I'm not sure why Sun's Java coders don't support a sort of minimalist mindset as part of their Ivory Tower Syndrone, but they don't. This is not news, and I believe I complained about this the last time I acquired a Windows laptop and was trying to find a decent RSS aggregator. Regardless, it hurts to see the pain again.

JNN is a decent RSS aggregator, notoriously referred to as James Gosling's "weekend hack." It did all your RSS reader needed to do. Unfortunately it's since had one heck of a lot of dependencies added to it, which I'll paste here for those not lucky enough to be registered java.net members.

File  Rev.  Age  Author  Last log entry
bloged.jar
cmu_us_kal.jar
cmulex.jar
cmutimelex.jar
en_us.jar
freetts.jar
jaxen-core.jar
jaxen-jdom.jar
jdom.jar
jsapi.exe (??)
jsapi.sh (??)
rome-0.8-HEAD.jar
saxpath.jar


It's annoying when people make code this incestuous. I'm not going on a limb when I say the full power of each of these libs is not necessary for the application to work, but occasionally JNN utilizes only a few functions from a library because whatever developer (here's one possible culprit of many) was familiar with that other project.

I hate dependencies. If you're going to add them, make the application degrade gracefully if they aren't found. Right now, JNN just stops at its splash screen without so much as a dialog box. Slick. And for heaven's sake, include the danged libraries in the download to your app from the app's home page. Can this really be the home of the sorry as crap DefaultModels for their GUI renderers? (That is, when developing with Java, the kitchen, at least with respect to GUIs, is so bare/minimalist that it's nearly unusable, forcing you to roll your own objects rather than leaning heavily on the libraries.)

Skillz-a-plenty. Hopefully I'll finally bother to CVS the initial version and fork this one into something usable from a hacker's point of view.

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