Hello,

  Welcome back to the Thinlet Titan Interview series.
Today let's welcome Thinlet World publisher Alan
Williamson.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Alan Williamson: You can read all about me at my blog:
http://alan.blog-city.com/read/71043.htm

Q: How did you stumble onto Thinlet? Have you tried
out any alternative XML UI toolkits for Java before
settling on Thinlet?

Alan Williamson: A long time ago while i was at Java
Developers Journal.  I believe one  of the editors
said to me to take a look at it.  I can't honestly
remember anymore than that.  Once I had a look at it I
was very 
impressed by its sheer size and the Amazon demo
literally sold me on the whole concept.   I thought to
myself thinking, why wasn't this around 5 years ago
when applets needed help against the likes of Flash. 
Maybe if Thinlets had been around at the start, we
wouldn't be in such a Flash biased world.

Q: What's the hook? Why would anyone use Thinlet over
say plain old Java Swing coding?

Alan Williamson: Speed and size.  You can literally
have code knocked up in minutes without worrying about
importing jar files, implementing interfaces and have
it all shipped that anyone with Java installed can
run.  Swing has its place, do not get me wrong, but
this is for more lightweight apps.

Q: Can you highlight some of your applications built
using Thinlet?

Alan Williamson: Primarily my focus has been on small
internal applications that would have normally spent
their lives as console driven utilities.  Thinlet
allows me to literally paste a UI onto any function
very fast.

Q: How did you get started on FileLet?

Alan Williamson: Driven from a need to browse my file
system and be able to edit a file as soon as i clicked
on it, as opposed to always double-clicking or sending
it to WordPad.  I wanted a real lightweight emacs
style way of looking around my system but retain the
Explorer-tree structure of the filesystem.  i also
wanted to make sure i designed it in such a way that i
could plugin file-viewers/editors easily.  At the
moment it supports text files and images.

Q: Can you tell us some challenges you faced building
FileLet?

Alan Williamson: The biggest challenge facing Thinlet
is that while the widgets are powerful, they aren't
quite powerful enough.  Extending them is a challenge
that to be quite honest with you I am not interested
in 
taking up.  I am using Thinlet to forget my UI
problems, not introduce them.

Q: Can you tell us what FileLet can do today? What
works and what needs to be done?

Alan Williamson: It can open up anyfile in textmode
and quickly move around the file space.  It can also
view files.  The next wave of features that need done
are to introduce the standard
(delete/rename/copy/move) file 
operations.  Sadly Thinlet doesn't support drag-n-drop
so thats another shortcoming.

Q: What's your take on creating an OO wrapper for
Thinlet?

Alan Williamson: There are two directions for Thinlet
to satisfy; desktop apps and J2ME apps. We've come to
the stage where the same code base isn't working 
for both parties, and therefore a decision has to be
made.  Anything that makes Thinlet more accessible and
more extensible i support 100%.

Q: What do you think is still missing in Thinlet?

Alan Williamson: The ability to extend it.  It's
killing Thinlet.  If it could even allow a Swing
JComponent to be dropped in then that would go 99% of
the way. At the moment it only supports
java.awt.Component's to be dropped in, but no one is
coding widgets specifically to that level anymore. 
Another thing that Thinlet is suffering from at the
moment, is any form of leadership.  It's an
open-source project that is in dire need of some
management.  The mailing list is wonderful, but its
all talk and little 
action.  It's killing the project.

Q: Do you have any future plans for Thinlet?

Alan Williamson: Keep dialogue and conversation going.
 There are a lot of smart people that want to move
this project forward, and if I can assist in anyway to
make that happen then I will.  Thinlet is a great
project and it needs to florish.  But at the moment
there are some great alternatives now making their
mark and if Thinlet isn't careful, its moment in the
sun may have gone.  I hope not.

Thanks Alan for taking time out to share your
thoughts. Keep up the great work on FileLet.

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