Develop Reference

Is text rendering possible onto 2D images with Javascript/PHP?

I own a sports apparel company and I'm looking to have an applet built that will allow customers to see how their team names will look in certain colors on jerseys. Below you can see the final result of a competitor site's Flash applet where text is rendered on 2D surfaces/images.
My requirements: I need users to be able to set the font, primary text color, outline text color, and text style (arched or straight).
So my question-- Is this sort of text rendering possible with only Javascript/PHP?
If so, what limitations do you for see? I've been told the arching and outline text color may be issues. I've also been told that I may have to upload library files to a server where the actual rendering may take place.
If not, what scripting would you guys recommend? I'm trying to stay away from Flash because it's slow and costly.
I'll be passing this onto our developers so please feel free to be as detailed as possible. I figure'd I'd save them some leg work!
Thank you!

Depending on how complex you want your graphics to be, html5 drawing abilities could be used. Check Raphaël library, for instance, webGL/canvas renderers already have a lot of features in modern browsers.
As of the solution with server rendering, it's also possible with gd2(php), but imho that would be less convenient, at least try something different from php (btw, what's your backend running on?)
Your competitor's solution with java applet honestly seems the easiest, except that it requires jre, which few people are eager to install =)

That's kind-of a high level question, but yes you can definitely use javascript for it.
If there's a problem with getting characters to look right, you can always save each letter as a separate image and have javascript place them next to each other in preview. I'd try to see how close you could get with the existing fonts first.
Layering the text: one color large font, then a different color smaller font will give you the outline effect your looking for.

Programming with a Java MVC approach using NetBeans GUI builder

I've been tasked with making a GUI that essentially takes a bit of user input and does some folder/file manipulation on various drives accessible by the machine the program is being run on. While designing this GUI, I'm starting to realize that MVC will make my life much easier and anyone else who decides to modify code, but I can't really see how this can be done via NetBeans.
I've done a bit of reading up on this topic, and I can't really see any clear cut answers as to whether or not this can be done on NetBeans. Surely it can be done if I programmatically build the GUI, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of why I chose to use NetBeans.

Netbeans is fine to do this.
The key thing to realize is that while all of the basic Swing components are MVC, for the most part you don't interact with them that way. A simple text field has it internal model, but that model isn't your model, the text field is more a primitive.
Your model deals with higher level events (button actions and what not), rather than button presses and arrow moves and mouse clicks.
So, for high level MVC, the primary mechanism of communication is through PropertyChangeListeners. And the basic task of building your app up is wiring the PCLs of the assorted data elements along with their GUI components together.
For example, a simple case is you have a list of items. And that list is rendered on the screen via a JTable, and that table is on a JPanel.
Your list has it's own model, i.e. it's not simply a Java List. It's not a List because standard Java Lists don't support PCL notifications. But your Model would obviously wrap such a List.
Now, the next question is how do you wire up JTable to be associated with your List model.
One, you could subclass JTable and bind it to your Model. Or, more simply, you use the JTable as a primitive, and let the enclosing JPanel manage the interaction between your Model and the JTable.
That means having your JPanel implement PropertyChangeListener, and then, when wiring everything up, you do something like this:
ListModel myModel = new ListModel();
ListPanel myPanel = new ListPanel();
myModel.addPropertyChangeListener(myPanel);
Now, whenever your ListModel is changed, is will notify the ListPanel.
On your ListPanel you can having something like:
#Override
public void propertyChange(PropertyChangeEvent evt) {
if (evt.getPropertyName().equals(ListModel.CHANGED)) {
ListModel model = (ListModel) evt.getSource();
DefaultTableModel tm = (DefaultTableModel) listTable.getModel();
tm.setRowCount(0);
for (String s : model.getList()) {
tm.addRow(new Object[]{s});
}
}
}
Now, you can see this simply reloads the entire table model, but you can make your property changes as fine grained as you want. You can also see that if this was some other model (like a Person or something) you can populate individual text fields and whatnot on the panel.
This is a pretty simple GUI, but it shows the fundamentals of how this all wires together. I think a bit of this is lost in the Swing examples which are great for one panel screens but don't scale at all when you start adding other views.
Your JPanels basically become combined VC, as your GUI gains complexity you can factor those kinds of things out, but its works pretty well for reasonable amounts of screens and such.

There are two ways in which Netbeans can help you leverage its codebase: GUI Builder (1) and NB Platform (2).
(1) Netbeans had for a while one of the better drag-n-drop GUI builders in the Java world, codenamed Matisse.
That said, it's been a long time since I worked with it - and I never really liked the generated code, it wasn't very comprehensible (which of course is not the purpose of auto-generated code). For more complex UIs we hand-wrote the layout and the work was bearable, even if not the most pleasant. For simple UIs, I'd try GUI Builder again, for complex UIs with a lot of wired logic, I'd probably still would write it by hand.
To see how the GUI Builder works, take a look at one of the many tutorial videos, e.g. this one:
NetBeans GUI Builder: Adding Components
(2) Netbeans Platform is to Netbeans, what RCP is to Eclipse. A rich set of components developed for an IDE, that can be reused. I briefly looked into NB Platform and we would have used it, if the project didn't change course. Maybe this SO question can shed more light on this aspect: Which Rich Client Platform to use?.
Concerning MVC. There was JSR 296, a generic Swing Application Framework, that looked somewhat promising, but was withdrawn in 2011. That did not stop people to fork it and work on it, as this project shows: Better Swing Application Framework, with a release in mid 2012. Even if you do not use such a framework, please do not put all code in one class (as you mention in you comment), but create a simple model/controller and keep the UI components separate. It does not need to be fancy for a simple app, a minimal MVC-ish separation of concerns might suffice.

I also hit this problem and i found a link which gives a good example how to seperate the controller from the view using the NetBeans GUI builder.
Here is the link.

Java/Swing Volume Slider

Part of my application has a media component, and I'm looking for a nice volume slider I can use rather than a JSlider which looks a bit ugly for this purpose (or specifically, an extended JSlider with custom visuals would be nice). I could write one, but I don't really want to reinvent the wheel.
In terms of "nice" volume sliders - I'm looking on the lines of something like VLC:
Is there a (free) component like this already out there that I'm missing?

Jasper Potts has a nice blog post about how you can skin the slider using Nimbus Look and Feel: Skinning a slider with Nimbus.
Here is how it looks like:
By following the blog post, it's not very hard to make your own custom look on the slider. You may also be interested in my answer about customizing the JScrollPane using Nimbus Look and Feel with a full code example.

Since you will want a mute operation if clicking on the speaker, I suggest that you implement your own JSlider and plug it in to the look-and-feel; however, I would also highly suggest that you reused the BoundedRangeModel that the JSlider implements.
Or, you could subclass a JPanel and package two widgets in it internally; however, this technique will require a mediator pattern to keep the two widget's displays in sync with the one shared BoundedRangeModel.
Look at the old Sun documentation about making custom widgets, and use the source code for JSlider as a starting point. It's not as hard as it may seem; however, it does take some time to get it "just right".

Beginner to Swing

I'd like to create a simple Swing app. I've got very, very, very little experience with Swing, however. I want to create a one window app that refreshes every 5 minutes with the contents of a screen-scraping that I do. I'm using Clojure to write the code. I assume Swing is the way to go with this, but if there are other, better options I'd love to hear more about those as well.
What code would I need to do this with Swing? (what classes should I use, etc)
Thanks,
Alex

Well, for the every five minutes bit, java.util.TimerTask should be of help. For general Swing information, this link to the Java Tutorials ought to help.
To have a Window, specifically, JFrame is probably your best bet.
To display single or multiline text, you ought to look into JLabel or JTextArea, respectively.
To display images, ImageIcon ought to do the trick.
For other needs, the Java Tutorial ought to be a big help.
As trashgod suggested, javax.swing.Timer has some advantages when it comes to GUIs over java.util.TimerTask. This article on using timers in Swing applications should help you decide which to use.

You're right. Swing is the way to go, but connecting all the pieces can be a bit tough if you're learning Clojure and Swing. There are a few short examples floating around showing how to create simple Swing GUIs in Clojure. Here's another short example that combines a simple GUI with a Timer object.
(ns net.dneclark.JFrameAndTimerDemo
(:import (javax.swing JLabel JButton JPanel JFrame Timer))
(:gen-class))
(defn timer-action [label counter]
(proxy [java.awt.event.ActionListener] []
(actionPerformed
[e]
(.setText label (str "Counter: " (swap! counter inc))))))
(defn timer-fn []
(let [counter (atom 0)
label (JLabel. "Counter: 0")
timer (Timer. 1000 (timer-action label counter))
panel (doto (JPanel.)
(.add label))]
(.start timer)
(doto (JFrame. "Timer App")
(.setContentPane panel)
(.setDefaultCloseOperation JFrame/EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
(.setLocation 300 300)
(.setSize 200 200)
(.setVisible true))))
(defn -main []
(timer-fn))
When run, this will create a small window with a label that is updated every second. From your description, you would change the frequency of the timer from 1,000ms to 300,000ms to trigger an action every 5 minutes. To do something other than updating a label, you would change the contents of the timer-action function.
I think this is thread safe, but haven't checked for sure. There are cautions and tutorials about thread safety when updating Swing components too. You'll probably want to check those too.
I hope this is informative enough to give yo a few clues as to where to look for further information.
EDIT: I wanted to point out one more interesting thing here. Note that the 'timer-action' function is changing the value of one of its arguments. The 'counter' argument is an atom defined in 'timer-fn', yet the action listener is able to change it. This is something you cannot usually do in Java. Maybe someone smarter than me can comment on whether this constitutes a "closure". In my previous experience with languages like Pascal, I would say the argument passing is "call-by-reference" as opposed to Java's strict "call-by-value" argument passing. Is this something different?
EDIT 2: After checking my facts with another question, this is, in fact, an example of a closure in Clojure.

In a Swing context, javax.swing.Timer has some advantages; there's an example here. Depending on what you want to display, JEditorPane may be appropriate.

On top of the resources mentioned by #Zach L (particularly regarding the timers), I would take a good look at Seesaw, especially since you're writing this in Clojure.
In particular, I note the seesaw.timer for firing the refresh events. Using a JTextPane (read-only) or a JEditorPane (editable) would work well for displaying richly formatted results (like HTML).

Try this link for Swing. As Zach said you will need to use JFrame and TimerTask should be used for your requirements.
You can also try other alternative frameworks for Swing.

Clojure's software transactional memory allows you to set watches on variables; your callback is executed whenever the variable is changed (by anything). This lends itself very well to GUI programming. Your GUI can auto-update whenever anything touches the variable.
Here is a short but non-trivial example of how to do this, with explanation of what is going on: http://www.paullegato.com/blog/swing-clojure-gui-black-scholes/

Overlay multiple JSliders in Swing

Is it possible to overlay multiple JSliders so I can see the "thumbs" on both (I've tried disabling the painting of the track and setting opacity to false but one still hides the other)? Basically I'd like to create a component that allows the user to define a range (and I didn't really want to write a custom one since it has most of the attributes of a slider). If there is another way I could do that with a slider, that would work too.
thanks,
Jeff

Ah, I found it (i must not have been seraching on the right terms). Swing labs as a JXMultiThumbSlider that I think will do the trick.
http://swinglabs.org/hudson/job/SwingX%20Weekly%20Build/javadoc/org/jdesktop/swingx/JXMultiThumbSlider.html

I recently had the same problem, I wanted a slider with two thumbs. I didn't get into it too much, and what I ended up doing to get the range is simply putting two sliders and in the "onSliderChange" event listener prevented one beeing smaller than the other and the other bigger than the one. I don't beleive Swing has a two-thumb-Slider, although it might be a cool new feature to add, so I think this is your best bet.

JIDE has a RangeSlider with 2 thumbs (and a nice extra one on top to move both thumbs at once (e.g. drag the range around) in their open source common layer: http://www.jidesoft.com/products/oss.htm