SnowFlake Project

New Project: SnowFlake started to deal with the complexities to deploying multiple J2ME platforms since the games and screen savers projects will need to be developed and published to a multitude of devices.

The inspiration for the SnowFlake project's name came from the one liner in the movie Fight Club - "You are not a unique little SnowFlake!" :-)

As some build's are unique but of course need to be built in a uniform fashion at the end of the day this is achieved by the SnowFlake application and three new XML formats....
  .sf.platform.xml (manufacturer definition per file)
  .sf.mobile.xml (mobile device platform per file)
  .sf.config.xml (SnowFlake config for automated per project calling)

SnowFlake reads in the XML files and processes each manufacturer and its related mobile files performing a J2ME build per mobile turning on and off the required inline code in the java source automatically (using an already finished application's J2MEPlatformMerge (per source file) and J2MEPlatformMergeRec .

The XML / XSD Java infrastructure source code is being visually modelled by and automaticly generated from CodeSlayer.

Currently the prototype reads in all the XML files and processes them accordingly, it just needs to generate the Theena build properties and build script then call it.

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Prototype Requirements.
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- Provide a command line application to perform the multitude of builds
- Build platform framework is Theena
- Turn off / on the SnowFlake inline commented source to provide the different source code solution's across the multiple J2ME platforms such as MID 1.0 / 2.0 / 21 and CLDC 1.0 / 1.1 and any device specific idiosyncrasies.
- Provide an easy way to develop for multiple platforms from one source code base
- Easy deployment of the resulting builds to J2ME OTA or too a vendor.

J2ME Development and new Website

Eldian has begun J2ME application development and a new website to reflect this. A new project Galactic Swarm has begun to prototype the J2ME game development process.


Above: pre alpha image of Galactic Swarm

A J2ME application template is being developed as well to be the code base for J2ME games and screen savers.

Theena Project

New Project:Theena.

Theena is an Ant scripting standard and also platform for calling Theena scripts as well as being an application.

The first publicly available alpha will be released with the repository (SVN) update feature disabled for safety reason's.

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* Requirements
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- Create a simple Ant based scripting standard for project building.
- Provided a detailed view of the over build process.
- Continous Integration (Continuum or Cruiss Control).
- Perform Project Repository functions.
- Provide a java command line application & Theena java library.
- Provide a html based detailed outline of the Projects last build.
- Provide project documentation in html or pdf (Forrest).
- Provide an audomated versioning and release implementaion.
- Use Maven as build engine

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* Conclusion....
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Theena will provide a simple and easy frame work for creating a project build process, continous integration implementation and project overview document. This minize's the effort to create a new project and place it into an already functioning build infrastructure using continous integration.

Older projects with there build processes already using Ant can be wrapped using a copy of the Theena standard template build script providing a more standard implementation to an existing build process.

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* Overview of Technologies used....
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Application build framework - Apache Ant.
Application build engine - Apache Maven.
Project documentation - Apache Forrest.
Development platform - Java (version 1.5)
Continous integration - Apache Continuum or Cruiss Control.
Repository platform - Subversion (version 1.3).