Eric Arseneau's Weblog

eric<.>arseneau<@>sun<.>com

• 7 Version Control Systems Reviewed

• Subversion - Since my project was moved to Squawk @ java.net, was logical to use the same repository mechanism that was the most up to date
• Mercurial - I wanted a local and a server based repository tool, and had heard about git. But as was usual, I procrastinated for a while before taking the plunge, only to find out that our own Java organization (such as OpenJDK) was going with Mercurial, so I went with it. So far very happy with it.

• HOW TO USE MERCURIAL FOR LOCAL SOURCE CODE MANAGEMENT WITH A PUBLIC SUBVERSION SERVER

I've been having some issues with Subversion recently and decided to go out and find out what Subversion/svn clients I could find. Although I don't mind working with the command line once in a while, getting a nice GUI that allows me to manipulate my source code in a visual and logical way is much more what I want and need.

Here is a run-down of the clients I found, along with some pros and cons of each. The initial set of pros and cons are coming from minimal use, as I go through to see if I can find one to resolve a couple of my current issues. I will make an attempt to update the pros and cons as comments come in to this blog entry.

I could not find information in one single location that listed information on this topic, so I thought I would create my own.

• Cornerstone
  • Pros
    • Looks really nice
  • Cons
    • No way to edit the svn:externals property, which makes this tool a nogo for me, as I use externals quite a bit
    • Checking out a large workspace could stand to have a better progress showing. All I got was the usual spinning disc, but no indication of how it had gotten. I know that a percentage complete is hard to do, but at least show me how much data downloaded, which directories done so far, something ?
• iSVN
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • Does not seem to have any development since 2006 ?, so did not bother trying it out
• RapidSVN
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • No browser for folder structure on checkout, need to know what the path is you want. The same went for revision selection.
• SmartSVN
  • Pros
    • Works really well for most operations, this is the tool I've always recommended and use 90% of the time.
  • Cons
    • Could not find a way to recover a delete directory, without using the log trick and doing a search on the resulting log. This is what got me on this quest of looking for other options for an SVN client.
• svnX
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • UI is not very intuitive, setup a workspace in Working Copies window, setup a repository in Repositories window, then double clicked on respository
    • Seems to be very slow, first double click on our repository ran for a long time, over 15 minutes.
    • Switched from one view to another, and it seems that the reason for slow down is that it is doing an svn log, and svn info on the root level URL I gave it, and the result is not cached. So it needs to re-read this information all the time.
• Synchro SVN
  • Pros
    • UI seems ok
    • I like the repository explorer
    • Console is pretty good, gives me a glimpse into the commands used by the tool, so I can learn to use the command line better
  • Cons
    • Treats SVN externals the same as other properties, this is very limiting if you use externals
    • Although I like the repository explorer, its not where I spend most of my time, so having it so prominent seems a little weird to me
    • MDI interface I really dont like
• Versions
  • Pros
    • Nice UI
  • Cons
    • Cannot checkout a directory that defines externals into repositories that require different credentials
    • Treats svn:externals property the same as other properties also, which is bad.
• ZigVersion
  • Pros
    • Was nice, fast, and simple to use.
    • Used it a lot to deal with my migration of source from internal to open source, and was very handy for that.
  • Cons
    • Only supports one working copy for a given svn directory
• scplugin
  • Pros
  • Cons
• NetBeans
  • Pros
  • Cons
• Eclipse
  • Pros
  • Cons

• SmartSVN
• Eclipse
• svn command line client

Wow, its been WAY too long since I last blogged. I used to have an alarm that would go off every week, but I just trained myself to ignore it as I was always too busy. Now, I've decided to change the alarm to once a month, lets see what happens.

There is too much really cool stuff that has gone on since I last posted, but I need to start somewhere. So here goes.

In the past few months, I became a board member of a local non-profit school based in San Diego California. The goals of the school are to teach Software Engineering to middle and high school kids. We do this through the use of Java and other interesting curriculum content. The school was founded by Vic Wintriss and is called Wintriss Technical Schools (http://www.wintrisstech.org). Its been a lot of fun and I have had many opportunities to look at software engineering from a different vantage point, from a kids perspective trying to do really cool stuff in today's day and age.

The school does its best to be flexible with its curriculum and its students. One of my students was getting a little bored with some of the programming we were doing, so we took a little side road. This side road turned out to be fun, in a couple of ours we were able to put together a stop motion movie using some pretty simple tools. It took us another couple of hours to get our video together to post on You Tube, you can see it at
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7QHU4TnOMY - Clay Time

Now to the point of this entry. Another way we are trying to get our students into what they are doing, is to give them the opportunity to make their work more visible and to add some pressure and value to what they are working on. To this end the school is putting on an autonomous robot competition. You will find a lot of information at
  http://www.iaroc.org

The competition is open to anyone who wants to sign up. The web site is primitive and needs work, but it does contain a significant amount of information about the competition. We have some teams from students of the school already signed up. Its been quite the experience for them as they get to work on putting logos togerhter, help with the planning, as well as work on their own robot. Being able to work with physical objects along with software is a very gratifying experience, even indirectly through working with a child.

The competition has three phases

• 1) Technical Presentation

  20 minutes presentation on the technical aspects of the chosen platform and algorithms.

• 2) Urban Challenge

  20 minutes to traverse a maze as fast as possible. Many tries allowed within time allocation. Intent is to have robot learn maze through its multiple tries. Winner is the robot with the fastest time through the maze. Maze is static.

• 3) Gold Rush Challenge

  All entries are placed into an arena with obstacles, the first robot to reach one of three beacons wins. Second place goes to second robot to another beacon, and so on. This challenge is intended to have the robot work through a more dynamic environment than the Urban Challenge.

There will be money and other prizes handed out to the top 3 in the following categories:

• Junior - Grade 8 and lower
• Senior - Grade 9-12
• Open - Any grade, any age

There is a $250.00 sign up fee, however with that you get a Sun SPOT developer kit (http://www.sunspotworld.com) and a Create from iRobot (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=305).

Come take a look and sign up, registration is open.

So, a few days ago I catching up on my RSS feeds and ran into the following article Sun Scrapping Mobile Java, Moving Devices to Standard Java
which then led me to Sun starts bidding adieu to mobile-specific Java. Both of these articles really surprised me, considering I have just recently become a Java ME licensee.

Upon reading these articles, I took it upon myself to e-mail people that work with James Gosling to find out what was going on. One of the cool perks of working at Sun is that I can do this kind of thing and get an actual response back :) Here is part of the response I got:

   If Java ME could talk, it would quote Mark Twain and say that "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

   We're working on clarifications for this dust up.

• JavaME is *not* dead!
• Sun: Plenty of Life Left In Java ME
• Plenty of Life in Java ME technology

One thing that did surprise me however, was that there was no direct mention that what is going on is not that Java ME is necessarily growing up, it is that the capabilities of devices using it today are growing. This does not mean that Java ME is dying, this means that Java ME is able to go down even lower into the device food chain. Remember that Java ME stands for Java Micro Edition. What has happened is that our view of what is Micro has changed from Mobile phones to smaller devices. What was once considered Micro is now capable of running Standard, and therefore Java SE makes good sense.

There will ALWAYS be a need for something smaller to be able to run on small things. The thing that is really cool in this space, is that as small things get to be more and more capable, this means that even smaller things are able to support more as well. This is where I see Java ME fitting in for a VERY long time, and where I plan to put all my effort into.

• By simplifying the development of wireless transducer applications, the Sun SPOT System from Sun Labs will help transform the potential of wireless sensors into real-world products.
• Sun SPOT: Simplified Development of Wireless Transducers Using Java™ Technology

This is a big milestone for us, and we believe is a first for a research Java VM. Here is a quote from the logo page which made me VERY happy: The self-certification notice indicates that your company's product(s), based on the Java technology, meet all compatibility requirements including complying with the corresponding API and Specification and passing the applicable test suites (if any) for each Java technology. This is our first step, as we will be moving forward with adding more platforms that Squawk is certified on.

This is totally off topic for technical stuff, but I really had to share my thoughts on an event I attended today.

I attended the Change of Command Ceremony for the Marine All Wheather Fighter Attack Squadron 121/Green Knights. I am not a person who is really for war, however something came to light today that I really wanted to share. The key thought I had was that ware involves people, however obvious that may sound, until you really get close to some of these people and what their lives are like, I think it is very dificult to understand some of the implications.

I saw an impressive display of dedication and of course REALLY cool planes today. I had TWO F/A-18 Attack Hornets take off about two 400 feet away form you is quite an impressive display of power and NOISE. The traditions involved in this ceremony were very evident, but also seemed to make sense even for an outsider such as myself.

In all of the discussions I have seen from the two sides, those for and those against the war, I have yet to see anyone address the following facts and their importance:

1) The decision to go to war was made my a few key people. So arguing pros and cons and reasons for going to war should be had with these people, and not the people who are "doing" the war. You think it was a bad decision, blame President Bush, not the people who are doing the war.

2) The people doing the war are in a situation where their commander in chief, the President, has decided that we should go to war. These people are doing what they been commanded to do. Blaming them for the war just does not make any sense to me. Blaming the President, yes, the people doing there jobs, NO !!! These are people doing their best of a bad situation. I now believe that having a "Support our troups" sticker on my car is a very appropriate thing to do. I would go one step further and have an additional sticker that would indicate my feelings about the war itself. The two are totally distinct issues.

3) The people who go to war, have a family's at home. Family's that must persevere through a lot worry and support for their "warriors". Having their loved ones purposefully in harms way must take a very strong person to handle the worries every day. I am very impressed not just with the people doing the war, but the people back home who keep their lives and homes together for the eventual return of their loved ones. Providing support for the people back home I think is just as important as supporting the warriors. They may not be in harms way, but they have to deal with the implications of having their loved ones in harms way.

I hope this did not come out as a political discussion. It is the warriors and their family that I am writing about. The choice of going to war, right or wrong, is/was not my intent here.

Lets SUPPORT our TROUPS !!! Then figure out what we want to do with our thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of war.

Thank you for your patience in reading this.

I have been using Trillian for quite some years now and it works pretty well. Trillian is an IM client that allows me to connect to almost every type of IM service without having multiple clients installed and running. This is the main reason why I have been using it, one IM client all services: Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, IRC, Jabber. Its skinning ability has been quite useful to me, as I am able to use a skin that makes everything very small and therefore uses limited real estate.

However, they have been very slow in putting out updates in the past year or so. I ran into a little blurb in a magazine the other day about an IM client I had not heard of before Qnext. It turns out its pretty cool and seems to work quite well. The biggest kicker is that it is written in Java !!! One complain I have at the moment is that the UI is really driven around this concept of Zones which includes many things other than just IM client related stuff, so its a little more complicated than I would like. I am going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes.

Well, I have moved from the Sun Tools organization to SunLabs. I've gone from working on Tools to enable Enterprise developers to more easily build Web Applications to working on Java virtual machines for small devices. Way too cool.

It turns out that I ran into one of the founders of Smalltalk, Dan Ingalls, while out for a stroll on Sun campus. It was really cool since I have spent most of my life as a developer being a Smalltalk programmer. I then find out he now works for Sun. Well we had lunch a couple of times, our release of Creator 2 was coming to an end, and I realized that I could have some fun working with Dan.

Well, it HAS been and IS a LOT of fun. The project I am now co-Principal Investigator on is Squawk. It is a Java written in Java and is targeted for small devices without requiring an OS. Styled after Squeak.

(2006-01-31 20:09:45.0) Permalink

• http://www.digg.com
  It seems an interesting alternative to http://www.slashdot.org. digg lets users put digg's on a story and the highest number of diggs show up.
• http://www.librarything.com
  List the books you liked and are reading and share with others. Its interesting to me since its related to a product I would LOVE to have/write myself. A service where I can log books I have read, books I want to read, and when I am browsing in book store I can confirm whether I have read a book or not, or if I want it or not. Would save me a lot of money from buying books I have already read.
• http://www.teleflip.com
  A free service that lets you send SMS messages to any number without knowing the carrier. Going to take a look and see how it works out. Been looking for something like this, but have not looked really hard. Could be interesting.

• Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman

Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005.

• If you have NEVER heard Guy Kawasaki give a talk, then you are really missing something. His blogs seem quite interesting as well
  • The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists
  • The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Take a look at these Creator has recently picked up two nice awards:

• Creator is the "Java Tool or Add-in of the Year" at Developer.com, more...
• Labs has picked Java Studio Creator 2 as the most attractive developer tool for 2005, more...

I should be posting some How-To's in order to help get around some of the limitations in our new refactoring functionality. Next release we will really nail refactoring. This time around I made a bad design decision and we got stuck living with if for this release :( B

(2006-01-18 01:06:29.0) Permalink

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