Jose Diaz-Gonzalez

Poorly Designed Online Portals

I just want to rant for a bit. It is a pet peeve of mine when I am a member of a organization (like a school or society etc.) that has a badly designed portal.[Read More]

Posted at 03:53AM Dec 18, 2008 by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Phone Synchronization on a Mac

I occasionally tether to my 3g enabled phone. No, it is not a smartphone, not by any means (it runs on S40, but by today's standards it is very dumb). When I do so, I get text messages or calls from people that are usually of some importance, and it is nice to know who is calling. 

Posted at 07:40AM Dec 14, 2008 by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez in Personal  |  Comments[0]

The Optimal Open Source Project Homepage

I've take many detours with my current project, and one of them has led me to the following thought: Why are so many Open Source home pages designed so badly?

In the process of downloading a CMS, I realized that I no longer could find the actual download for the software.

Take a look at the joomla page. It took me a solid 3 minutes to find the black "DOWNLOAD JOOMLA" button on the right-hand side. I've worked with Joomla for a few years now, since the Mambo fork, and I have to say that this really caught me by surprise. It isn't even apparent what the latest release might be (1.5.8 if you were wondering). Not very user-friendly.

Posted at 12:06AM Dec 12, 2008 by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez in Sun  |  Comments[0]

GlassFish Stacks

One of the things that has irked me since I first started using GlassFish+Netbeans is the fact that there aren't any real good "Stacks". If you need an example of what I mean y this, take a look at Bitnami.

Basically a Stack allows one to deploy an application, both fully tested and configured, to a server simply and easily. Yes, you can checkout a project that already has PHP/MySQL or Ruby/[Insert DB Interface Here] and add in your application, but this doesn't mean that your application will work. I've had plenty of instances on a machine I had full root access where I could not figure out how to install Joomla because of dependencies. And this is never fun at all.

What would be nice is to have a repository of the top X Open Source applications that one can checkout and deploy as a WAR. To be fair, the same can be done for proprietary applications, and this would also be nice. But if I am a small business, I would rather not have to pay the $$$ for Zimbra Commercial or similar when my small company can use Roundcube just as well. And an Open Source Repository means that I can deploy the application without going the extra step.

Has anyone setup MySQL within a WAR? A cursory search brings up no immediate results. I'm sure there has to be a way to reroute calls within a WAR to the respective binaries. GD would be nice as well.

My reason for bringing this up? It would be wonderful if I could drop my host today and bring my whole application, databases and all, which that host installed, to some other host. Or even another machine within that company. Without having to ensure the right versions of my dependencies are installed.

Posted at 02:24AM Nov 25, 2008 by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez in Personal  |  Comments[3]

Using PHP within a GlassFish Server

While working on a related project, we've developed a working version of PHP within a GlassFish server. This is incredibly useful as it will allow developers to potentially scale their PHP applications, as well as allowing all the benefits of a GlassFish server. The implementation utilizes PHP via Java Bridge, and as such each version of PHP may have different functionality; standardized, fully-featured PHP compiles are in the pipeline. Currently tested as working on Solaris and some OS X machines, with PHP compiled but not tested within Linux and Windows. However, we'd like to increase that to all platforms, so any bug reports are appreciated.

Source Code can be checked out via SVN at the following link, as well as the wiki and issue tracker. This is still a work in progress and more features and various improvements will follow soon.

http://kenai.com/projects/glassfishresources

Hopefully I'm not jumping the gun, but I would really like some feedback and quality control. :-)

Posted at 05:39AM Nov 04, 2008 by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez in Sun  |  Comments[2]