Hi, all Java gurus inside and outside of Thinknostic - I have a very interesting problem. Imagine the following situation: we have three existing Java Web applications, written back in 2000/2001, based on open source libraries of that time: Struts 0.9/1.0 and JSP 1.x (no JSTL) with Tiles for Web layer, Apache Torque for ORM, early version of Quartz for job scheduling, Jasper Reports for PDF reports and Freemarker as template engine for email creation. The application has been (and still is) in production for almost 7 years and works great. Now the customer is expanding the functionality and wants add several Ajax features - in short, version 2.0 is on the table.
It's been over 10 months since we have started to seriously use virtualization and run Windows inside virtual machine to ease installation and configuration pain. It starting first as convenient measure of isolation two different development environments (.NET 1.1 based and .NET 2.0 based) and avoid "crosspolination" in the data analytics project. At that time, my expectations what would be the limits of what you can or cannot do in virtual environment were mostly around performance, responsiveness and device support (USB especially). As it turned out, all of that actually worked much better than I have ever expected. With new versions of Parallels, the performance is very good and user experience (user means fellow developer) is barely noticeable difference against developing on host system. Assumed that you have decent dual-core system with 2 GB of RAM, of course. Using Parallels gives you the added benefit of moving the virtual environment between Windows, Mac and Linux hosts, which is very convenient.
go and get it - at http://www.ghisler.com/
It got nice visual upgrades - look and feel and icons are gently nicer and more XP-ish. Plus many other new features. Upgrade is still free for registered users.
If I should pick one single most useful program I ever used on any computer system, Total Commander would be clear winner. I do not remember when exactly I purchased the license - I guess sometimes around 1994-95, when it was named Windows Commander. Since that time, I was using it pretty much every day (except few short periods I was working exclusively on Unix). I still use it every working day (as I often spend weekends on Mac platforms).
Thanks to long weekend and more quiet time in last couple of days (Happy 140th Birthday, Canada!), I managed to read something else than Ruby-ism/Rail-ism. Among others, I finished the Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, a book promising to explain why software is hard.
It is pretty tough question to answer. The way this books tries to address it is following the story not very well known open source project named Chandler through it's beginning over period of 3 years. Chandler was - and still is - developed by the OSAF - Open Source Application's Foundation, founded (and financed) by Mitch Kapor, who was before the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of the "Ur-spreadsheet" Lotus 1-2-3.
An interesting article on JavaLobby caught my eye today: Do .NET Applications Run Better on Java?
Normally, knowing the not exactly impartial focus of the Java centric site such as JavaLobby or theserverside.com, one should be careful when reading how much Java outperforms .NET. The bias works the other way too - just look at the Theserverside.net or other .NET centric side how much is C# superior :-). With that in mind, I looked at the technical report.
I have spent last two days (and few evenings before) playing with Rails and using Netbeans Ruby IDE. What a great experience ! Unlike before, it is so much easier to have really good debugger that allows put breakpoints not only into the Ruby code in controllers and model - but even into the RHTML view files !
Netbeans team works hard on improving the tool. With latest build - 2434, I have noticed great addition - Rails console. The IDE had IRB window even before, but the environment did not load the Rails context and would not recognize e.g. ActiveRecord. Now with latest build, everything works like charm.
As seen in the video at http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/IDT2RMJNvSA#searchkeywords
The source code:
Very good explanation is in the video mentioned above. So far so good - unfortunately the technique, however cool it is, does seem to work in Firefox only. Or at least it does not work in the still most prevalent browser on the Net.
Here is how it renders (properly) in Firefox (tested with 1.5)
and here is how it looks in IE7:
Today's blog of the day is not really a blog, but a screencast. Dedicated to Ruby on Rails, the Railscast offers (as of today) 46 episodes of short, targeted practical advice on various aspects of Rails development.
Unlike some other screencasts who try to record the screen action as MPEG movie, this one is perfectly legible. In addition to the Rails enlightenment, you can also enjoy the speed and aesthetics of using TextMate - with many great Ruby editing shortcuts and beautiful OS-X typography.
It has been quite some time since I used a Swing based Java application. Compared to beauty and close-to-native feeling of Eclipse based application, Swing just did not feel right - it looked differently and behaved a bit differently. For long time, my desktop was Swing-free (not counting the JDK demo). Not any more, though.
What made me to reconsider, is new release of the Netbeans v 6. In the latest milestone builds (M6 to M9), Netbeans team built amazing Ruby development environment. Compared to Ruby plugin in Eclipse, it has way more functionality, better debugging, really impressive editing support and very cool Rails extensions. The full description of new features is here.
There has been lots of interesting news related to Microsof and Ruby recently, mostly about DLR's support of dynamic languages. One of my favorite tech authors stirred the waters once again last Friday with an article that goes beyond this and tries to paint larger picture of the uneasy relation between Ruby platform, Agile movement, OpenSource Community and Microsoft.
One quote from the article:
The attitude to open-source is a large part of this problem. When Java appeared there were yawning gaps in its portfolio, and worse some dreadful standard tools in its API (visions of Entity Beans spring to mind). Those gaps and bad ideas were fixed by the open-source community. Ant gave us a build tool, EJB was displaced by Spring and Hibernate. .NET has also got its gaps, and again the open source community has stepped up to fill them. Yet Microsoft refuses to collaborate with these efforts, even seems to go out of its way to undermine them. I was particularly sickened by Microsoft's reaction to NUnit - an excellent XUnit testing tool, elements of whose design were lauded by Anders Hejlsberg at OOPSLA. Microsoft ended not just bringing out a competitive library, but deliberately making it incompatible. That's not the kind of reaction that encourages people to invest their time in the platform.