Introducing the Time Track Project

The Time Track application is a small side-project I have been developing since late November 2010. It is a simple application that lets a user keep track of time spent on work, projects, tasks etc.

Time Track main window, Windows Vista x64

The main requirements for the Time Track application were

• Be a software version of a time punch clock, for any purpose


• Keep track of time in a persistant format that can be saved


• Cross-platform support (at least Windows, Mac OS X)


• Needs a GUI


• Lightweight, simple to use and set up

I developed this in Java as a standalone desktop program with a GUI using all OpenSource components. I am nearly complete with an initial version that meets all this functionality and I intend to release it as a free-ware app for now, maybe it can be made released as open source by itself in the future.

Implementation

I had really two paths I could have taken with this, one would be to build a dynamic webapp with a RDBMS backend. The second approach was to develop a standalone self-contained application that could be somewhat portable itself. I was hesitant to take on a project that required any sort of server set up and hosting, I am just not set up to do that now, so although the webapp was pretty easily cross-platform being browser based, I didn't like the idea of the dependency on the remote server.

I went with the standalone app approach, in order to be cross-platform and easy for me to develop I went with Java as the source language. I didn't want the program looking like a Java Swing application so I opted for the SWT api which is the basis for the Eclipse IDE and platform, it tends to look more "solid" in my opinion as one of its main features is native look and feel for UI components on every OS. I think so far it is coming along nicely. You can see a side-by-side comparison of the interface in Windows Vista, and on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04, 64-bit)

I have probably spent around 5 weekends and the occasional hour on a weeknight in total since I started building this application. Probably overall time spent has been under 80 hours. It was enjoyable to more or less go through the full development life-cycle for a new project. I got to do design, open-source research, coding and integration, source-control, and complete build scripts in Ant. Even though I may never release a line of code from this, I am building like I could.

In terms of the OpenSource projects that I used a variety of different components in my stack.

• http://www.eclipse.org/swt - Standard Widget Toolkit for all User Interface
• http://db.apache.org/derby - Apache Derby for lightweight embedded relational database connected with JDBC
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencsv - OpenCSV library for creation of CSV format exports of data
• http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project - library of free icons

For my build environment, I am using Java JDK 1.6.0_17, Eclipse Ganymede IDE, Junit 3 (for the few automated unit tests that were really helpful with Derby), SVN for source control and builds are done with ANT. Testing was done on Windows Vista SP2 x64 and Ubuntu Linux 64-bit GTK.

RoadMap
On my to do list I still have a number of items I'd like to close out before really wrapping up this release.

• The main table needs to update when changes occur. Currently it is loaded at start up.
• Need to think about an import data function.
• Testing on a Mac
• Implement a more solid connection pool mechanism
• Release strategy. Post on this site? or create an OpenSource project page?

Subclipse SVN plug-in for Eclipse

10/10/10 - had to post something.

I've experiences utter frustration with the SVN command-line client to maintain the various projects I've been working on and the lack of a Linux equivalent to TortoiseSVN. Typical example, I added a directory to the repository by mistake before running a clean operation. It took 20 minutes trying to delete files, cleanup commands to get back to a starting place with the files I really wanted to add.

The only apparent GUI for SVN on Linux appears to be through an Eclipse plug-in. Since I am moving my projects to Eclipse anyway this is a no-brainer.

Subclipse

Subclipse is the Eclipse client that integrates directly with the Eclipse IDE, even my Eclipse CDT IDE works. The download instructions are out of date with the Helios package of Eclipse (or Linux version). But you can more or less follow the instructions they give.

The installation is performed from within Eclipse

1. Start Eclipse
2. Help > Install New Software
3. In the Install wizard, Work with: field, enter the URL for the Subclipse version from the download and install page of the Subclipse site. In my case: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x.
4. I selected all the packages there, Core SVNKit Library, Optional JNA Library, Subclipse.
5. Finish your way through the wizard to install everything.
6. After the install you have to restart Eclipse.
7. I got a JavaHL error on start up of Eclipse, having to do with the JNA library. This is another topic discussed on the Subclipse wiki.
8. I ignored the error and Subclipse worked so I don't know how serious it is. I since went and installed then performed the JavaHL test cases successfully.
9. Note: I already had the SVN subversion command-line client installed, that may be a prerequisite, I am not sure to be honest.


The usage of Subclipse is not that clear-cut and documentation is lacking.

1. You need to set up a repository. Under Window > Open Perspective > Other choose SVN Repository Exploring. You can add a new repository if you have the URL (I had already created a local repository with the command line client, "file:///home/ammianus/svn-repo").
2. From the SVN Repository Explorer perspective, you can right-click a folder in your repository then click Import..., select a project in your workspace and you are good to go.
3. Once a project is associated with a location in your repository, if you right-click on a project or file > Context Menu > Team > * there will be all the normal SVN commands you would need. You will also notice that next to the project name will be the SVN repository location in brackets [].
4. You can see the behavior of Subclipse in a Console view in which you can switch to the SVN console output.

Building Static Libraries and Test Program with Eclipse CDT

Based on sample code from a book, GNU/Linux Application Programming by M. Tim Jones, I have been reading to refresh myself on Linux programming, specifically in the C language, I have been trying to explore using the Eclipse CDT IDE.

I have managed to get projects set up in Eclipse for a simple application that prints numbers to a file. For the sake of practice, I have split the code into 1) a static library, libexp, based on the random number API library example from Chapter 7 2) a static library, libtherm, that wraps the random function with a function that returns the "temperature" 3) a simple executable that calls the temperature library function multiple times and prints the results.

Eclipse CDT
I downloaded and installed the Eclipse CDT Helios version for Linux (x86_64)
This requires a Java Runtime be installed on the machine. I had to install OpenJDK (1.6.0_18, 64-bit)

Project Structure

I started from an existing project I had created using the Automake/Autoconfig to set up a build environment. In this set up, I there was a single "project" directory with an app and lib subfolders containing respective source and build files.

As far as I can tell, the Eclipse CDT approach is that there is a single build target per Project. Perhaps if you develop the Makefile rather than have Eclipse create one you could do a different set up. Going with a completely Eclipse controlled build process I created separate projects for each static library and the executable file. All the source files went directly into each project directory under the workspace.

Build Artifacts

See Right-click Project > Properties > C/C++ Build > Settings > Build Artifact
For each of my projects libexp and libtherm, I set the Build Artifact properties as Artifact Type: Static Library, Artifact Name: ${ProjName}, Artifact Extension: a.

This results when you compile in Eclipse building and archiving the object files into libexp.a and

For temp-app the difference was the Build Artifact was set to Type Executable and there was no extension.

Referencing Libraries

In my case, the libtherm library references libexp library. The temp-app needed to reference both libtherm and libexp.
For libtherm Properties > C/C++ General > Paths and Symbols > References. I checked off libexp / Active.

This adds under the Includes > GNU C tab the Include directory /libexp.

I also updated the Properties > Project References to check off libexp project.

These steps also add GCC Compiler flags. Under Properties > C/C++ Build > Settings > GCC C Compiler > Includes it adds under -l included paths: "${workspace_loc:/libexp}"

If you click on the main GCC C Compiler heading All the options are listed:

-I"/home/me/workspace/libexp" -O0 -g3 -pedantic -Wall -c -fmessage-length=0

For the temp-app the procedure was more or less the same. Under the Project References, Path and Symbol References I added the two library projects libexp, libtherm.

Difference seems to be in the Executable type Project, the C/C++ Build > Settings has new options for GCC C Linker. Under Libraries -l I added "therm" and "exp" (GCC C Linker will prepend "lib" and append ".a"). Under the Library Search Path (-L) I added paths to the Debug directories in my other projects where the library artifacts were being built. For GCC C Linker All Options this results in:

-static -L"/home/me/workspace/libtherm/Debug" -L"/home/me/workspace/libexp/Debug" -o"appexp" ./test.o -ltherm -lexp

(note: one crucial step when linking libraries that may refer to each other: you must order them in a top down way. i.e. the libraries that have their own references to lower level libraries should be ordered first, so in my case it was -ltherm then -lexp. See this discussion on StackOverflow for more details: GCC C++ Linker errors: Undefined reference to ...')

Running the Project

Once the projects have been set up and you have a working build. You can try to run it.

See Run > Run Configurations
Add a new C/C++ Application to run e.g. "AppExp". Clicking run will execute the program with output going to your Eclipse Console panel

Log4j explanation

This article helped me get around a problem at work. It was so simple and so helpful all at once.

Thank you sir!

Specifically what I was trying to do was to find out what logging was being done by some classes I was trying to test with JUnit Testing with an Eclipse plugin. I didn't know how the server I was interacting with was trying to find the log4j properties (what file name at what path) and I was having no luck seeing the log messages for the classes I was trying to test because there was no category set for them.

I would receive warning like this:
log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger(somePackageName.someClassName).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

In order to add a specific appenders to DEBUG and ERROR level messages from my class I need to find the log4j configuration.

In the Eclipse Debug Configurations on my JUnit test configuration, click on the Arguments tab. For VM Arguments I had the following:

-ea -Xmx256m -Dlog4j.debug

That did the trick, I was able to see in the console a message stating the xxx.properties was not found.
With that information I updated the properties file in the path it was looking for to add a category for the packages under test, and to change the appenders to point to new log files in my Eclipse project.