TaxCalc.eu Irelands First Online PAYE Tax Calculator - a History

The calculator was developed originally as an excel spreadsheet, on a Mac, in 1995. In 1997 it was 'ported' to Sun's Java, which was only 2 years old then and I wanted to learn Java. So it became Irelands first online tax calculator. Currently (2009) it's also the oldest!

The original website in 1997 was http://indigo.ie/~grabe/TaxCalc/applet/TaxCalc.html with a mirror at http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/3413/TaxCalc.html but neither of these sites are in existence anymore. The calculator then moved to http://www.esatclear.ie/~grabe/TaxCalc/TaxCalc.html. Esatclear became EsatBT and then BTireland. These hosting sites were free so it wasn't clear how long they would survive so the calculator was move to it's site at TaxCalc.eu in April 2006. At that time the .eu domains had just become available.

In 1997 the calculator was developed as an applet on a Macintosh using Metrowerks Powerplant. There was a GUI designer (the Java Constructor) which was great except it didn't seem to generate any usable code! So a French developer, Florent Pillet, came up with a tool called JPOB generator found on this (no longer available) website: http://w3.teaser.fr/~fpillet/JPob/, this is his current web page: http://www.florentpillet.com/.

here's a post by me about JPOB from 1997:

>From grabe@indigo.ie (Karl Grabe)
Date: 12 Mar 1997 23:24:47 GMT
Organization: <none>

To be honest, using constructor for java is a bit of a mess. It took me
ages, as a novice, to figure out how to use it.
However a very good alternative is to us JPOB generator. Check this site:
http://w3.teaser.fr/~fpillet/JPob/

And an example is included. Using this generator, you get much smaller &
faster code (50k as opposed to 500k in my case.
Check http://indigo.ie/~grabe/TaxCalc/applet/TaxCalc.html (Constructor w. JPOB)
as opposed to
http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/3413/TaxCalc.html (Constructor only)

The big problem with Constructor only is that it generates a Class for
EVERY item in the applet GUI (every button, popup etc). So you wind up
with loads of classes. Then I could only get the applet to run as runnable
zip file. IE (on a Mac anyway) doesn't work with Zip files.

Maybe I've approaced it the wrong way - some real Applet examples from MW
would help.

Hope this helps, again check out JPOB generator (it's free)
-Karl
I found this here.

From about 2006 onwards members of the askaboutmoney.com forum have given input on bugs and ideas.

The calculator was written using the Java 1.0 event model and the calculator still used this and the JPOB code in 2009!

Karl Grabe, 04 Apr 2009