Header Image

One of the often requested features in Codename One is zip support, we had some issues with it until a couple
of years back when we added tar and gzip support. But people still asked for standard zip file support which was
missing.

We’re working on a tool that we hope to share next week that needs zip to work. Initially we thought about doing
this natively as zip works on most native OS’s but one of the true benefits of the tool is if we can get it to work in
the JavaScript port live on the web…​

So I “ported” the zipme project to Codename One
here. I’m quoting the word “ported” because I did almost nothing.
I just copied the sources into a new cn1lib project and it “just worked” for the most part.

I did have to fix one thing in the iOS builds though. Some hackers use String objects to store binary data in
rather creative ways to save a bit of syntax. This practice is rather inefficient when compared to just using arrays
but it is still widely practiced. In this case this code was used:

String bitReverse = "00100414021206160111051503130717";

That is the exceedingly rare octal notation in Java strings…​ Unfortunately because the data includes many “invalid”
characters translating this into a C string is really hard. So our VM choked on that.

Normally we’d fix something like this but since it’s both rare and slow when compared to just using an array
we chose to just fix the code and be done with it.

ToastBar Messages

My code is littered with code that looks like:

// error handling code block...
Dialog.show("Error", "Generic error message", "OK", null);
return;

This is in catch blocks, if statements etc.

I’m sure your code is full of that too and this was getting on my nerves. It’s great to have an error message but why
do we need to dismiss it or even have it in a Dialog?

So I wrote some code that shows it in a ToastBar
and then it dawned on me that this should really replace Dialog
for this specific use case.

So we added these two static methods:

ToastBar.showErrorMessage(String msg, int timeout)
ToastBar.showErrorMessage(String msg)

These methods effectively make showing an error message stupid trivial. they also include a nice error icon on
the side from the material font…​

This cuts down on the boilerplate code and shows something that is “pretty” & modern by default which is
important.

Archived Comments

This post was automatically migrated from the legacy Codename One blog. The original comments are preserved below for historical context. New discussion happens in the Discussion section.

bryan — May 18, 2016 at 9:41 pm (permalink)

bryan says:

The ToastBar error is neat. When will this be available ?

Shai Almog — May 19, 2016 at 3:33 am (permalink)

Shai Almog says:

Thanks. On Friday as usual 😉

Discussion

Join the conversation via GitHub Discussions.