I want no monuments

Echo2 is a wonderful graphical toolkit that lets you create web applications giving them the look of the traditional desktop ones. Its API is very similar to the Swing one: indeed you can consider it a web-oriented subset of Swing.

I was told (that’s an italian programmer’s experience) that the customer will never see nor understand the difference between a desktop application and your Echo2 + Tomcat + browser combo (his customer believes that’s Visual Basic).

The system requirements are the only someway negative aspect of Echo: you will need at least Firefox from version 1.0 or Internet Explorer version 6. Anyway, if your customers run IE6 they won’t ever enjoy some graphical features because the browser is not capable of rendering them. PNG transparency in particular. IE7 seems to render PNG correctly (finally!). Check it using Browsershots.

The first thing you need is the Echo2 framework itself. The upcoming version 2.1.0 has introduced many improvements and it is the base for the Echo2 Extras package. The main classes of the Extras package are the menu bar pane, the accordion pane and the tab pane.

The community has then release EchoPoingNG, a set of additional components (mainly extensions of the official ones) with many interesting features. The drop down calendar is my favourite!

If you run Gentoo, I’ve just submitted three ebuilds for:

• Echo2 version 2.1.0_beta5
• Echo2 Extras version 0.3
• EchoPointNG version 2.1.0_rc3

Check them out!

Yeah! It took about 6 hours (you know, first ebuild, never seen python before…) but here is the ebuild to have Mapnik on your Gentoo box.

Bugzilla entry

Now it’s time to use it and create maps. We’ll see.

One solution could be not to try to get an ebuild for Mapnik, a very nice software for maps creation.

That is my first “serious” ebuild for my lovely gentoo box, but I’m stuck on an annoying error!
It (emerge) is complaining with a bunch of
ACCESS DENIED: open_wr

Let the night bring suggestions…