Eclipse – thought I’d give it bit more of a test drive. Its been
fine, apart from its wierd insistence that non-project source files have to be
in jars. Why can’t I just point it at a directory? And its hugely annoying that
you can’t apparently specify a project source code directory outside of your
project path. My opinion currently is that the SWT widgets make it look nicer
than IDEA, but it has a way to go in ease of use terms. Oh yeah, and it deleted
a whole bunch of property files in my classes directory without telling me it
would, which was nice. [Pushing the
envelope]

In wonder what really does make it look nicer than IDEA? [Begblog]

On further reflection, its not so much that it looks nicer, as more ‘native’.
Swing apps. can look slightly cartoonish. IDEA isn’t one of them thankfully.
Maybe I just fear change 🙂

Don’t worry about me switching just yet – IDEA has pretty much become an
extension of my hands!

While playing with Webwork and the JMX-RI it occurred to me to wonder what webwork would look like if it was JMX-ified.  If the action mappings were exposed as managed properties, would it be possible to re-configure the workflow of your webapp on the fly via a browser?  Hmm.  That could be fun.  What about using JMX notifications to make WW reconfigure itself in response to network events?  (Like putting a ‘we’re sorry’ message over a bit of the app. if a db goes down, then automagically re-enabling it when it’s back up).  Is this even remotely possible we ask?

If nothing else attempting to find out should improve my understanding of both WW and JMX.

Its been a morning of issues so far:

Eclipse – thought I’d give it bit more of a test drive. Its been fine, apart
from its wierd insistence that non-project source files have to be in jars. Why
can’t I just point it at a directory? And its hugely annoying that you can’t
apparently specify a project source code directory outside of your project path.
My opinion currently is that the SWT widgets make it look nicer than IDEA, but
it has a way to go in ease of use terms. Oh yeah, and it deleted a whole bunch
of property files in my classes directory without telling me it would, which was
nice.

Webwork – A bit fiddly to get started with. The skeleton app didn’t work
initially, it was looking for an ‘xhtml’ directory that wasn’t there. I
eventually found it in the examples folder, and copied it to the webapp,
whereupon it worked fine. From what I’ve seen so far in my dabbles it looks
like there is a lot of good stuff here though.

WebWrock!

Test first web-apps once again wooohooo![Joe’s Jelly]

Superb. Now all I need is a handy project to use WW on. I feel tempted to write a blogging app. and see how many open source frameworks I can shoehorn into it! Oh, and it’ll need to be scriptable with Scheme, my current ‘just for fun’ language 🙂

Bruce Perens, Open Source evangelist has put together a website countering the Microsoft-affiliated ‘Software Choice’ (aka. choose us) site.

Bruce’s site: http://sincerechoice.org/

The other one: http://www.softwarechoice.org/

Even though I did go through the steps to get the latest Windows Update stuff (SP3 and IE6) I’m actually using this as an opportunity to wean myself off of Microsoft entirely. I’m keeping strict track of the apps I’m installing and only using the apps that I really, really need. OpenOffice is now the only version of Office on my computer. It’s been there, but I’ve always gone back to the old one. By keeping track of which apps I really need and use that are Windows specific, I’ll be able to eventually move to Linux as my main OS and use a bare-bones Win2k install using VMware for those other apps. Now that I’ve got all the cruft off my system, it’s nice to see clearly what I need and what I don’t (Macromedia stuff mostly).

Man, I’m almost Microsoft free… I actually don’t mind Win2k all that much. It’s not horrible. But this is not my OS of the future – I’ll never upgrade to XP or beyond because of Microsoft’s ever-wackier licenses. A Unix variant will be my future, whether it’s OSX or Linux (the later being because I can’t afford the former). So I’m doing what I need to now to be able to interopt with the world. I really can’t wait for RedHat 8… I think that may be the OS I finally switch to on this machine.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

I hope you succeed. I went dual-boot FreeBSD/Win98 on my old pc in an attempt to accomplish the same thing. Not the most pragmatic move, as there has been something of a delay getting OpenOffice ported to FreeBSD, and the Java support is a way behind Linux. Sometimes my hacker-nature desire for the ‘best’ technical solution is at odds with my pragmatic ‘whatever I need to get stuff done’ side. Now I’m hooked on FreeBSD – for some reason I found it an easier learning experience than the two times I played with Linux. This makes me wish I had the time/knowledge/ability/influence to bring the Java support up to the levels of Linux. OpenOffice is just about there, which will be great, although I can’t fully ditch MS Office until clients stop requiring documents in Word format – OO’s conversion is good, but not perfect, and sometimes there’s no alternative than to tweak things in MS Word before sending them. There is definitely scope for a standard file format – OO’s one has to be a contender. Its files are essentially zipped directories containing XML documents. Plain text – it just makes so much more sense than proprietary (or even open) binary formats for document interchange, now that file size is much less of an issue than it used to be (says the man with a 120 gig hard disk). Zipped XML data sometimes even ends up smaller than the equivalent Word file.

Quite an illuminating FAQ of some of C#’s new features.

http://www.geocities.com/csharpfaq/

Never write code again!

This topic seems to crop up every 3 years or so, with reliable regularity. Some
company proclaims that writing code is dead, their fantastic new tool will do it
all for you. Just tell it what you want by point-n-clicking / writing a spec in
plain english / beaming it directly from your brain and it will mystically
produce your application, exactly how you wanted it!. Hah. I think one
of the earliest one of these appeared some time around 1983. Apparently we’ve
all been wasting our time writing code for the last 20 years. The fact that
this time its Sun doing it might make it a bit more interesting, but not by much.

http://research.sun.com/features/ace/index.html

The java.nio stuff looks good.  The non-blocking sockets classes especially.  It looks similar in operation to the C ‘select’ function.  Wonder how long before some of the app. server products make use of it.  It will be interesting to see how much of a performance benefit there is compared to all the clever multi-threaded connection handling architectures that have evolved in the meantime.

Read more at:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/09/04/nio.html

SPAM.  Sigh.  It won’t even start to get fixed until SMTP servers have a mechanism to athenticate each other (callback with a digest etc). [Part of the problem…..]

Paul Graham has been looking into this very subject, with an interesting approach:

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.

Bayesian filtering, cool – I should have paid more attention in stats classes.