Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Is JBidWatch 0.4 supposed to work cross plat?

I’ve been trying to get JBidWatch-0.4.jar to work
with Java 1.2 and now 1.3 on SPARC Solaris – currently Solaris 8. What I get is this:

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: JBidWatch-0/4/jar

Is there supposed to be something else that I have to do to get it to run?

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / We have a new mascot!

Greetings,

Previously I was using a cute picture I’d taken of a friends parrot as the splash screen… A friend of mine convinced me I needed something better, and had another friend draw up a REALLY pretty graphic for me! It’s a pun on the ‘JBidWatcher’ name, ‘Jay Bidwatcher’. (Although I occasionally slip and call it Jay Birdwatcher… grin) It’s the jbidwatch.jpg file, and is now the default splash screen on startup. I’ll probably make an icon out of it also, so the project can have a default icon as well.

If you have CVS access, I highly recommend using that, because the volume of changes in CVS over the last release are huge. I’ll be putting out a release within a week, hopefully, if I can get the XML save-file format to save and load cleanly by then. That will allow the event logging capabilities to work better, and many other useful features.

Stay tuned. BIG changes are coming!

— Morgan Schweers, cyberfox

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / JBidWatcher update

Greetings,
There’s been a lot of recent activity on the source. Here’s some of the primary features and changes so far in CVS since the 0.2 release:

Browser proxy connections so the browser user doesn’t have to log into anything that JBidWatcher is already logged into.

Browser monitoring of the JBidWatcher state (you can retrieve the table of auctions w/ info remotely, and you will eventually be able to remote control it via browser).

Time resynchronizes every half hour.

HOPEFULLY correctly supports timezones, but since I’m in the timezone with the only server I’ve implemented, I haven’t tested this yet.

Constantly updating time display (clock), showing the time at the default auction server. (Which is default will matter when I implement other auction sites than eBay.)

Adult auction bidding/sniping works (this appeared to be broken).

There’s a ‘show status’ option which tells you the last thing that was done to that auction item, and how successful it was. (This will eventually also be put into a log.)

Even less hardcoding of ebay-related information. (It’s getting to the point where I may implement Yahoo auctions soon, just to clean out any ugliness that still remains.)

Removed the ‘Track Bids’ concept for now, so that I could set the configuration item up for enable/disabling the proxy links (for ‘view in browser’ and remote-browsing).

Improved configuration dialog consistency.

Sniped bids show up in the list as green, so you can instantly tell the difference between things you’ve only bid on and things you have a pending snipe on.

You can now cancel snipes w/o exitting, editing the auctions.cfg file, etc., etc… It’s a right-click option now.

It now honors the configuration option for whether you’re adult registered or not.

Many of the menu options added are not working, and some will even throw NullPointerExceptions, as they’re just tied to the right-click menu, but don’t have the same context information yet.

Of the actual bugs that I’m investigating right now, the most annoying is the apparent memory leak in the coloration code. It makes it very difficult to use under Windows 98… I don’t know if it’s the JRE or if it’s something somehow in my code, but one tool (JProbe) claims that the number of Color objects grows uncontrollably.

Bugs to expect will be fixed before the next release:

eBay removing an auction, and us losing the data because we presume it’s a valid auction.

Bidding not working on adult auctions.

Auction Update not working under Windows 2000.

Connectivity to the server is not reported.

If I get to features, I hope to work on:

configuration tabs (a browser tab, one for each auction server, and some JBidWatcher specific options).

Double-clicking an auction should instantly request an update from the server.

Add storing to the save-file whether we’ve done a final update on an auction or not, so on launch it only updates auctions that we need to update.

The next version will be named 0.3.0alpha (should probably be called pre-alpha, but I started this naming convention, so I’ll stick with it).

This is a call for people to try it, test it, abuse it, and report every niggling annoyance you get. Feedback is critical!

Thank you!

Morgan Schweers
cyberfox

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / State of JBidWatcher

Greetings,

This is a brief update of the status, and plans for JBidWatcher…

I’ve actually used JBidWatcher a lot lately, including sniping on auctions, monitoring auctions, and generally keeping good track of them.

It runs as a single binary under both Windows and Linux right now, without any problems. (In fact, my primary development is under Linux, with a Windows box that maps the development directory and runs the same .class files using the same configuration files.) It supports drag and drop of auction URL’s straight off of Netscape onto the program on both platforms.

It hasn’t been released yet, because it needs a little bit of configuration to get it going. I want to make the program automatically handle that initial configuration, instead of making you create a text configuration file. It also isn’t handling drag-and-drop in a piece of the window, which makes it non-obvious how to add auctions.

There’s also a memory leak in the version which has colored text in the main display, but the memory leak is someplace deep in the Swing HTML libraries. I’m hoping 1.3 fixes that.

The code is being build mainly with Jikes, although I try ‘javac’ again every so often, to make sure there’s nothing incompatible being put in.

It’s very clean code, in my opinion, and remarkably resiliant.

Ongoing goals are: release a pre-alpha version for people to try, thread the updates, clean up a lot of the HTML parsing so more conditions are recognized, fix it so that it doesn’t load all the auctions before starting, encrypt your configuration information on disk, and consider adding more auction sites (Yahoo, Amazon, etc.), since the code DOES support that relatively easily.

Please feel free to comment, and file feature requests!

— Morgan Schweers

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Initial note on JBidwatcher

Greetings,

The goal is to have something that is usable under Windows and Linux (meaning in this case supporting drag and drop from Netscape under both), and at least somewhat clean looking for the first release. The current show stoppers for doing a first-pass release are bug 103650 (Drag and Drop from Netscape under Linux crashes) and bug 103646 (downloads all auctions before starting UI). Bug 103647 (not able to bid) is not critical for an initial release.

I’d encourage people to check the code out of CVS and take a look. It’s very clean code right now, and the goal is to keep it that way. I’d love to hear bug reports / comments / ideas, and certainly code!

— Morgan Schweers (cyberfox@users.sourceforge.net)

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Welcome to Help

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Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Welcome to Developers

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