Wednesday, November 6, 2002

Hierarchical Thinking and Outlines After reading Russells post some time ago, I've been meaning to get around to trying out JOE. Well I've just tried it and love it. I've finally retired the massive ToDo.txt file I've been hacking for the last few years which contains my to do list, things I'm working on, stuff I should do, issues to investigate, stuff I should read and random thoughts. I just opened it in JOE, it already guessed most of the hierarchies I'd been using for me, thanks to the whitespace indentations and now I've a groovy outliner editor to keep track of stuff and keep myself more organised. Thanks Russell! 12:28:37 PM    comment []

MS Releases .NET Source, Sort Of MS Releases .NET Source, Sort Of. [Erik's Weblog] Though notice that its a non-commercial-only licence and so its highly restrictive. Though I guess GPL is just as restrictive. I tend to avoid both these kinds of restrictive source licences, I far prefer more open licences like BSD and the Apache licence. 9:49:23 AM    comment []

Eclipse Vs. IDEA IDEA rocks - I can't say it enough. Eclipse Vs. IDEA - Russ is looking at both IDEs. Everytime people say how good Eclipse is, I go try it - then come back to IDEA. Feature for feature, they look very similar. IDEA is not an IDE though, it's an experience. Until you learn all the keys and what it does for you - you won't experience it. Have you tried selecting some code and doing <ctrl><alt><v>? (I found that yesterday and used it many times already today) Do you understand how to use all the refactorings? Can your IDE to introspection into WARs and code complete JSP tags from the web.xml file? (That is seriously cool) Does it introspect into JSP tags (TagExtraInfo classes) and know in it's JSP completion what variables are valid? Does it think for you? (IDEAs completion is very smart - it will only suggest classes that match the current assignment etc) IDEA is awesome, unfortunately it does take some testing to really see why it is so awesome - but hey, I bet most people thought didn't get the big deal with vi the first time they used it either right? [rebelutionary] I've tried IDEA and really liked it. For me the 3 reasons why I'm sticking with eclipse are eclipse has the best CVS integration I've ever seen in any tool, ever. Its a thing of beauty. eclipse can easily support working on many, many projects concurrently. Last time I used IDEA I had to open and close projects to get things done which is a PITA. I work on lots of projects concurrently - I've maybe 50-60 projects from all kinds of Jakarta stuff to JCP and JDK stuff to lots of day-job stuff. At any given moment I might wanna dive into a bit of one of them and compare it with stuff in another project. In eclipse (with the Resource Perspective) I can seamlessly move about different projects. I found that very hard to do in IDEA. eclipse is open source and so free 9:42:16 AM    comment []

Maven fun Other people have Maven probs too. Maven Fun. I'm working on packaging up the first release of my Nebia project. I use a combination of IDEA and Ant... [Talk.org] At least I know I'm not the only one now When is Maven 1.0 due out? (Out of interest) [rebelutionary] It seems like Pelle figured it out the next day. To answer Pelle's orignal issue with Maven, you can create your own local or remote repositories. For example your company could create its own intranet repository of jars that its projects require, containing internal builds of code etc. Different teams can share repositories plus you can have your own personal repository. Maven will happily use an ordered list of whatever repositories you wish. There is some documentation describing how to create your own repository here. Basically just mirror the directory structure of the core Maven repository. Once you have your repository just define the maven.repo.remote property to point to a comma seperated list of URLs to the repositories you want to use. maven.repo.remote=http://www.ibiblio.org/maven,http://www.acme.com/maven/repository You can put this property in your projects properties (in project.properties) or in your own personal configuration (in a build.properties file). There are details on working with Maven properties here. To answer Mikes question, I've no idea when a 1.0 release of Maven is gonna be here. 1.0 beta 8 should be released any day now and I expect a full 1.0 release to be along soon afterwards.   Update:  hey its nice to know I've contributed in a small way to Pelle's NeuDist project. 9:22:09 AM    comment []

OXF PetStore OXF PetStore. Another PetStore implementation appears. This time it is from Orbeon who are pushing their Open XML Framework (OXF). "OXFTM is an XML processing framework leveraging the power of J2EE and the flexibility of XML to provide enterprise application developers with a robust next-generation application development platform. OXF is the result of building multi-million dollar critical applications for fortune 500 clients. It enables IT organizations to rapidly build reliable and elegant Web applications on top of enterprise-class J2EE platforms in weeks rather than months. Although OXF is designed primarily to develop Web applications, it will play a role wherever XML is used." The "building multi-million dollar critical applications for fortune 500 clients" statement is a real eye catcher :-) They did add PDA support and internationalization to their PetStore offering also. It seems OXF is an implementation of Model 2X. It goes further by adding a Cocoon-like pipeline approach to processing. So what you have is an extension to Struts using OXF (XSLT) pipelines, very nice. I will have to look into it and see what it's about. [dsuspense] This looks interesting. OXF is the closest thing I've seen to Jelly so far. I'm probably biased but I do think Jelly is much more flexible. OXF is very XPath and XSLT centric. While Jelly can do that, Jelly can also implement JSTL, can work with Ant tasks, can operate with normal Java beans in a Velocity-like manner etc. So Jelly can work with different semantics, whereas OXF focusses on just being an XML pipeline with XPath and XSLT. OXF does remind me a little of Maverick, another XSLT/XML component that integrates with Struts. It never ceases to amaze me how many web application frameworks there are. 9:01:55 AM    comment []

OReilly blog on the .NET vs J2EE PetStore fiasco OReilly blog on the .NET vs J2EE PetStore fiasco. Ted Neward (who teaches for DevelopMentor, a competitor of The Middleware Company) gives his views on the whole thing. [dsuspense] This is a great post, Ted makes some excellent points. I particularly liked the following section in his summary... Instead, do what Microsoft does so well, and steal from them: steal ideas, steal concepts, steal designs, then twist them around to make your Java apps faster. .NET doesn't provide any kind of support for entity beans? Ask yourself why that is. .NET doesn't provide any kind of support for object pooling? Ask yourself why that is. 8:24:14 AM    comment []