Category: Development

Java programmers search engine

Prospector Demo
From the site:
Prospector a “search engine” for Java code examples, designed to help programmers use, navigate, and learn about object-oriented APIs. The primary design goal is to help out programmers that get stuck using complex APIs. Imagine that a programmer is writing some Java code, that she has a URL object pointing to a JPEG file, and that she wants to display it as an image using the java.awt.Image class. Unfortunately, Image is an abstract class, and it’s not very obvious how to create one at all, let alone how to create one from a URL. Now, she can ask Prospector for a list of code examples, pick out an example, and get back to coding.

My Comments:
Nice, they are developing this as an Eclipse plugin and there is an online demo. If only I could get it to tell me how to make a BufferedImage from an Image. Ooops, my fault, I wasn’t specifying BufferedImage correctly, I should have said: java.awt.image.BufferedImage.

Open Source Video Interoperability

BEK : piksel : piksel04
An interesting set of pages describing a conference, some open source software and documentation regarding efforts to provide interoperability between open source video based applications. Of note is Livido a plugin framework, VideoPiping (sending raw video via named pipes from one app to another), Vloopback and so on.
Here is what they say on the site:
Piksel is a framework of tools and libraries which aims to provide interoperability between various free software applications dealing with video manipulation techniques.
The current focuses of the project are: implement a library for plugin dinamicly loaded video processors and colorspace transformations; develop of a standard set of control commands for interoperability between media applications, providing a library implementation which makes it easy to be embedded into softwares.
This project has its origins at the Piksel meeting held at the Bergen Center for Electronic Arts, in which authors from various free software applications met to settle common specifications: EffecTV, FreeJ, LiVES, MoB, PD/PDP, VeeJay.

Open source QuickTime initiative

OpenQuicktime – a new Quicktime Library
Very interesting project, includes a beta version of a broadcasting app as well.
From the site:
OpenQuicktime aims to be a portable library for handling Apple’s QuickTime™ popular media files on Unix-like environments. It is aim is to provide encoding, authoring and editing support as well as video playback.