Blogging Roller

I missed a couple of Friday photos, so today I have two for you. Both from the soccer double header last weekend. Alex and Linus had back to back games and my dad was there with his telephoto. First, here is Alex seconds before scoring a goal:

Linus didn't score a goal during his game, but here is a shot of him playing goalie.

Those boys are about as sad as can be today. We just learned that the stray cat we took in last year has stomach cancer. Luna was the sweetest cat. She got along great with my three loud and rowdy boys because she was totally deaf. We will be having another one of those tear-filled back-yard burials again tomorrow. Sigh.

My bro located these pictures of Saturday's Wilco show in Raleigh. It was an amazing show, BTW.

Simon Brown describes how to upload build artefacts to your blog with Ant using the Pebble Ant Tasks. Very cool.

Time to take another look at Netbeans (downloads and key features).

SonicBreakdown is turning into a very cool blog app. As I mentioned before, the SonicBreakdown client scans your music collection, uploads the info to the SonicBreakdown server, and then provides you with customized news, local concert dates, and release information for your favorite artists - from 80 news sources. Now it does all that, plus it serves up customized RSS newsfeeds based on your music collection.

Cory Omand: "For quite some time, I've wanted to publish my large list of bookmarks on the web. The primary reason is to give me a map of information to use when I am not near a browser with my bookmarks. Another reason is to let others benefit from the time I've spent gathering and organizing these links. I could just upload my Netscape bookmarks.html file, as it is just HTML, but there are issues."

Cory shows how to use HTMLTidy, Perl, and XPath to parse his bookmarks.html file, filter out entries from internal corporate domains, and generate stuff. Well, he doesn't actually show how to generate anything yet, but he is ready to generate just about anything. For example, he could generate OPML and then import bookmarks into Roller 0.9.9 (coming soon) for display as I do here. Or, he could write the additional code necessary to check each bookmarked link for an RSS feed, using RSS autodiscovery, and then write the links to those RSS feeds to OPML format for import into his favorite newsfeed reader.

Microsoft flexes more open-source muscle | CNET News.com: "FlexWiki is the third piece of Microsoft code that the company has released this year under an open-source license, all under the Common Public License (CPL). In April, Microsoft posted its Windows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge.net, following up a month later with the posting of the Windows Template Library (WTL) project."

JBoss honcho Mark Fleury: First of all, I am pissed off that there is a blog war with SUN in which I have no part to play. It annoys me given my long nasty history there. [...] RH is a PACKAGER, not a technology house. How do they DARE call SUN on technology innovation [...] So to me both SUN and RH are open source "wannabees", or as one of my developers put "open source girly men."

Fleury admits that feels left out of the so called "blog war" between Sun and Redhat, uses the occasion to vent all of his Red Hat grievances, and finally remembers to spew some bile in Sun's direction. Ain't blogs grand?

Java.Net powered by Perl? Gotta figure out how to do something about that.

Red Hat opens losing propaganda offensive against Sun | The Register: "Tiemann will lose this battle of blogging wits in a big way. It's probably best, Michael, if you toddle back to the labs and find new and improved ways to put proprietary wrappers around Torvalds' code."

Ouch!

Randy Charles Morin explains "how to properly publish and pull RSS content from the Web" using skipHours, skipDays, TTL, ETags, GZip, and HTTP cache control headers. (Via breyten's del.icio.us links).

The Rome project has released another alpha version of the Rome newsfeed library. Rome 0.4 adds adds an HTTP client for fetching feeds and handles XML charset encoding defined by XML 1.0 spec and RFC 3023. The next release will be a beta.

While I was enjoying a soccer double header with Alex and Linus playing back to back games, relaxing at Cupajoes, and rocking at a sold out Wilco show, Sam Ruby was doing my work for me. He dove right into the Roller source code and implemented the hard parts of the RFC 3229 "feed" instance manipulation method. Check it out: FeedDiff for Roller.

I'm not sure why the Redhat exec team decided to respond to Jonathan Schwartz's post about OpenOffice.org instead of one of Schwartz's other Redhat jabs, but I would like to point out that the David Johnson who responded to Redhat is not me.

I've been at Sun for only a couple of weeks now and I'm working remotely, but I can sense that Sun people are are very excited about the idea of an OSI licensed OpenSolaris OS, ecstatic even, and rightly so. You can see this excitement shining through the Sun blogs as individual bloggers take on mis-informed journalists, engage in point-by-point discussions with Linux advocates, or just rave about their favorite OS. My favorite posts so far are Analysts on OpenSolaris and Rebutting a rebuttal.

Jon Mountjoy explains the couple of steps necessary to get the Sun Java System Application server running on OS X, and wonders why there is no officially supported version for Mac OS X.

After Rick Hightower posted a positive review of Java Server Faces, the alternative framework zealots decended on him like a rabid pack of OS/2 fanatics. He fought back valiantly here, here, here, and here. Along the way he was able to plug his company's training class, drew lots of attention to his JRoller hosted SourceBeat blog, and ended up as a feature story on Java Developers Journal. Score: RickHigh 1, Zealots 0.

Sun bloggers Jonathan Schwartz and MaryMaryQuiteContrary get a mention along with Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble in a Fortune magazine article titled "It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog" about corporate blogging.

If you are reading this, then MarsEdit works with Roller. And, by the way, NetNewsWire 2.0b3 rocks!

Eclipse was the first IDE that was powerful enough to pull me away from good old trusty and ubiquitous vi. I had worked on a couple IDE projects, including Object Factory at Rogue Wave and HAHTsite at HAHT, and I had tried almost every Java IDE in existance, but I couldn't find an IDE that could tempt me away from vi. But, when I tried Eclipse in 2002 I was sold. What did I like about Eclipse at that time? Take a look at a My Eclipse Review to read my review of Eclipse from September 2002.

After seeing lots of cool demos of Java Studio Creator at JavaOne, hearing about Netbeans 4.0 release, and remembering to eat the dogfood, I decided that I had to take another look at Netbeans. I downloaded the Netbeans 4.0 demo over the weekend and I've been working with it all week. If you've used Netbeans before, you will notice some drastic changes. The Netbeans UI is much more clean, simple, and easy to use. Gone is the clunky filesystem mounting stuff and the complex options dialog is much more streamlined and easy to grok.

Here is a screenshot of Netbeans 4.0b1 showing the Versioning view:

There are still some shortcomings that will keep me going back to Eclipse, but there are also some areas where Netbeans seems to outshine Eclipse. Here are some of the things that impressed me:

• Speed of startup and general responsiveness: 'nuff said. IDEA IntelliJ (and others) have proven that Swing Apps don't have to be slow (and ugly), now Netbeans proves that point as well.
• Ant integration: Netbeans will read your existing Ant file and use it to drive your project. If you are starting a new project, Netbeans provides new Ant build file for you, loaded with userful targets.
• J2EE server integration: J2EE server startup, shutdown, and debugging for Tomcat (and the Sun app server) is incuded. I had to buy MyEclipse to get this in Eclipse. The integrated UI also allows you to start and stop individual web applications within the server.
• CVS improvements: CVS setup has been much improved and is now easy and trouble free. The new Version Control view of the filesystem is nice. Each file can be expanded to show previous versions and commit comments (see screenshot above).
• Built-in JSP editor: Netbeans also includes built in JSP editor with syntax coloring and code completion (another MyEclipse extra I paid for).

And here are the things that will keep me going back to Eclipse:

• CVS icon labels and decorations: the CVS icon labels and decorations in Eclipse make it really easy to see which folders contain files and folders (recursively) that have been modified.
• CVS synchronization: The CVS synchronization view in Eclipse is great. It makes it amazingly easy to review incoming and outgoing changes, to select files for merge, to override and update, or to override and commit on files or groups of files.
• More refactoring options: Netbeans just added support for refactoring, but it has been built into Eclipse for quite a while an Eclipse has more refactoring options by far.
• Organize imports: Eclipse organizes your imports with one easy click. I think the "Fix Imports" feature is broken in Netbeans 4.0b3, but I'm not sure.

It is cool to see such great improvements in Netbeans and it is great to have so many excellent Java IDE options. I've also spent some time recently with Visual Studio C#.Net and I'm here to tell you, Microsoft has some major catch-up work to do. The current crop of Java IDEs blow Visual Studio away.