Working solutions

So it looks like the basics are working on the program. Now that it does what it’s supposed to, it’s off to creating the not so easy portion of the system.  There are still some minor portions or the program that aren’t working properly.

The answer to the initial question was…

this.setVisible(true);

Guess it was the simple stuff that was causing things to fail.  It almost always is.  The next question I’m wondering about is the scroll bar on the text box.  I’m sure it’s something easy, but easy isn’t hitting on the head right now, I’m going to have to keep guessing. 

The other items I’m wondering about are all style issues.  Simple things like why there is so much gap between the top grouping and where the list box starts.  I shouldn’t call it a list box, but that’s what it reminds me of.  It’s really a JTextArea.  

This is what often happens in many of my programs and projects.  I break down to fighting simple/stupid stuff that doesn’t really equate to how the program operates.  It’s just a visibility/design issue.  But design issues can make or break a program.  Certainly, there should be more to the program, but at the moment, everything seems to be acting like I think it should.  As a test, it works well. 

The next questions are all technical ones.  Such as, the InetAddress.isReachable implementation.  I question these things, because the creation I’m thinking of making is some sort of thing that examines the current state of hosts imported through an XML file and alerts based on whether hosts are reachable or not.  It then checks every 30 seconds or so and writes the information to a database.  From there, you can see the long term uptime of a network.

And I really want to know what it does and how it operates, because proper troubleshooting requires knowing why something is doing what it is doing.  And really, you need to know both what the results tell you and what the results don't tell you.  I've spent 3/4 of a day fighting an Internet issue because I quit listening to what everything was telling me.  I was being too quick to jump to conclusions. 

There are other things I’m contemplating, but I don’t know how to implement them.  In the end, almost all of my programs become horrendously ungainly things where feature creep becomes a dominant factor.  Well, feature creep and general GUI design flaws.  Like I said, I spend a lot of time fighting GUI design.

Other than something I wrote in C# that checks to see whether a collection of backup files are there, and the date on those files.  It then emails me, telling me whether things succeeded or not.  But that probably needs updated just to make sure it stays working.  Or,  I need to rewrite the entire thing in Java.