXOR.

I think it's an interesting step into the future and I'll keep on trying it 
the next days. I needed some days until I found out that XUL is not 
a real standard yet, but I think as Gerald: That doesn't matter. It 
can become a standard in case many people are using it. So it 
only must be quick enough and easy to use and the rest will come.

Because with Caché database normal programming happens 
inside the database the next natural step for me is making web 
services with it. So the only things I need outside of it is a standard 
GUI and a general way of printing especially to windows printers. 
My idea was to separate this nearly completely from application 
programming - to have 2 specialized programs which are 
comunicating via XML with all other programs and doing this  
independently of what to show on screen or what to print.

Luxor is a first step into that direction. A Java code generator will 
be the next step. Gerald maybe I can help you with that.

For the near future I'm thinking of a ready to use Java black box 
which helps Non-Java-programmers just to use their platform and 
XML to get a Swing or other GUI front end.

Let's see what we can do.

Best Regards 
Werner   

I´m new in this list


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