Blogging Roller

In the end, I think the talk went pretty well. Kevin did most of Pat and my slides on syndication because we had split the talk 50-50 when we couldn't locate Pat on Wednesday night (and assumed he was still in Paris). He did a good job with the material and added in some interesting points from his experience at Rojo.com where they parse millions of feeds per hour with the Java-based Apache Commons (sandbox) FeedParser.

We were a little disappointed with the turnout. I'd be surprised if the 700+ seat Yerba Buena theater was more than 30% full. The fact that were in a lunchtime timeslot on the last day of the show certainly didn't help. Anyhow, I'm relieved that it's over and ready for a nice long week off.

Preview version of the new NetBeans CVS Support now available!: The NetBeans team is proud to announce a preview (alpha) version of the new redesigned CVS support, an innovative approach to integration of a Version Control System (VCS) into the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The new module provides a simple, efficient IDE versioning workflow and intelligent support for common versioning operations.

The module is not derived from the current NetBeans VCS support, but instead is meant as a lightweight approach with less focus on architectural abstraction and much more attention to User Interface (UI) functionality.

CVS integration is the one thing that keeps pulling me back to Eclipse, so I'm really glad to hear the VCS subsystem is being re-worked (maybe 'replaced' is more accurate). Check out the screenshots, looks like good stuff. I hope better Subversion support is not far behind.

Via Roman Strobl and John Jullion-Ceccarelli

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.

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.

John Udell, InfoWorld: Programmer and author Dave Johnson shared an anecdote on his Weblog last year about what happened when his 5-year-old son walked up behind him while he was coding. "He saw the JUnit green bar on the screen," Johnson reports, "and said 'Dad, you did good.'" There's more to this touching father-and-son moment than meets the eye.

Matt has the RollerWikiPlugin up and running. He has also created a very nice new JSPWiki theme and started his own Wiki to support his weblog, AppFuse, and StrutsResume projects.

Sang Shin's slides (with speaker notes) from the TechEngage Dot-Net vs. J2EE shootout are online on the RTP-WUG download page.

From Computer World's interview with BEA's CEO Alfred Chuang:

What Linux trends are you seeing with BEA software?

Huge adoption curve climbing very fast for BEA over the last six to nine months. A lot of focus in the financial services marketplace, where there's a lot of experimentation and initial deployment going on with Linux on Intel. And I think the motivation in that arena is simplification and cost reduction, so they are looking to buy significantly less expensive hardware.

What's the breakdown of platforms on which BEA software is running?

About 50% is on Sun, and about 23%, 24% is on Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard has both Intel and non-Intel platforms in there. And then it drops off pretty quick. IBM hardware, I think, is 5% or 7%. In some countries, we sell a lot of IBM's hardware.

What about the Linux operating system?

Linux is around the 15% to 20% range, which has climbed pretty quickly.

I had to do some grueling work on the Roller persistence layer this weekend, the kind that requires lots of searching, replacing, trial-and-error experimenting, testing, and debugging.  I decided to make the job fun by trying something new: Eclipse.  Normally, I use WinCVS and VIM for my development.  Sometimes I use JBuilder when I need to throw together a quick Swing UI or Netbeans when I need to do some debugging.  Here is the story of my first real experience with Eclipse:

eWeek reports that Sun will be adding 18 new modules to the open source Netbeans IDE. I wonder what they are doing for Struts support.

Among the 18 new modules is one that features support for Java Data Objects, which is a Java technology for mapping entities in relational databases to Java objects. Another is a module for Java 3D support. And a third is support for the Apache Struts framework, which is a technology built on top of JavaServer Pages that enhances productivity for Web application developers, the company said. Other modules include a Support Interface Module, a BugSubmitter module, an audit module for defining best practices, a metrics module for analyzing source code, and an XTest module for providing performance and API compatibility tests.

The Xulux (pronounced zoolooks) project is gathering steam. Its going to be an ASF licenced open source XUL framework. The aim is to simplify the development of rich/thick clients [by] using XUL to define more traditional, rich user interfaces. The XUL can then be transformed into HTML / DHTML / JavaScript for old HTML browsers such as IE while still supporting rich in XUL browsers such as Mozilla or Flash (thanks to ZULU). So the aim is to build a HTML, Swing and SWT clients for XUL as well as a server side framework for developing XUL applications. James Strachan on XULUX