Many good posts about programming, coding, business, aesthetics, with nice touch of wisdom, If you are into programming languages, do not miss this one, this and this. If you are more into process and management, try this and this or this. There also deeper and lighter stuff :-)
As Reg says about popular bloposts
One model for popular writing is that it panders to the reader's prejudices. Plain and simple. People like writing that validates them and especially their ideas.
Every software developer will tell you how frustrating it is to trace problem in your application up to the point of third party library call (jar file or .dll / .so - make your choice) - and then have to resort to trial and error exploration, because you have no source code for that particular library module. For this very reason, most developers always prefer working with libraries or toolkits that comes with source code attached - if they have a choice. As a side benefit, these libraries are often free as a beer as well - but being able to understand the module is much more important as whether you have to pay license fee ...
Can you imagine a database table with 25000 (twenty five thousands) columns ? No, not rows, COLUMNS ! Now if you can do that, can you imagine displaying these columns in a datagrid (spreadsheet) on a screen ?
This is exactly what this guy is describing to be his requirements. I hope he did misunderstood or misread the requirements, because displaying 25000 columns on a screen is not only impossible - it is absolutely useless. How would the user interaction look like ? As one of the guys in the discussion pointed out, the table would be few hundred meters wide (assuming 1 cm cell and 19 inch monitor) ....
For sixty more days (actually 59 days and 17 hours as of Time.now, or if you prefer to speak Javaish rather than Rubyish, new java.util.Date()) you will be able to download free PDF version of the book by Patrick Lenz Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications - courtesy of nice guys of Sitepoint.
The book download page is here, no strings attached - all it will cost you is disclosing an email address (book download link will be emailed to you) and bandwidth to get the 20 MB PDF. Mine is downloading right now, so I cannot tell anything about the book yet. It has 447 pages and from the table of content it looks like solid beginner's book.
There is - after all - a Petstore implementation for Ruby. Somebody asked a question at the DZone and the response posted by Raphael Valyi was:
Re: Is there a Pet Store in Grails/Rails? I'm speaking here for the Rails (JRuby) side:
there is actually a petstore, it can be found there:
http://viewvc.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/cgi/viewvc.cgi/?root=tw-commons
Some guys used it to compare C-Ruby vs JRuby performance:
http://www.nabble.com/JRuby-vs-MRI---Petstore-shootout-t4289470.html
According to the TIOBE Programming Community index (which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages), Ruby jumped 3 places and made it to top ten. Congratulations !
If you look closely on the trends down on the page, the dynamically languages popularity has risen over 3.6% during year period. Which is A Good Thing (TM).
Should I make my personal Top Ten of the programming languages, ordering languages by my degree of comfort of using the language, the language beauty (which is, in the eye of the beholder ;-)). Factoring in also how much I do enjoy reading/writing code in that language and it's usefulness from both personal as well professional point of view, the index would look like this:
As part of current project I need to test some ORM frameworks and for that, you need a database. In this particular case, database equals Oracle. I need a local instance to be able to work outside of the customer's location.
On my notebook, I have already installation of MySQL (for all the Rails stuff) and SQLServer (for ASP.NET). Plus few lightweight databases (meaning that they do not really need a server) such as sqlite3, Derby and HSQLDB). I was very hesitant to add another instance and for some time tried to do the work with MySQL - but differences in SQL and most importantly the way how the CLOBs and BLOBs are handled convinced me this is a bad idea.
If you try to deploy one of the Spring 2 samples included in the Spring framework source distribution - Petclinic on Tomcat 6 (6.0.14), the web application does not get loaded and fails with errror. The cause is the ClassNotFound exception for the class org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader, more precisely:
SEVERE: LifecycleException
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
Part of the technology upgrade in the three Java based projects is also tool update. We have started with Eclipse version 1 and gradually moved up to the currently used Eclipse 3.0. The build and deployment process was based on custom written Ant build script, which compiled, created WAR, deployed, undeployed, run the tests, created source snapshot - you name it. The Eclipse was used mostly as editor and debugger - using JPDA talking to Tomcat started in debug mode.
During my recent return to Javaland, I have noticed many improvements in newer releases of well established frameworks and toolkits, as well as many new ones. One such new release is version 2 of Spring framework. It is not really a hot news, because the final version of 2.0 is out for almost a year (October 2006), but it is new to me, because I spend pretty much all of last 12 months in DotNet, C# and OLAP worlds, with only brief visits to older Struts based, Spring-free Java projects.