SELECT column_name
    CASE
        WHEN column_name LIKE pattern_1 THEN 1
        WHEN column_name LIKE pattern_2 THEN 2
        WHEN column_name LIKE pattern_3 THEN 3
        ELSE 4
    END AS arbitrary_order
FROM table_name
ORDER BY arbitrary_order

I will test this ordering with the ip2nation’s table “ip2nationCountries”. Let’s assume the requirement says that the order should be based on the given list of prefixes: U, C, Un, B, remainder. Besides this order, all results should be returned in ascending order. At first, one can try the following query to fulfill this requirement:

SELECT country,
    CASE
        WHEN country LIKE 'U%' THEN 1
        WHEN country LIKE 'C%' THEN 2
        WHEN country LIKE 'Un%' THEN 3
        WHEN country LIKE 'B%' THEN 4
        ELSE 5
    END AS arbitrary_order
FROM "ip2nationCountries"
ORDER BY arbitrary_order, country

The result of this query is here. As you can see from the results, one problem is visible: “United States” appears before “China”, which does not fulfill the given requirements. This occurs because “United States” matches the first pattern in the case-switch (U%). This can be solved by placing the Un% case before U%:

SELECT country,
    CASE
        WHEN country LIKE 'Un%' THEN 3
        WHEN country LIKE 'U%' THEN 1
        WHEN country LIKE 'C%' THEN 2
        WHEN country LIKE 'B%' THEN 4
        ELSE 5
    END AS arbitrary_order
FROM "ip2nationCountries"
ORDER BY arbitrary_order, country

The result of this query is here.

This type of arbitrary ordering is very useful when you need to fill combos whose first results should reflect the interests of a particular group of customers, or when you need to decrease the amount of post-processing while creating a report.

Window created by Matisse (Java)

Window created by wxMatisse (C++)

Code created by Matisse

public class MatisseTest extends javax.swing.JFrame {    

/** Creates new form MatisseTest */
public MatisseTest() {
    initComponents();
}

/** This method is called from within the constructor to
* initialize the form.
* WARNING: Do NOT modify this code. The content of this method is
* always regenerated by the Form Editor.
*/
private void initComponents() {//GEN-BEGIN:initComponents
    button2 = new javax.swing.JButton();
    button1 = new javax.swing.JButton();
    panel1 = new javax.swing.JPanel();
    button3 = new javax.swing.JButton();
    panel2 = new javax.swing.JPanel();

    setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    getContentPane().setLayout(null);
    button2.setLabel("Right button");
    getContentPane().add(button2);
    button2.setBounds(210, 310, 130, 30);
    button1.setLabel("Left button");
    getContentPane().add(button1);
    button1.setBounds(50, 310, 130, 30);
    panel1.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(204, 102, 255));
    panel1.setLayout(null);
    button3.setLabel("North button");
    panel1.add(button3);
    button3.setBounds(20, 20, 250, 60);
    panel2.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(255, 255, 0));
    panel2.setLayout(null);
    panel1.add(panel2);
    panel2.setBounds(20, 100, 250, 130);
    getContentPane().add(panel1);
    panel1.setBounds(50, 40, 290, 250);

    java.awt.Dimension screenSize = java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
    setBounds((screenSize.width-410)/2, (screenSize.height-403)/2, 410, 403);
}//GEN-END:initComponents

// Variables declaration - do not modify//GEN-BEGIN:variables

    private javax.swing.JButton button1;
    private javax.swing.JButton button2;
    private javax.swing.JButton button3;
    private javax.swing.JPanel panel1;
    private javax.swing.JPanel panel2;

// End of variables declaration//GEN-END:variables

}

Code created by wxMatisse

// File created by wxMatisse

#ifndef _MATISSETEST_H
#define _MATISSETEST_H

#include <wx/frame.h>
#include <wx/button.h>
#include <wx/panel.h>

class MatisseTest : public wxFrame { 

public:

	MatisseTest(const wxString &title);

private:

	wxPanel *wxpanel2;

	wxPanel *wxpanel1;

	wxButton *wxbutton1;

	wxButton *wxbutton2;

	wxButton *wxbutton3;

	void initComponents();

	enum {
		WXBUTTON1 = wxID_HIGHEST + 1,
		WXBUTTON2,
		WXBUTTON3,
		WXPANEL1,
		WXPANEL2
	};

};

#endif 	 /* _MATISSETEST_H */

// File created by wxMatisse

#include "matisse.h"

MatisseTest::MatisseTest(const wxString &title) : wxFrame((wxFrame*) NULL, wxID_ANY, title) {
	initComponents();
}

void MatisseTest::initComponents() {
	wxbutton1 = new wxButton(this, WXBUTTON1, _T("Right button"), wxPoint(210, 310), wxSize(130, 30));
	wxbutton2 = new wxButton(this, WXBUTTON2, _T("Left button"), wxPoint(50, 310), wxSize(130, 30));
	wxpanel1 = new wxPanel(this, WXPANEL1, wxPoint(50, 40), wxSize(290, 250));
	wxpanel1->SetBackgroundColour(wxColour(204, 102, 255));
	wxbutton3 = new wxButton(wxpanel1, WXBUTTON3, _T("North button"), wxPoint(20, 20), wxSize(250, 60));
	wxpanel2 = new wxPanel(wxpanel1, WXPANEL2, wxPoint(20, 100), wxSize(250, 130));
	wxpanel2->SetBackgroundColour(wxColour(255, 255, 0));
}

There are still many things to do until I release version 0.1, of course. For now, only null layout is supported. Support for other layout managers will be added in the future. The goal is to be able to translate all windows created by Matisse as long as they use the supported layout managers. As expected, there will be no support for widgets that wxWidgets offers for an operating system exclusively. Unlike Matisse, you will have total freedom to modify the generated code, as there is no coming back from it. The windows that wxMatisse translates need not be created by Matisse: as this translator uses the properties of the window rather than code, it does not rely on any code convention. As long as the code compiles and runs, the code can be a complete mess that wxMatisse will still work. wxMatisse will be useful for migration projects where code needs to be translated from Java to C++. I will open the wxMatisse project on java.net as soon as the project support all the basic widgets in null layout. If you want to collaborate, or if you know anything about NetBeans programming and want to give a hand, you’re more than welcome to join the project!

1. Download and install MinGW if you don’t already have it. Add MinGW’s bin subdirectory to your PATH environment variable. Note that if you use Vista, you must override GCC’s utilities with their corresponding Vista builds;
2. Download and install MSYS – you will need it to compile wxWidgets. Add its bin subdirectory to PATH as you did with MinGW;
3. Open the MSYS console and navigate to the directory where you extracted wxWidgets (or where the installation put the files from wxWidgets);
4. Create a directory for your build (mkdir build-static-debug) and navigate to it. You may want to use other names;
5. Run configure with your preferred options, which may include
   • --enable-debug – enable debugging info
   • --enable-optimise – create optimised code
   • --disable-shared – create static libraries (use this unless you want to distribute wxWidgets dlls with your application)
   • --enable-unicode – compile wxWidgets with unicode support

   When you are done choosing, enter the configure command. In my build, I used ../configure --enable-debug --disable-shared --enable-unicode. After configure is done, it will output the basic options of your build

6. Run make to build wxWidgets. As this may take quite a while, you may consider doing 100 push-ups to burn the calories of that burrito you’ve just eaten while following this guide;
7. Remove object files with rm *.o (you’re not going to need them);
8. Run make install to install wxWidgets;

This is it for compiling wxWidgets. Now you need to setup a C/C++ project on NetBeans to use what you’ve just compiled:

1. First of all, make sure NetBeans recognizes your MinGW + MSYS setup. Go to Tools --> Options, then select C/C++. Check if MinGW and MSYS bin subdirectories are listed on the current path list. Add them if they aren’t. make should be found inside MSYS while gcc, g++ and gdb should be found inside MinGW;
2. Now that NetBeans recognizes your MinGW + MSYS setup, it’s time to create a new wxWidgets project. Go to File --> New Project... and select C/C++ application;
3. With your project open, enter the project properties dialog;
4. Select C/C++ --> C++ Compiler --> General options;
5. Open the MSYS console and navigate to the directory where you’ve made your wxWidgets build (e.g. build-static-debug) and enter wx-config --cxxflags. wx-config will output the compiler flags for your project. On my machine wx-config --cxxflags outputs -I/c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/wx/include/msw-uni
code-debug-static-2.8 -I/c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/include -I/c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/contrib/include -D__WXDEBUG__ -D__WXMSW__ -mthreads. Remember to leave this console open;
6. Add all directories preppended with -I from wx-config output to the include directories of your project;
7. Select Command line and put the remaining flags from wx-config there;
8. Now select Linker --> General options;
9. Back on the MSYS console, type wx-config --libs. wx-config will output the linker flags for your project. On my machine wx-config --libs outputs -L/c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib -mthreads -Wl,--subsystem,windows -mwindows /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_richtext-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_aui-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_xrc-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_qa-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_html-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_adv-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_mswud_core-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_baseud_xml-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_baseud_net-2.8.a /c/wxWidgets-2.8.7/msw-debug/lib/libwx_baseud-2.8.a -lwxregexud-2.8 -lwxexpatd-2.8 -lwxtiffd-2.8 -lwxjpegd-2.8 -lwxpngd-2.8 -lwxzlibd-2.8 -lrpcrt4 -loleaut32 -lole32 -luuid -lwinspool -lwinmm -lshell32 -lcomctl32 -lcomdlg32 -lctl3d32 -ladvapi32 -lwsock32 -lgdi3;
10. Add the directory preppended with -L to the Additional library directories inside General options and click OK to close this dialog;
11. Now select Linker --> Libraries --> Add option... --> Other option...;
12. Back on the MSYS console, copy the remaining linker flags;
13. Paste the remaining flags from wx-config --libs on your notepad and replace all occurrences of /c/ by C\:/ (this letter may vary depending on where you installed wxWidgets), then paste the result on that field. Remember: replacing /c/ by C\:/ is utterly necessary if you don’t want to see ugly linker errors!;
14. Create a simple wx program and build it;

That’s a lot of work for a first application, but for your next applications all you will have to do is to repeat the compiler and linker options. Now you can use your favorite IDE to make wxWidgets applications on Windows.

PS: A wxWidgets plugin for NetBeans (wxMatisse?) would be great.

Fortunately, Steve has managed to be persuasive. What is very interesting about his post is that Steve, as someone who has managed to understand compilers, didn’t fall into the arrogance trap. Instead of arrogating himself for his compiler knowledge, Steve took the self-critical route, describing in a very candid manner what he thought about compilers early in his career. Instead of enumerating arguments that make sense only for the GCC team, Steve describes how different programmers in different contexts can benefit from this knowledge, showing his awareness for diversity in a post that instead of condemning, stimulates and encourages all of us to look further into compilers.

Regular Expressions are one of the most overlooked things in programming. A simple search on Google for form validation returns many cook-book style tutorials that help making things worse by just showing an ugly finished expression (or an even uglier string parsing function). Because it’s so easy to shy away from regular expressions just by seeing them finished, I’ve decided to demonstrate a regular expression construction step-by-step. The expression will validate an hh:mm:ss time pattern. Here it is:

^((\d)|(0\d)|(1\d)|(2[0-3]))\:((\d)|([0-5]\d))\:((\d)|([0-5]\d))$

On a first glance it looks ugly, but if you consider that it validates that time pattern in a single line, it starts to look better. Let’s proceed to the step-by-step construction.

First, let’s start with the body of the expression. You don’t want to validate anything before or after the expression itself, so you delimitate it with ^ (to match the beginning of string) and $ (to match the end of the string):

^$

This results in an expression that will match only an empty string. Try it now:

Validate Pattern: ^$

If you just used ^ or $, the expression would match anything that had a start or an end, respectively, which is not what you want. Try it now:

Validate Pattern: ^

Validate Pattern: $

When we create regular expressions, we should be able to think in terms of expression cases. The first case is the hour value. It can be any value from 00 to 23, and we must consider the single digit cases too (0 to 9). Let’s create an expression for each case and test them. The first case is 0-9:

The user may choose to type just a single digit, so we must be prepared for this case. A regular expression that can match is \d, which stands for “any digit”. The ^\d$ expression matches any string that contains only a single digit:

Validate Pattern: ^\d$

Besides 0-9 numbers, the user can also enter a two-digit number such as 18, but we must delimitate this range from 00 to 23. Because regular expressions work on a character basis (and not on a number basis), we must think in terms of which characters can vary and how they can vary. You can’t, for instance, use \d\d, because that would allow numbers like 45 to match. Neither can you use [0-2][0-3] because that would not allow numbers like 19 to match. It’s time to subdivide them into groups, which are the following:

• 0\d – allows numbers from 00 to 09 to match
• 1\d – allows numbers from 10 to 19 to match
• 2[0-3] – allows numbers from 20 to 23 to match

When creating regular expressions it’s nice to test them one by one to be sure they’re working:

Validate Pattern: ^0\d$

Validate Pattern: ^1\d$

Validate Pattern: ^2[0-3]$

Now we can validade any hour value by just grouping all cases so far. Grouping is very intuitive because it uses (...) to group and | to alternate between groups:

^((\d)|(0\d)|(1\d)|(2[0-3]))$

Validate Pattern: ^((\d)|(0\d)|(1\d)|(2[0-3]))$

Time to include the : sign, but because it has a regexp meaning, you should precede it with \ on the expression such as this:

Validate Pattern: ^\:$

Moving on to the minute and second values, the digits range from 00 to 59, and we should include the single digit value as well. The minutes case is much easier because we can give a lot of freedom for the second digit. The [0-5]\d expression does the trick:

Validate Pattern: ^[0-5]\d$

Joining this expression with the single digit rule yields the following expression:

^((\d)|([0-5]\d))$

Validate Pattern: ^((\d)|([0-5]\d))$

With this expression ready, the seconds value is ready as well, since the seconds rule is the same as the minutes rule. Putting it all together we have the final expression:

^((\d)|(0\d)|(1\d)|(2[0-3]))\:((\d)|([0-5]\d))\:((\d)|([0-5]\d))$

Validate The final hh:mm:ss validation pattern

• Editor – code font and colors are not always updated when I change settings on the Font & Color dialog. For example: if I change the field color, I have to reopen the code to see the changes. Font & Color settings weren’t imported from my NB 5.5 settings, even though I’ve chosen to do so when I first opened NB 6.0. This is a minor issue that should be fixed soon;
• MUCH better CSS support – clicking on a CSS rule updates a “Style Builder” form where you can change font, background, border and other settings plus a window where you can preview the style. That means much less dependency on tools like Dreamweaver;
• Javascript support – in NB 5.5 I had to use a plugin for Javascript code completion, which is now native to NB 6.0. To make things even better, you can see the minimum DOM version to use every function. With the widespread use of Javascript libraries like Prototype and Scriptaculous, I would like NB to parse all the Javascript files in my project just like it’s currently done with Java files. That would yield a better code completion support for Javascript;
• Easier encoding configuration – if you ever moved your code across different OSes and saw your “é” become a “?”, you know encoding is something you have to care about. It would be easy to write an entire project in NB 5.5 and forget that because the encoding option is so well hidden within the advanced options inside the options dialog. Now you can easily set the encoding for the project in a more intuitive manner by simply choosing a value in a combo box that is inside the very first page of the project options dialog;
• Cool Code insertion – I remember I was once bashed in a forum for requesting method delegate facilities in the Java language. Maybe we’re not quite there yet, but NB 6.0 now features a code insertion facility that makes it easy to proxify methods of objects that your class contains. Just press Alt + Insert and choose “Delegate method…”

Fig. 1. Improved CSS support now shows a preview of the rule

Fig. 2. Javascript code completion is now native to NB 6.0

Fig. 3. Encoding configuration is now on the very first page of the project configuration dialog

What I really like about this new version of NB is that things have either become easier or as easy as they were before. All these features are integrated, making NB worth the Integrated Development Environment title. Everyone who download it will benefit from these changes and there is no need to know which NB branch will match your needs. If you downloaded the RC versions of NB 6.0 and you were disappointed by editor problems, you can make your upgrade now since most of those issues were solved. If you were waiting to upgrate to NB 6.0, the time is now!

    /**
     * Reads an image from disk and exports it to PNG format using 
     * alphaColor as the transparent color.
     *
     * @param alphaColor the color to use as the trasparent color
     * @param src the path of the source image
     * @param dst the destination path of the exported image
     */
    void toPNG(Color alphaColor, String src, String dst) {
        RenderedImage image = JAI.create("fileload", src);

        PNGEncodeParam.RGB param = new PNGEncodeParam.RGB();

        param.setTransparentRGB(new int[]{alphaColor.getRed(),
                                          alphaColor.getGreen(),
                                          alphaColor.getBlue()});

        JAI.create("filestore", image, dst, "PNG", param);
    }

The resize code:

    /**
     * Reads an image from the given src and writes it to the
     * given dst resized to the given width and
     * height.
     *
     * @param src the path of the source image
     * @param dst the destination path of the exported image
     * @param width the width of the new image
     * @param height the height of the new image
     */
    void writeResizedPNGImage(String src, String dst, int width,
                              int height) {

        RenderedImage image = JAI.create("fileload", src);

        BufferedImage buf = new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage
                                             .TYPE_INT_ARGB);

        Graphics2D g = buf.createGraphics();

        AffineTransform transform = new AffineTransform();

        // Resize to fit
        transform.setToScale(width / (double) image.getWidth(),
                             height / (double) image.getHeight());

        g.drawRenderedImage(image, transform);

        JAI.create("filestore", buf, dst, "PNG");
    }

Useful links: JAI download. JAI API docs.