MCS Wiki

MacBook Pro

mpecher — 2007-10-12T10:46:38GMT+10:00

Been wanting to get a Mac for a long time now, and finally convert from a PC.

Its now been a week since I've had my MacBook Pro 15". First impressions:

sleek both the hardware, but also the OS itself
things "just" work
things seem to be rendered much nicer.
iLive 08 really nice so far.
too MANY good things to point out....its just a different way of operating.

Main things to get used to:

Mac keyboard shortcuts (particularly with apps that I am used to)
Still needing to run some Windows apps (due to unavailability in MacOS). Currently using VMWare Fusion. Seem pretty cool, particularly since I've not got my old laptop image to use. Will also try Parallel.
Mail client is a little dodgy. Being used to Outlook (mail, contacts, calendar) Entourage (Mac's outlook is a little backward). Entourage also doesn't allow importing of Outlook .pst (annoying).
newish keyboard has a more plasticy feel than I am used to. Will wear in I am told.
Wireless mouse is awesome.

Over all very happy, don't think I'll be able to use it to replace current work computer a client, since they make use of to many build in Windows options (auto login etc)

This will be the computer or me for home/MCS use though. Will need to start developing on it.

More to come.

Appfuse

mpecher — 2006-12-07T12:36:37GMT+10:00

www.bidzforit.com.au has now been in production for about 3 months!!

This reverse auction web application was created with the aidg the Appfuse framework. The entire site was developed within about a 2.5 month timeframe, (including requirements gathering, testing, enhancements etc).

This turn around could only have been achieved through the use of a framework such as Appfuse.....it also meant that the project could be quite agile, since a lot of the supporting infrastructure that normally would need to be build was already there, allowing us to concentrate on developing the business requirements.

The beauty about Appfuse is definitely that it allows rapid development of a website using the full MVC approach. Not only does it give the basic structure required for a MVC site (security, build scripts, tests), but since most sites really just expose data in CRUD screens, allows the easy creation of all the "plumbing glue code", such as creating the basic controllers, views, DAO, configuration files, i18n etc.

Given Rails, Grails and other are rapid, but they require a learning curve (appfuse allows usage of familiar J2EE technologies...the site used Spring-MVC and hibernate) and also generally require a user to follow the "Code Convention Pattern".

Appfuse is not perfect, but its rapid development of new screens based on data (along with test and security) is great. Most simple web sites would probably leave it at that, but since its all standard MVC, its easy to put complex screens together (such as uploading files, streaming back dynamic images etc).

Open Source Java libraries: Are they really making our life easier as developers?

mpecher — 2006-04-09T13:23:08GMT+10:00

There are thousands of open-source libraries available to Java developers. Some open source libaries are now de-facto standards.
5 years ago I used to ask interview candidates "Object-Relation Mapping, how would you go about it??". A lot were stumped (the real question being could they think laterally and tell me what needed to be done). These days the question would probably be "Have you used Hiberante??". Sure Hibernate is great, I use it all the time, but I think in its use a lot of people are loosing the higher level conceptual view of what Hibernate is there to solve.
"What you're not using Hibernate??" Just like in 2000-2001...what you're not using EJBs???

Open source libraries definitely make life easier for Java developers, but we need to make sure that we use them probably. Let's compare PHP,.NET and J2EE projects for instance.
All three of these technologies make lots of libraries available to developers. PHP and .NET though are always attributed to be more rapid-development environments than J2EE?
Why? When it comes down to it, we can usually do the same stuff nearly as quickly in J2EE....but we don't. Why? In the Java world we always tend to over engineer a solution, thinking it will turn out better. Where as the PHP/.NET guys just get the job done (yes, it won't scale as well, be a maintenance nightmare, won't allow reuse down the track and all the other arguements we throw at them to justify the larger architecute/design solutions we put in place). How much re-use down the track does your typical projects get? In over 10 years of development in all kinds of environments and different project sizes, I have seen very little reuse.....especially these days with websites. Most solutions are throw-away, or we refactor so much, we might as well start again. So what am I getting to? A lot of J2EE projects are over engineered. Are more complicated than they need to be. We can still design and implement great solutions, but we need to look at always keeping the architecture, design and implementation as simple as possible. Instead we seem to address every project like its the next complicated Fianance/Banking/Broking solution.

In the early days we wrote a lot of our own frameworks, which gave people satisfaction. After all, I am a "Software Engineer". These days we use off the shelf libaries, but then heavily modifiy them, making the justification that this project requires it. For example SourceForge's displaytag libray, is an excellent component for rendering content in table format for websites. What makes it great? Its an easy solution to use for displaying content, but too often have I seen where it required heavy modification for customisation (often the same development effort required than just writing something our own to begin with). This can be quite deceiving, when another developer wants to use it. Yes were using displaytag, but no forget what you know in that area, we've made all these mods.

Struts is another example. Too often have I seen people essentially write another custom framework on top of struts that is company or projects specific. As a developer it doesn't even feel like your using struts, having to extend their custom abstract actions (oh yes we're also using an Xwork interceptor here etc). Again, I wouldn't refer to this as being a "Struts Project", since to the developer there has been so much customisation, that they appear to be using a completely different library or framework. What's happening here? Well, instead of now writing our own frameworks, projects are now modifiying them heavily each time, which in extend can be worse than writing something from scratch. Using known libaries is meant to enable more rapid development, afterall, we're not writing the framework, someone else is, and maintinaing/bug fixing, allowing us to concentrate on implementing a business solution.
I think we in the Java/J2EE community need to step back and look at ourselves. How can I deliver the simplest solution that will work for this project? But instead we as the J2EE community seem to then always want to throw in the muli-database support, N-tier architecutre with EJB/Web-services etc, even though there is absolutely now business requirement for this (or ever will be).
It seems to happen every now and then some of the community steps back and looks at these issues, and tries to simplify things (alah Spring). Unfortunately the majority of the community just seems to go along with what the current trend be it EJB, or now Spring and Hibernate.
Let's start using these frameworks and libraries for what they were mean to do....help speed up development and not put our own modifications into them everytime we use them.

Firefox Extensions

mpecher — 2006-03-14T20:07:24GMT+10:00

There are many extensions around at the moment. Since Firefox/Mozilla usage is growing everyday, and its my preferred browser, I think its time to explore how easy they are to develop. Hmmm, XUL and Javascript....not my favourites technologies, and generally not the best for rapid development.

Potential Candiates for extensions:

SnipSnap toolbar
Mail checker in status bar

Other ideas?

Also a good time to add instructions in wiki.

State of IT/Engineering Companies

mpecher — 2006-02-25T19:37:20GMT+10:00

Reading one of the ServerSide.com forums, came across a comment to a post, which I think (unfortunately) reflects the state of many large IT/Engineering companies today....substituted said companies/names. Should be easy enough to replace with ones you know, as I constantly seem to encounter this myself.

IT_CORPORATION_A's management has long been known to be idiots pretending to 
be gurus. Marketing people dictate them what is in vogue, and what is "expired", 
and they follow. It was so with, for instance, SOME_PRODUCT's NEW functional 
that penetrated the product against the will of marketing people - marketing 
people had no clue what it was, and never heard from their executive customers 
anything about this new functionality.\\
How come SMALL_COMPANY prospers, and IT_CORPORATION_A is in coma? How come the 
best developers left IT_CORPORATION_A in anger? Nobody needs the best developers 
anymore? Google does. But not IT_CORPORATION_A; what IT_CORPORATION_A obviously 
needs is more marketing people and more managers. I (person from orig post) 
spent 7 years there. The ratio was something like 1.5 manager per one developer. 
And then they had the famous bozo, IT_CORPORATION_A's CEO. He said that 
inventions are made by marketing. And that we all are numbers to him.

Hmmm all employees are all just numbers....seem to have seen this to many times too.

AJAX Library

mpecher — 2005-12-08T15:38:15GMT+10:00

Just found an interesting blurp on the theserverside.com about an AJAX library called RICO.
http://openrico.org
Looks pretty cool some of the stuff they let you do. Their demos are quite impressive. Will need to look further into it.

AJAX

mpecher — 2005-11-21T20:13:05GMT+10:00

There is a lot of hype around AJAX of late. Google has made a great deal of use in it (Google Earth etc). I have also read some interesting articles on it. JDJ had an interesting article. I think the main issues are still that as its Javascript on the client side, its good all the usual issues that come with Javascript development.

As more and more AJAX libraries through tags, and frameworks becomes available, I think this will become a much more viable solution.

Is it the answer to the issues that have plagued the web world....well see.

Dynamic HTML a viable technology?

mpecher — 2005-08-13T17:30:39GMT+10:00

Exactly long a way have we come since HTML was first used by academics in the early 1990's?
I remember when I saw my first HTML page render in Mosaic at RMIT in '93 or so. The page which contained a few small images and text took forever to load.

Those were the days of the client-server. Rich clients written in VB, Delphi etc for Windows were all the rage. They were slick, quick and generally provided a great interactive interface. Then comes the late '90's and the .dot days. The internet promised to be the flaship of the .dot economy. Everybody seemed to be making money from it (or at least everyone was investing in it, in an aim to be part of the cash cow that this technology seemed to promise).

But how far had the internet technnology come from the early '90s? The two most popular browsers IE and Netscape were both in verison 3. They still only provided a really basic HTML interface. Some new technologies were introdced to try and improve the poor HTML thin client frontend such as

Java (Sun's language for the internet. Java Applets were to be the rich client inside the browser. Never really took over due to the library downloads, and general broswer support...thanks to Micro$oft)
Flash (Macromedia, great for animations and intros but no real over alternaives)
Javascript (introduced by Netscape, to try and add some dynamics to the HTML page, but had very poor compatibility between browsers)

Major problems of the late '90s were browser incompatibilities and the average user's poor bandwidth.
Turn to 2005. Where do we stand now? In my opinion, we haven't come a long way. What the decade has given us, have been efforts of standardisation (W3C's CSS, HTML 4 etc), along with lots of new ideas/technologies that promised to replace HTML (lists too long to mention), but none have made much impact. Macromedia with their flash have come a long way, and it does give the impression of a nice rich client, but IMHO still doesn't cut it. Applets never made it, and Java is now the defactor language of the Server.
But where does this leave us? HTML has improved. Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript, DOM have fairly good implementations with less compatibility issues in the latest browsers. This interface is pretty good these days for serving up content to users, who may not want to install any special software, or may want to access a site/application from anywhere in the world. But is it good enough to run applications that are used for hours on end, with complex workflow or interactions...no.
Some of the big advantages that web applications give to companies are:

deploy in a single place...users will use the latest version always (no need to redeploy to all users new versions etc)
the web application can be run from anywhere on any platform (well pretty much).

But I wonder if studies that have showed how these two points above have saved companies money, how the poor interface that they provide have instead cost money. Poor design, interaction and user's time to wait b/w page reloads.
An often overlooked alternative to this is Java WebStart. What is? Well think of it as an applet running on your desktop. A user simply points their browser to their company's website, clicks on an application link. This link though is a Java Webstart app, which downloads Java webstart files to their computer. It automatically installs the framework (regardless of O/S). Once installed, the latest version of the application they wish to download is installed. They are now using an application running on their desktop. Full rich interface, with some business logic running in the client, the rest on the server. The next time the user wants to access this application, they click on the shortcut on their desktop and the app starts. It checks with the server to see if a newer version exists, if so installs otherwiser start up.

Simple. I think this sort of thing is what companies should be using for feature rich business applications. Browser based apps are still cool for low usage, or for the general public who want run something occasionally.
For business applications that are used frequently this is a viable alternative, giving the user a rich slick interface (without having to wait for page refreshs all the time), but still gives the company the security of running their business logic on their server, ensuring that the webstart client is the latest, and not having to worry about the logistics of upgrading their whole user base. What do you think?

Setup SnipSnap on production box

mpecher — 2005-08-08T23:33:00GMT+10:00

A few issues setting up snipsnap on the RedHat production box. It doesn't seem to want to sit behind a context very nicely.

Other than that everything seems ok. Now need to create some other accounts. At least that's done.

Professinal Java Development with the Spring Framework

mpecher — 2005-08-08T23:22:35GMT+10:00

Rod Johnson's latest book. I've only been reading it for a couple of days. So far very impressed. Up to his usual standard. I've picked up Spring in Action and Spring Live. Ok as references, but not really something you can read cover to cover.

They cover the latest (1.2), along with Spring MVC (something I really want to start using), Acegi Security etc.