Re: OT:News readers..so many to choose from

Well I've abandoned google groups for the time being and have switched
over to PAN on Linux and Gravity on Windows. What I am wondering is,
how hard would it be to write a news reader client in Java? I know it's
way beyond me, but there must be people reading this ng who have had
some degree of sucess at it. What was the process you went through to
design and build the program? How much practical experience would one
need to be able to sucessfully code such a program? If you know that
you need say, a class that will send a request to a news server, how do
you go about finding it in the API documentation? And if you don't find
one, do you write your own or simply extend one that is already there,
and is close to what you need? I have a book on OO Design coming, but
it would be interesting to know what others think. I know this is
pseudo-off topic, which is why I put the OT in the subject line. This
is my first post using Gravity so it may not work, but if it does, I
hope we can have a good discussion about this topic, if it hasn't
already been hash(tabled) before.

Cheers