A while a go I used to do Swing development, and I sometimes used the tool of Instantiations to develop my GUI. I quite liked the tool.
Before that I used Visual Basic and Visual Studio frequently. I never fully understood why people would fiddle so much with pixels, stylesheets, colors etc when you could just design your GUI visually.
Well, Instantiations has GWT design tool as well. I recently tried it out very shortly. The tool looked very nice.
I just recently Google bought Instantiations. Will this mean developer productivity in frontend development is cool again?
Google buys Instantiations
Posted in Various.
– August 11, 2010
McDonalds running Linux
A unix like OS on their video-screens outside, in shopping center Hoog Caterijne, Utrecht. At least something else then those Windows 95/98/NT screens I often see running at terminals, when they’ve crashed.
Posted in Various.
– August 5, 2010
Stuff to research: JDO on Cassandra, GIT on Windows, Restlet, VMForce
Just had evening of just trying out stuff and not finishing anything on my Windows machine.
I wanted to try out a persistence API for Cassandra. There’s a JPA implementation for Cassandra: Kundera, as well as JDO implementation, on top (or using) datanucleus: datanucleus-cassandra.
Just to clarify why I would want such a thing: nosql solutions such as Cassandra are, in essence distributed key-value stores. I know, from following a few classes on databases and distributed databases when attending the university that’s a whole lot more complicated to implement then it may seem.
Nevertheless, to do anything useful with that you need a layer on top of the key-value store. Basically all SQL databases like Oracle or MySQL have SQL layer around there key-value store. But the nice thing about stuff like Cassandra you can put something more convenient on top.
I wanted to try out both, starting with the JDO version, as that seemed more like a natural fit, and I once started ORM with JDO 1.0 many years ago.
I’d need a git client on Windows, and apparently there’s already a Tortoise Git client, based on the truly great TortoiseSVN, on of the tools I really miss on my Mac. The client version of git first had to be installed, but that was quite easy as well, just download and install msysgit.
The tortoisegit client looks very well, and seems easy to use. At least I got the code of datanucleus-cassandra in a breeze. Well now it’s kind of late, I’ll try out later.
Other stuff I want to try out: creating a Rest service using Restlet on Google AppEngine. Just to find out how that works. But later.
Finally I saw a demo on VMForce. Looks very promising, as I like Spring for development and that’s what you’d use. Nothing is released however, now there’s just articles and a demo.
Posted in Technology.
– July 30, 2010
Database upgrade during deployment
I want to create an installation package of a Java application. Part of the installation involves upgrading a SQL database (Oracle) – by running a few SQL scripts. Creating the SQL scripts to do the update by itself isn’t the problem, however I need to find a way to easily run those script.
Of course Oracle has something like SQLPlus, but that would mean SQLPlus has to be installed on the machine from where the package is installed. Another problem with SQLPlus is that it’s not so userfriendly.
Using JDBC and some programming I can easily create something that would check what current version of my application is installed, and then run the needed SQL scripts to upgrade the database. However, even easy things take some time and I’d think there are already some existing solutions.
I was about to ask a question on stackoverflow, but before I finished typing my question stackoverflow already came up with a similar question: Update a backend database on software update with Java. I’ll have to try out on of the suggested solutions, Liquibase, dbmigrate and maybe Autopatch.
Posted in Technology.
– July 29, 2010
Motorola milestone: frustating as hell
Since a few weeks I have a Motorola Milestone, the European version of the Motorola Droid. For a small computer/handheld works very well. I can browse, use email, install application, write documents. As a phone the device fails.
There’s a lot of talk about the IPhone 4 supposedly having bad reception. Well, the Motorola Milestone has a problem too. When calling, I very often incidentally put the telephone to mute, which causes the other party not to hear me anymore. This is caused by the mute button in the middle of the touch screen. I often press is that area with my hear while calling, as I have the habit of putting my telephone to my ear… Well apparently few people in Motorola though of that.
Posted in Reviews.
– July 21, 2010
Apple: 32 bit or 64 bit
I am about to download the latest version of Eclipse IDE, Helios. Naturally there are packages for various types of platforms. I know I have a Mac, however I also had to choose between 32 bit version and 64 bit version. There was a time I exactly knew these kind of things, but then I also used to build my computer myself.
Fortunately, there’s a Apple support page which exactly tells me exactly that: How to tell if your Intel-based Mac has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor
Posted in Various.
– July 15, 2010
Apprentice in software
When you want to become a pilot, you’ll first have to be a co-pilot (after your training). You’ll won’t become a medical professional without working with an experienced doctor first. As software engineering is a profession that also combines deep knowledge, analytical skills and experience as well, why would this be any difference?
My company, Xebia, has started a master-apprentice program in the Netherlands. See Apprenticeship Program for more information.
Posted in Ideas.
– July 14, 2010
Virtual secretary
Most of my friends are in there are twenty/thirty something and have quite a busy (social live). Making appointsments can be quite cumbersome, especially when multiple people are involved. Fortunately, there’s electronic help, there are websites were you can schedule appointments. I’ve used the Dutch sites Datumprikker.nl and the fairly new startup Pleft. Although there both quite easy to start using, I’m far from satisfied. Datumprikker and pleft both have quite limited functionality. The only thing you can enter are available dates and a list of contacts/emailaddresses with whom you want to make an appointment.
What would like is integration with my electronic calendar of Google Calender (personal) and MS Exchange (work). That way, almost automatically available dates could be picked. Both Google Calendar as the latest version of Exchange can make there calender available via ical – so integration should be quite easy. When all people you want to make an appointment with have there calenders integrated as well with the appointment tool, an appointment could be created automatically – just like a secretary would do by calling other people’s secretaries.
Furthermore, besides entering emailaddresses, picking contacts from my address book from either google or MS Exchange would be more convenient.
I was thinking, such an application shouldn’t be hard to make. I wasn’t the only one with that idea. Recently someone suggested another website: Doodle. From what I can see, that website seems a whole lot better than there Dutch counterparts. Integration with Google Calendar and Contacts. Integration with Exchange and possibility to add ical calenders. Looks good, saves me from creating a startup 
.
Posted in Ideas.
– July 4, 2010
Springsource and electric cars
Just read an article on electric cars in of the Saturday’s edition of the NRC – a Dutch newspaper, which can be found online at the authors blog (in Dutch). Some entrepreneur in electric cars is mentioned by the name of Alef Arendsen. The name did not immediately rang a bell, but when it was mentioned got his wealth after the sale of a opensource software company he co-founded I recalled. Alef Arendsen was part of SpringSource, early on and made Spring big in the Netherlands (hm, I think I’ve read about the framework in about 2004 on javaworld, found it pretty cool – too bad I didn’t do anything anything with it by then). He quit SpringSource about a year ago because he wanted to do something else.
He has now started a company in electric cars: The New Motion, which he mentions in his blog: Challenges when introducing new technologies to the market. Quite a surprising move, but then again, you could say Electric cars are to traditional Petrol cars as Spring is to EJB2/J2EE.
German electric car, 1904, with the chauffeur on top
(Above picture from Wikipedia – of course electric cars aren’t actually new, just as the idea dependency injection or reversion of control existed long before spring)
Posted in Various.
– June 23, 2010
Proxying authentication using JBoss
Wouldn’t it be nice if the connection to the database is done using the same username as the username used to login to a (JEE) application? Oracle has a solution for that: proxy authentication. When using proxy authentication, every application user is also a database user: meaning when someone logins to your JEE webapplication using username john, he’ll also access the database as user john. This way all actions of the user are logged at the database-level: an administrator or auditer can see exactly what data a certain user modified or accessed during a JEE session.
Posted in Technology.
– June 22, 2010
English
Nederlands