Google Web Toolkit... looks nice but...

The Google Web Toolkit looks nice, but dammit Google, really it's 2006 and you should be in the habit of launching things with Mac support from day zero.

GWT looks more than nice actually. It's AJAX development with no writing Javascript; you write Java top to bottom, and GWT takes care of everything else.

They'll have to rename JavaOne to JavAjaxOne if this keeps up.... it's been a deluge of Ajaxy Java this year.

What would be handy...

What would be handy is a simple hotkey for the command line so that when you type in...

somecommandthatneedsroot

and it comes back permission denied, you hit it and it recalls the line with "sudo " in front...

sudo somecommandthatneedsroot

(Another suggestion here is that you could just catch the permission denied and change it to "permission denied... sudo it y/n?" but that'd a lot harder to implement and probably bugger up all sorts of scripts)

Ah now we know the Secrets of the Swing Team

A Netbeans Bug thats bugging me...

Netbeans has a bug where it gets the indentation wrong after annotations which have no braced parameters after them, when you use it's reformat code. See the bug entry here. A quick workaround is to tag empty braces after your annotations so

@Entity
public class ....

becomes

@Entity()
public class ....

Brilliant - Omnicore

I went hunting for my serial number for Omnicore's XDevelop. Couldn't find it anywhere. So I mailed Omnicore and asked.....

And within 5 minutes, I had a reply with my serials. So apart from making a brilliant code focussed IDE, they are also still one of the most responsive companies I've come across.

Why am I pulling out XDevelop? Well, I was looking at the RIFE site, and apart from it being very interesting as an application stack, I noticed that the first flash demo uses XDevelop to show the neatness. And it reminded me of how nice XDevelop's code environment is; especially compared to NetBeans which is "almost fast enough".

Sitting on the Doctype....

Tim Bray talks of dropping the Doctype from XML and I have to concur. For me, is a carrier for cognitive dissonance in XML... contrary to the nature of an XML document, human readable but not human meaningful... But I suspect Mr Bray is right when he says it won't go away.

Switching to Tiger on Tiger (J2SE 5.0 on OSX 10.4)

The number of times I see someone post "Here's how to use J2SE5.0 as default on Mac OSX 10.4..." and proceed to tell you how to change the JDK symlink for the current JDK....

It's not necessary.... Here's how I do it. Add to your .profile

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

There we go. JDK set. If you want to set it for webstart and applets as the default, go to /Applications/Utilities/J2SE 5.0 and run Java Preferences, which lets you change the order of use safely (and lets you get at a whole bunch of run time settings)....

There, no messing with sudo, no changing symlinks, no danger when Apple update Java runtimes.

A clean sweep in the toolbox

So, I'm revising my toolbox for 2006. What looks like it's going to be in it? Netbeans 5.0 for an IDE, EJB3 Persistence+Derby/Java DB for storage, Spring+Struts for server framework (I think), Mochikit for Ajaxness... Now, a decent Javascript editor and debugger would be good (Come on Netbeans!), but what else...

Break out the Festivus Pondering (post the airing of grievances)....

What am I up to...

I'm playing with Mochikit to write an Ajaxy application. I'm finding Netbeans jolly nice, but it really needs to get up to speed for Ajax with some Javascript editting support.

Well Thanks for nothing AOL

AOL have decided to autoadd two bots to everyone's Buddy lists. It's easy enough to get rid of them, but the sheer impoliteness is going to ruffle enough feathers out there that IM bots could end up dragged through the mud meant for AOL's incompetent management.

DashBlog

I use DashBlog... well I did till it stopped working. Now I'm trying to fix it. If you see this, I guess you'll know I've been successful!

Mustang savvy....

This blog entry contains the yummy news that a new register allocator in the latest build of Mustang gives Hotspot clients a 50% plus boost in benchmarks. Can't wait to see how that translates to actual application performance. Java 6 has all the signs of being a rockingly good release.

Strange bugs

Sometimes you really don't expect things to interact quite the way they do. For example, the latest drivers on the Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller and Java. Yes, run a Java application with the 8.xx drivers and at some point as the application (Eclipse updating or Azureus) your machine will lock up it's Ethernet interface. I had to go back to the 6.23 drivers for the ethernet interface and make sure Windows Update wasn't going to update them to get a reliable connection again. Quality drivers there....

Eclipse, getting to like the dark...

I've been working on a 'hands-on' coding review of a developers tool, but thats not important right now. What it has made me do is use Eclipse a lot more; and dammit, I'm getting to like it. I've always had a fondness for Omnicore's CodeGuide and was developing affection for X-Develop, the cross language replacement for CodeGuide, but this partially forced exposure to Eclipse has made me rethink what I'm looking for in an IDE. I still miss CodeGuide's instant checking; Eclipse eventually mentions code errors in the IDE, but it's not as well, instant, but Eclipse does offer more options for resolving errors, so... Eclipse does make much better use of a high res screen though. Ah, dilemmas.... I think the real decider will come when I move development off Windows and back onto OSX.

Mail Pattern Boldness - That Email Article....

My article on JavaMail vs Commons Email is now on up at Uk.builder.com.

The working "headline" for this article was "Mail Pattern Boldness".... well, it's nice to start work with a dreadful pun... and have an editor who'll put a proper headline on it when I've forgotten to remove it.

Anyway, what you'll see in the article is JavaMail and Commons Email contrasted to demonstrate when Commons Email is appropriate; from sending a simple text email, to embedding an image in a HTML email. Enjoy!

Quite pleased....

Eamonn McManus gives my article on getting started with JMX and JConsole a mention. And my occasional code blindness when I name things. Thanks Eamonn!

A change of heart...

I thought the Apache Commons Email library was a silly idea, a simple wrapper for JavaMail? Why, I thought. Then I used it; it's a great "no worries" library for sending email, and as it rides atop of JavaMail so you can still use JavaMail when you actually need it. It's interesting to see how the reasonable and sensible abstractions of the JavaMail API make the world more complex when you want to do the simple things. Apache Commons Email makes the simple things simple again. Hussah. (And now back to wrapping up an article on that subject....)

Perils of I18N

Even when you've got the language support there, there's always something thats going to bite you. In Google's case, the Google Pakistan has the right language, but the wrong script.

A seperation of content....

This is a new shiny blog for codepope. Why? Well, there's going to carry on being the Livejournal blog, but that'll be more about well personal things. This new shiny blog is for me to talk about code, which is what I do, rather than confusing people with a stream of personal and code stuff. So... Hello to the codepope blog about code....