Publications

Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators

By Robert Haskins and Dale Nielsen (Addison Wesley Publishing Company, December 2004)

The Java Foundation Class, also known as Swing, in addition to augmenting, enhancing and generally implementing platform-independent replacements of AWT components, also added the JTree class to its repertoire of new GUI components. Swing's JTree supports a Windows Explorer-style (outliner-style) tree that makes it very easy to graphically render data with hierarchical relationship. A limited number of graphical attributes as supplied by the default look-and-feel provided with Swing - e.g., the icon representing the nodes - is also readily configurable.

This article describes an implementation similar to JTree that can be used in Java 1.02 or when using Swing may not be an option. This implementation also added features not found in the default JTree. These include the option of rendering a tree vertically or horizontally, and of aligning it left, center or right. In addition, subtrees can be interactively moved from one branch to another using drag-and-drop.

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Layout manager objectifies the component layout strategy. It disentangles component layout code from the drawing code of the container of components. By isolating the implementation of a layout strategy in a separate class, programmer can reuse it by simply assigning an instance of this layout class to the container that requires it. With a layout manager, the layout strategy would have to be embedded within the drawing code of the container itself.

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A real-life experience in remote upgrading of a Linux PC across the Pacific Ocean.

Experiences installing Linux on notebooks.