andthennothing.net

A couple of days ago I started developing my own RSS feed aggregator. I know that there exist a lot of those, but there is only one of the aggregators I have tried that fits my needs, namely Feedreader. But since it’s not open source I cannot do the changes I want to. I also wanted to learn a bit more about SWT and XML handling.

SWT is a GUI framework that is part of the open source project Eclipse. What makes SWT special is that it’s a GUI framework that uses native widgets. That way it looks exactly like the rest of the applications on the different platforms, while still being cross-platform. It is really great (especially the IDE Eclipse that is part of the same project) and makes me believe in Java for desktop applications. I really dislike Swing—mostly since it hangs my computer, but also since the L&F is quite strange and it is really slow.

However, SWT is not perfect. It is quite young so it doesn’t support the things you expect. For instance, it seems like you can’t change the fonts used in lists. I want the unread entries to be bold, but that seems impossible. Or not exactly impossible, since I learned today that there is a workaround so you can render the text, with arbitrary appearance, into an image and show the image in the list. But it’s not the kind of workaround I would do (if I weren’t very desperate). I guess I have to use different icons to show the different states until SWT supports what I want to do.

Another problem is that it doesn’t include any browser-like widget. There is some support to make HTML into plain text and show it that way, but I need support for link and images. I think it’s possible to, on Windows, use Internet Explorer, but that would ruin the cross-platform compatibility. That is no problem for me, since I normally only use Windows, but it would be neat to achieve a cross-platform solution (maybe I will switch in the future :) ). But there is another possibility: Mozilla. There is a Java API, called Webclient, for using the browser component of Mozilla in a Java application. But to little surprise it uses AWT, which is quite a problem since I don’t think you could use AWT and SWT simultaneously. To conclude, I have two options: 1) use Internet Explorer and thus losing the cross-platform property. 2) port Webclient to SWT. I’m not sure which approach I will choose.

Moreover, I have just started working on the GUI, I have not yet read a single feed using my application. And I don’t have so much time to work on this project. Hence, I estimate that I will be done somewhere around 2015. Hopefully I still have the need for a feed aggregator at that time :)