Ok, so for several months, I’ve neglected this app, and I finally got around to fixing it. Basically, I updated my appengine libraries and GWT libraries, and it broke the app, preventing it from getting the list of sorting algorithms available to display with the app. Now that it is corrected, this should all work much better. I’ve also included the (very rudimentary) javadoc for the project at: http://showsort.darkhelm.org/doc/index.html. It is my rather rough attempt at writing documentation for the entire app, so please, bear with me.
The entire project was an attempt to learn about Google App Engine for Java, GWT, Jython, and making it all work together. The concept was an old application that I had to write for a computer class back in high school, a program I’ve rewritten multiple times to learn the basics of several languages. This is the first time I’ve tried to separate the code into specific components — display, algorithm, and processing. The algorithms are written in python, and visible in the app (as well as a brief summary/description of the algorithm), and they are quite literally what is executed to do the sorting of the array. The processing components of the app are the server-side components, which define the array, and execute the sorting algorithm. The display components are the client-side pieces, utilizing GWT for rendering, as well as some pieces of code to generate the graphical aspects with a canvas tag (and the excanvas javascript library so it works in Internet Explorer, that does not natively support the cavas tag). It also handles the syntax highlighting & rendering of the python code, plus the rest of the UI in general.
All in all, it ended up being a rather complex way to do something simple (sort an array of integers). As time progresses, I will most likely add to this app. There are some GWT 2.0 features I’d like to fiddle with, and some further features I’d like to add, not to mention getting a few more sorting algorithms added to the roster.