A Curious Animal

Taking a walk on our big virtual world I found this nice page http://elements.wlonk.com. which contains fun periodic tables which can be a great help to remember the elements.

As the page says: These colorful, fun, and informative periodic tables are great for elementary, middle, and high school students, as well as adults.

If like me, you need to parse some text using regular expressions and it must be done in a casi insensitive way, here is the trick you are looking for.

If you use the Pattern class approach, then add the Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE flag:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("YOUR_REGEX", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);

If you prefer to use the String.matches() method, then use the ?i flag in the regular expression:

"XYZxyz".matches("(?i)[a-z]+")

I want to note I found this help on: http://blogs.sun.com/xuemingshen/entry/case_insensitive_matching_in_java.

The project

Having the previous in mind, my final decision was to use WWJ as the 3D API and wrap it as a very nice desktop application. So a new question arise: do I must use a framework or programming the application from the beginning?

Again, when working on my own 3D API I was reading and making some tests with NetBeans Platform. There are other good frameworks like EclipseRCP or, the recently appeared on these days, Swing Application Framework, but after some readings I finally choose NetBeans Platform for the next reasons:

• 100% Swing
• Modular runtime container
• Plugin support
• Window system
• Support handling actions, files and many other things typical in applications.
• Active project, decent documentation and great forum activity.

I have no doubt, NetBeans Platform plus WWJ is a great combination.

History

The Balloon Project was born some time ago (I think in 2006) when ear NASA was preparing a Java API for WorldWind.

I always like 3D but never have enough time to make someting related with it. Finally I was decide to start my own virtual globe project. I was spent one year learning and programming 3D and as result I produce my first API release, never published, with next features:

• Smooth globe, no elevation information.
• Layer+Object composition, that is, all the information in the globe is understanted as layers: tile layers, icon layers, vector layers, composite layer, etc and every layer contains renderable objects: points, icons, polygons, images.
• WMS tiles request, I was initially created a WMS tile layer to get content from WMS servers. That way you can overlap aerial images with street data from OpenStreetMaps, etc.
• Picking, all objects reacts under mouse events throught the OPENGL picking mechanism.

Then... why to change to NASA WWJ?

This answer is easy. In the same year NASA release the first or second version of WWJ which some important features, like elevations. Also, in the next months I saw how the NASA team publish new release with more improvements I can do anlone.

Because this I start learning WWJ API and make some little contributions:

• Swing Annotation
• Prism objects
• Time animation
• Asincronous image loading

What I had in mind is not only to create a virtual globe API, NASA WWJ is the best Java alternative for that, but to create a complete applications.