Seapegasus Blog

Thursday May 15, 2008

Looking for Plugins?

Some plugins (such as Prolog, Jalopy, Groovy, Scala) do exist but they are not on the default update center yet. Inspired by Roumen's blog I added an FAQ entry about how you get access to plugins while they are still in development or, generally, just not quality-tested yet (so use them "at your own risk".)

So here's how to add development plugin centers, hope it's useful to someone out there!

Thursday May 08, 2008

Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Scala: Who Wins the Script Bowl?

Wednesday's Script Bowl was indeed what the caption promised, a rapid-fire comparison of scripting languages. Four developers took on the challenge to convince the audience of their language of choice -- in only three minutes per round. Guillaume LaForge represented Groovy, Charles Nutter represented JRuby, Frank Wierzbicki represented Jython, and Jorge Ortiz represented Scala.

All four languages compile to Java bytecode, but what distinguishes them? The jury, made up of Roberto Chinnici, Carol McDonald, and Ola Bini, made the four contestants compete in three categories: Each developer had prepared three demos, a desktop application, a web application, and one free-form app that shows off what the particular scripting language does best. After each round, the host Rags Srinivas encouraged the attendees to vote by sending text messages.

The rich client app demos were first. The task was to implement a desktop client that allows you to log on to Twitter and view your friends' feeds and status, and search for text in their postings. The ability to post was not required, but some of the demo'ed clients could.

The Groovy implementation clearly followed the MVC pattern and the language features made it very easy to parse the XML input; the GUI made a good impression. The JRuby implementation was designed using the NetBeans GUI builder (Matisse) and the Profligacy library, and therefor looked like a native app on MacOS; the users of this JRuby app will also appreciate that the build script generated native executables for different operating systems. The Jython app could save time by reusing an already existing model for accessing Twitter APIs; still the app was an odd one out, since it had to be started from the Terminal, and despite having a GUI with buttons to select Twitterers, the output was printed to the Terminal (frankly it looked as if he didn't have time to complete the UI). The Scala developer got started quickly by extending a SimpleGuiApplication class for desktop apps; Scala also made it easy to parse XML input, and the jury pointed out the clean error handling.

Next came the web applications. The application should access a MySQL database containing a world factbook, allow the user to browse facts about countries, and sort entries by criteria (language, population, etc). Additionally it should display the selected cities on a map.

The Groovy developer of course relied on the Grails framework together with Hibernate to access the database. The web application contributed by the JRuby community relied on the Rails framework and hooked up the components using the NetBeans IDE. The Jython web application relied on the Django framework with good-looking results. All three web applications made good use of their respective web frameworks and came with nice user-friendly web interfaces. Only the Scala team failed to produce the required web application and lost votes accordingly; instead, they demo'ed two other web apps, a chat client and a task list that use Ajax to keep the view up-to-date.

A quick look at the votes shows that JRuby and Groovy are presently the most popular choices in the audience... Will Scala and Jython catch up in the last round, where each team gets a chance to show off what their language can do best?

The Groovy representative decides not to show off demo apps, but instead he convinces the audience by talking about the seamless Java integration that Groovy is famous for. But then the JRuby submissions wow the audience with their smooth visual beauty: The first demo is a Star Wars-like scrolling Twitter client; the second demo is a 'Face For Steven Hawkins', a flock of colored dots that vibrate and change colors in response to audio input. Yes, admittedly, not very useful, but... pretty! The Jython representative chose to demo the Terminal-based Python help system that will soon be integrated into Jython too. The Scala demo was an application that searches and counts words in RSS feeds; it showed very well how Scala handles concurrency in minithreads.

Before the results were made public, the audience had a chance to pose questions to the experts. Asked about the relation of JavaFX to the other languages demonstrated today, Charles Nutter explained that each language was justified by its unique approach, so he does not see JavaFX as competition, but a powerful contribution to the variety of scripting languages. Another attendee asked how exactly languages such as Scala integrate with Java? All scripts written in these four languages compile to Java bytecode (war or jar files) that run on the standard JVM. Regarding Scala, Jorge Ortiz remarked that calling Java libraries from Scala apps is however easier than calling Scala from Java apps.

Finally, Rags announces the winner: JRuby! Groovy comes second, then Scala, and Jython (Check the final results in Rags' Blog, A=Groovy, B=JRuby, C=Jython, D=Scala). Jython had produced good results, but may have lost a few points for the terminal hacking required to start the applications, since all other contestants used IDEs. Although it felt a bit rushed and it was sometimes hard to pick up the details, this format of comparison is very suitable to get an overview of the "contestants".

Wednesday May 07, 2008

Maker Faire 2008 in San Mateo

A few pics from the Makers Faire...

After the faire... Yup, the instructions are in Japanese. But we went by the pictures and the robot worked right away!

Sunday May 04, 2008

Drink Solaris

Guess what I found on my way to JavaOne? A wine bottle that says, "Solaris... celebrate the day!"

See you at CommunityOne's NetBeans day tomorrow. I'm off to the maker faire now. That's something like JavaOne, but for hardware only. Kinda Steampunk / MacGyver / Mentos-in-Pepsi / Babbage difference engine themed. You know? Allright I'll take pictures.

Thursday April 17, 2008

Innovators Grant Winners Announced

As Tushar already mentioned, the NetBeans Innovators Grant winners have been announced!

We're working on a page detailing the projects so you can get a picture of what to expect from the acronym-titled ones, too. :)

Friday April 11, 2008

Free JavaOne Passes for Students

If you're a student and you can be in San Francisco between May 5-9, then don't miss JavaOne and CommunityOne. CommunityOne (Monday) is free for everyone to attend, but if you fax us a proof of enrollment from your college, you also get a free pass for JavaOne! What will you get?

• You can attend all general sessions, technology sessions, Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions, and you also get to attend extra Java University classes.
• Talk to experts, make contact with future employers, and learn how to start your own business.
• Free lunches, t-shirts, backpack, coupon for free Java Certification Class!
• Talk to fellow developers at the AfterDark party and listen to Smashmouth perform live

Here you get the free student registration for CommunityOne and JavaOne. Curious about the sessions? Here is more info:

• CommunityOne on Monday
  • We of course recommend our NetBeans-related sessions
• During Java University (Monday) you can choose between two tracks
  • Java SE essentials, or
  • Online Game (Project Darkstar) and Web 2.0 Application development (jMaki)
• JavaOne, Tuesday to Friday
  • For JavaOne, we recommend these NetBeans-related sessions

Hope to see you there! :)

Thursday April 03, 2008

NetBeans Grant Evaluation

Just wanted to mention that the review period of the NetBeans grants submissions has been extended until next week (see NetBeans Grant page).

We knew we'd be getting a lot of submissions, and there are so many good ones that it's hard to decide. You guys and girls submitted very detailed project descriptions, which shows you put a lot of effort into your planning, and we want to give each of them a fair share of attention during the evaluation. So please bear with us until we announce the winners next week!

Wednesday March 26, 2008

Donnerstag: Software Quality Environment für NetBeans

Vortrag:

Sven Reimers spricht über SQE - ein Software Quality Environment für NetBeans

Sven leitet die Entwicklung des Open Source Projektes SQE, das Software Quality tools wie FindBugs, PMD, CheckStyle, Lint4j und Dependency Finder in die NetBeans IDE integriert und es geht das Gerücht, dass Sven eine sehr interessante Ankündigung im Gepäck hat :-).

Für die besten Fragen und Diskussionsbeiträge gibt es gibt wieder T-shirts. Sven ist auch ein absoluter Experte was Rich Client Platform-Entwicklung mit der NetBeans Platform angeht, also nutzt die Gelegenheit auch für Fragen zu diesem Thema. Hier gibt es ein Exemplar von Geertjan's Buch zu gewinnen.

Anschliessend Diskussion und NetBeans Stammtisch.

Zeit:

Donnerstag, 27.3.2008, 18:30Uhr

Ort:

Genomatix Software GmbH
Bayerstr. 85a
80335 München
http://www.genomatix.de

Monday March 24, 2008

New Blog Spammer Hack?

My brother just discovered a mean blog content hack in an RSS feed. Somebody managed to insert a div with spam text into a blog entry's content (and in one case even into the description meta tag). As opposed to 'normal' comment spam (see rel=nofollow), content spam makes it look as if the blogger recommended the link, which (I presume) gives it a higher google ranking.

So why does the blogger not notice the inserted text? The height and width of the div are zero, so the text is hidden. Some feedreaders however preview entries without div styles, so the inserted text is visible in the RSS feed.

By googling for variations of the link text, I found 7 more blogs. Sure, eight is far from a botnet epidemic. Still it's strange how the same hidden text turns up in the content of eight unrelated blogs. Do they have anything in common?

The eight cases I saw all run on Wordpress, but on different versions. This still does not explain why only these eight were affected. If someone had 'teh über h4ck' to insert arbitrary text into other people's blogs, there'd be A LOT more cases, you would think. So is the common denominator something more simple, such as a weak password? But then, why only wordpress...?

If you have a wordpress blog, please quickly search the page source for a div with style='overflow:auto;width:0;height:0; and tell us whether you got one too. I'd really like to get to the bottom of this Easter mystery...

PS: Update

OK, I found out more. Somebody indeed exploited a bug in WordPress' XML-RPC interface to insert text into certain versions of WordPress blogs. They patched it, but users didn't update.

• 2008.02.05 - WordPress releases warning and patch
• 2008.02.05 - heise.de news about wordpress vulnerability, recommends patch
• 2008.02.12 - Technorati recommends patch
• 2008.03.24 - Blogger Bontb tracks down the problem in his blog
• 2008.04.07 - Technorati reminds about patch, warns about consequences (blogs not getting index)
• 2008.04.07 - Blogger DeepJive analyses the blog hack and its consequences: OMG!
• 2008.04.09 - heise.de news reminds bloggers about continuing sneaky blog spam

Do CMS providers like wordpress have something like the netbeans update center? Can they send users a message reminding them to update? I assume not (unless the user signs up to a mailinglist). :(

The recommendation is not only to update to the latest patched version, you also should change your password.

Tuesday March 04, 2008

Innovators Grant Deadline Extended to March 7

There is still time to submit a proposal for the open-source project of your dreams–and be awarded a grant (US$ 11,500 or 2,000) for implementing it!

Bruno Souza announced on the nbusers mailinglist that the submissions deadline was extended to this Friday (March 7, 2008) to allow more countries to participate. (Giving out a grant is restricted by very different laws in each country, and it was not easy to get permission to offer a grant in this form everywhere.)

Over a 100 developers submitted proposals for plugins, books, localization projects, and web and desktop applications. I really look forward to see them become reality, you guys and girls out there have great ideas, and the skills to do it!

Get your team into gear, read the Innovators Grant rules, and send your proposal this week!

Monday March 03, 2008

Deutsche Lokalisierung von NetBeans 6

Wie weit ist NetBeans IDE 6.0_de?

• Fertig sind bereits Platform, Base IDE, Java SE, Ruby, UML! Vielen Dank an die Community-Mitglieder Jake Jackson und Michael Holzer!
• Nicht wundern, wenn Ihr doch mal über ein englisches Wort stolpert: Es fehlen zur Zeit noch die Packs für Web Apps/Java EE/SOA, Mobility/Java ME, C/C++.
• Status der deutschen Lokalisierung in Zahlen.

Wie kann ich eine lokalisierte 'Daily Build' bekommen?

Neu! Es gibt jetzt besondere Lokalisierungsplugins vom Update-Center. Um den heutigen Stand der Übersetzung (sozusagen eine Daily Build) zu sehen, installiert die lokalisierten Strings mit Hilfe des Update-Centers in Eure NetBeans IDE 6.0-Installation! So geht's:

1. Im NB6.0-Menü, wählt Tools > Plugins, geht zum Reiter Settings, um eine neues Update-Center hinzuzufügen.
2. Klickt Add. Fügt ein neues UpdateCenter hinzu und nennt es z.B. daily-L10n. Der Pfad ist

   http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/nb6-community-ml/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/nbbuild/dist/nbms/catalog_all.xml.gz

3. Jetzt geht zurück zum Reiter Available Plugins. Wählt das Netbeans 6.0.1 de Localization Plugin und klickt Install.
4. Started die IDE neu.

Kann ich mitmachen?

Na klar! Wer selber im Lokalisierungs-Team mitmachen will, findet hier den Einstieg:

• Die deutsche "Community Localization" Homepage.
• Das deutsche Lokalisierer Wiki für Neuigkeiten und Tips.
• Software, die wir verwenden: Jakes Einführung in OmegaT.
• Noch Fragen? Jake's Fragen und Antworten zum Lokalisierungsprozess.
• Meldet Euch bei NetBeans.org an, logt Euch ein und meldet Euch an bei der german-translators-Liste!

Habt Ihr Fragen zu NetBeans IDE oder Platform? Die deutschsprachige Community hilft Euch weiter: http://www.netbeans-forum.de

Friday February 22, 2008

First IDE on the Moon

• Fact 1: Sun gives you $1 million (per project $11500 or $2000) to write e.g. an open-source application or NetBeans Plugin.
• Fact 2: Google gives you $20 million to land a robot on the moon and send back data. (*)

Sooo... Does this mean... If I write an open-source lunar lander control software.... Can I win both? >:-D

Check out the NetBeans wiki, there are more ideas what you can implement to win one of the grants. Get together with your hacker buddies and write your project proposal now! The deadline is in 10 days, on March 3 2008.

(*) Google always have to one-up us. Or, in this case, twenty-up. *sigh*

Tuesday February 19, 2008

New Spelling and More Aggressive Waitresses

Please stand by for a special announcement by John Cleese(*).
Letter to America
Effective immediately. Thank you for your cooperation! :-P

(*) PS: For completeness' sake, and in case anybody asks, it's a "John Cleese-style" letter, but I don't know who wrote it.

Thursday February 14, 2008

NetBeans Day in Zürich

Haltet Euch den Termin schon mal frei: Auch dieses Jahr gibt es wieder einen NetBeans Day in Zürich in der Schweiz, und zwar am 23 Juni, vor der Jazoon-Konferenz. Das genaue Programm kommt noch. :)

Wednesday February 06, 2008

Have Mercy With Unreal Developers and Gimme a Suite! Please?

Reading this new NetBeans Intro on Forum.Nokia.Com makes me want to continue with my poor little Java ME game... :-) The main reason that it's on hold is just as silly as that I need to clearly define the game resources and rules. Basic stuff like what "cards" you can or cannot play, and how many points you get, I never really defined that, argh... The Java part I can handle. ;)

Another article about the different SDKs is available too, including a video, which for some reason is an exe file, what the hey? Oh I remember, all real Java ME developers use Windows. :( But I, I am only an unreal developer, I just write silly buggy stuff over the weekend, my phone doesn't do Symbian, and I use Linux, bad luck for me. :(

Wasn't there something like a Nokia PC Suite for Linux somewhere, does anybody know what became of it? Because, if you use PC Suite, you can directly send the application from Netbeans to your test phone, via Bluetooth or USB - spiffy. But well, only on Windows, it seems.