Thursday, January 2, 2003

Quest for the perfect news aggregator One of my new years resolutions is to get a decent news reader. I've been using Radio's news agregator for some time; its OK and does the job. It aggregates the 141 blogs I'm currently subscribed to and I can zap the messages when I've read them . However it uses a web UI which is a bit clunky - especially the 'mark as read' feature and not being able to easily search, sort & query old entries  To read RSS feeds I'd far prefer to just use a single UI, that I already use much of the day already, an email client. So what I'd like is an RSS to email gateway such that there is 1 email per post on each blog, coming from a spoofed email address named after the name of the blog. Then I can read blog entries like I read email. I can do efficient mark-as-read or deletes on lots of emails easily. I can easily search & sort posts. I can use email rules to group feeds by topic etc. Keep around old posts even after I've read them. Sort by date, subject, sender. You get the idea. Then when I hit reply on any mail, I want that to post to my blog. I'd like to be able to search across all blog posts I've made or read too. Surely someone else has attempted such a thing by now? I've found bloglet which looks interesting - though what I'd like though is for it to read my OPML file to create my subscriptions for me. I started thinking of something using Jakarta James to spoof being a mail server or gateway then drop in some Java RSS news reader code. After much googling I stumbled on Hep which looks promising. I must give it a go...   Update. Hep rocks! After 30 minutes of following the install instructions, I can now read blogs via Hep. Now I just need to write some python to add all my 141 subscriptions to Hep and I'm all set... 5:48:58 PM    comment []

Eclipse tip of the day: Generating your project with Maven Just a quick note on using eclipse with Maven enabled projects as some folks don't know this. Setting up projects, source paths and classpaths in any IDE can be a pain - especially if you work with lots of different projects. But if your project uses Maven then this step can be totally automated. There are similar plugins to do the same thing with IDEA and JBuilder and too - I'll just describe the Eclipse plugin here. First off you need to configure your Eclipse installation so that it knows about your Maven repository. You need to define a property called maven.eclipse.workspace to point to where your eclipse workspace is. There's documentation here... http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/reference/plugins/eclipse/properties.html You can define this property a local build.properties, in the build.properties in your home directory or on the command line via -DpropertyName=value in the following command. Then to update your eclipse installation so that its aware of the Maven repository, type the following.     maven eclipse:add-maven-repo Now once you've configured your Eclipse installation, you can just cd into any of your maven-enabled projects directories and type     maven eclipse and Maven will create a .project and .classpath for you! Then import the project into Eclipse (or close and open the project if its already in your workspace) and all the classpaths & source paths should all be setup for you. You may wanna Rebuild Project and your errors should disappear. The nice thing about this is that it works on any Maven-enabled project and should ultimately work with any IDE. Right now Eclipse, IDEA and JBuilder are supported; I'm sure others could be added to the mix pretty easily. 11:33:14 AM    comment []

Bill's Predictions for 2003 Predictions for 2003. 30 something predictions for 2003. Java: Developers and architects cease to use stateful and entity EJBs in their designs. JMS and Message Driven Beans get overused. C# and VB.NET continue... [Bill de h"ra] Bill's got some great predictions in his post and I agree with pretty much all of them. On the subject of XSLT/XPath forking, I do think XPath 2.0 is a huge disappointment. Most developers I know will be giving it a wide berth. XPath 1.0 is a thing of beauty - sure its got a few rough edges here and there but it hits the sweetspot of being an excellent expression language for working with XML without being too complex. XPath 2.0 is almost the whole of XQuery which is way over the top and too complex. Its looking like already XPath has forked with the formation of XPath-ng. 10:57:32 AM    comment []