A mixed JVM application with a JavaFX frontend and a Scala backend to convert spreadsheet files into .smil files
This project is organized in two directories: listgen is the base application, written in Scala, with Sbt as the build
tool. listgengui was created later: originally meant to simply be a JavaFX frontend for listgen, it required a
complete project overhaul in order to be buildable with the post Java 9 version that JavaFX demanded; and thus the
entire project had to be created as a Java modular application, requiring some tinkering with the base libraries as well
as the building method. It uses Gradle as the build tool.
This project requires Java 14+ and Java FX 14+, as well as Scala 2.13
I have only built this application on Linux. It's multiplatform and I've made binaries for Windows from Linux (check the comments on the project's .gradle file), but I asked someone to build it on Windows and they didn't manage to; I haven't investigated the problem, all I know is that the embedded gradlew is not working for them. On Linux just install Gradle on your system so you can use the gradle command instead if you have problems with gradlew.
listgengui is a simple drag-and-drop file converter with 3 customizable options, as seen in the following
screenshot:
To execute the application, navigate to listgengui/ in a terminal and then execute:
gradle frontend:run
The build process will take a while the first time, but once it's complete, you will see the application open and show something like what you see on that screenshot.
You can find a sample file to tinker with in listgengui/backend/src/resources/. Drag it to the demarcated area in the
app and increase the sheet number to 2 (since that's the sheet containing the data in that file), then press
Execute. You will see 2 files are created in the same directory, a .txt for error checking, and a .smil file.
That's it! It's a simple application for a simple purpose, it does one thing, and it does it well.
If you're curious about the Scala backend, you won't be able to build it (yet) with the Gradle tool. Instead, navigate
to listgen/ in a terminal and then execute:
sbt run
After the build process is finished, you will see some text printed to the screen, and execution will stop. That's the application running without arguments printing the base help text. Running it with the corresponding arguments is equivalent to executing it through the Gui, since all the Gui does is translate the visual input into arguments for the function executed by this Scala application.
Special thanks to my customer for letting me open source this tool, and to Li Haoyi for his excellent Scala library, which simplified my work even more than Scala alone already did. Pay him a visit at https://github.com/lihaoyi