jeudi avril 19, 2007

Is Thunderbird's IMAP finally there?

The application I use the most (on many different platforms) is Thunderbird and version 2.0 was just released today.
I only have one question: does it (finally) have proper IMAP4/Offline support?

Update :
On other things I really dislike with Thunderbird (and v2.0 doesn't seem to be helping, quite the opposite):
•  pressing "stop" never really stops.
•  on lower bandwidth connection (hotels calling it High-Speed) compact folders doesn't compact.
•  overall, the user feedback could be greatly improved (the small green progress bar just isn't enough). Please tell me what you are doing.
•  deleting messages with big attachments without reading them seems impossible (and where's the "don't download attachments over xyz Kb" option anyway?)
•  selecting a message doesn't actually show its content (again, maybe just on slow connections)
•  why does Thunberdird need to download attachements before showing me the body of the message? Any mobile mail client is doing this right. Why can't Thunderbird do as well?
...

Any suggestion for an alternate email client (even pay-for) available on all platforms?

Is Restlets the new Hibernate?

Jérôme Louvel has released Restlets 1.0. Congratulations to him and the team! Any 1.0 version is always something very special. In this InfoQ interview, Jérôme is drawing a parallel between JPA and the new "Rest" JSR 311 (of which he's an expert member). Of course he would like for his Restlets implementation to be the main inspiration for the expert group just like Hibernate seems to have been for JPA. So Jérôme is not just a good developer and architect, he's also sounds like a good marketeer :)

In other comments on the article, I wish InfoQ's Stefan Tilkov would add GlassFish's JAX-WS to the mix when comparing Restlets to SOAP stacks. While the answer from Jérôme would likely be the same ("it's not really REST"), JAX-WS has Dispatch/Provider APIs to work at the lower messaging layer to implement any protocol including RESTful web services.

The other interesting part is the use of GlassFish Grizzly's technology in the Restlet framework as well as the use of the dual CDDL/GPLv2 licensing model which happens to be the exact same as what GlassFish uses... All this and the future promised WAR packaging could make Noelios (the company behind Restlets) a good GlassFish partner.

On a personal note, having only been thru the basic Restlet samples, I can claim that what I like best about the framework is its website. Clean and simple.

Nimbus for the GlassFish Update Center?

There's a lot happening in both the server and the clients Java camps. Of course JSR 295 and 296 are the most exciting, but in the community space, I find the work on the Nimbus Look-and-Feel (which I am kinda already using every day since it's based on the Solaris Gnome theme) sounds very exciting.

Of course I could use this new Nimbus look and feel and apply it to NetBeans (the -ui option makes that trivial and I'm still not sure why this is not a standard JVM/Swing option just yet), but I'll let Roman and friends do that. It's probably not yet well known, but GF now has an Update Center as part of v2. It's a separate application from the admin UI and it is Swing-based. Here's what it looks like:

Unfortunately, after some hacking do change the look and feel, the first very good impression I initially got from using SwingSet with Nimbus didn't translate to GlassFish's update center:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
       at javax.swing.JTable.setSelectionBackground(JTable.java:2454)
       at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.updateStyle(SynthTableUI.java:117)
       at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.installDefaults(SynthTableUI.java:95)
       at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicTableUI.installUI(BasicTableUI.java:1354)
       at javax.swing.JComponent.setUI(JComponent.java:668)
       at javax.swing.JTable.setUI(JTable.java:3526)
       at javax.swing.JTable.updateUI(JTable.java:3582)
       at javax.swing.JTable.(JTable.java:614) I'll keep looking...

In the mean time, the GlassFish Update Center is a tool for making documentation, product updates, extensions and even partner software available to the entire GlassFish user community. This is only the beginning.