Thursday April 12, 2007

GWT-based Visual GWT Designer

A good WYSIWYG HTML form editor should be written in the HTML and JavaScript , emulating the web browser environment is a hopeless work. I have developed a prototype GWT Visual Designer using GWT and NetBeans, check it out and you'll have to admit it looks promising.

The idea of web-based IDE is slowly materializing, there is a number of interesting projects going on. Many expect it to be the next big thing in the IDE world. AFAIK my effort was first such attempt for the GWT technology, unfortunately I will not be able to develop a production-quality tool by myself. Do you think it worth to carry on this project? Would you like to join?

Wednesday December 27, 2006

I've tried Solaris on the public beta of VMWare for Intel Mac

... and I was quite amazed by its compatibility, stability and performance (although the beta release only works in the debug mode, which according to a warning displayed on startup implies a severe performance penalty).

Before Dec 22 there was only one virtualization solution for Mac developed by Parallel Desktops, which supported Solaris as well, but it had quite a few issues (see Capitan Holy Hippie's blog).

According to the press release: The new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion, allows Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. It is built on VMware's rock-solid and advanced desktop virtualization platform that is used by over four million users today.

I was playing with OpenSolaris build 54 and a Mac Book Pro. Already during the installation the mouse pad was working and there was a network connection (unlike during my previous attempts of installing Solaris directly on the hard drive). After installing the VMWare tools (a set of guest operating system /Solaris/ drivers, which make interaction with the host OS even smother) I could also work with sound and full screen resolution, accelerated video (it felt somewhat sluggish before that).

I was truly impressed not to come across a single stability problem in a couple of hours I spent playing with Fusion, torturing it with NetBeans and other heavy stuff, really well done!

I hope the I/O performance improves in the final product, anyways, I find Fusion as it is the best way to run Solaris on a Mac as of today.
Posted by tomslot ( Dec 27 2006, 08:56:29 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday June 13, 2006

muCommander - a Java-Powered, Cross-Platform File Manager

I am addicted to two paned, Norton Commander-like file managers. I do not require anything fancy though, I was quite happy using the command line version of Midnight Commander. My work laptop was recently upgraded to MacBook Pro. Unfortunately I find the PowerPC emulation (Rosetta) rather disappointing, apart from performance penalty it has a tendency to hang the entire OS, especially when running Open Source stuff (try PPC-compiled MPlayer).

Being lazy to attempt to recompile Midnight Commander manually I made a quick research for alternatives. It led me to muCommander, a free, cross-platform app written entirely in Java. The author (Mexence Bernard) is using a Mac as well, when run under OS X the application takes advantage of Apple's Java libraries providing a nearly native look & feel (OS X-style menus, native keyboard shortcuts are yet to be seen though)

• Virtual filesystem with FTP, SFTP, SMB and HTTP/HTTPS support

• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files...

• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR and GZip archives

• Universal bookmarks 

• Multiple windows support

• Customize the look and feel to your taste

• Never leave that keyboard again, shortcuts are provided for almost everything

• Available in 11 languages : English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and Slovenian

Cool stuff, highly recommendable to Java desktop sceptics!

Monday May 01, 2006

Problems with Version Control in Enterprise Applications

I used to do a year long internship in a Latin American banking software company. As an "outsider with a fresh look" I was occasionally asked to try to think of better ways of doing certain things that were causing them most troubles. One of such areas was version control. Updates sent out to the customers, in spite of rigorous procedures in place, were continuously causing inconsistencies between the database schema and client application layers (and thus annoying runtime exceptions). I developed an auto update tool and carried on later writing a Master's Thesis on some ideas of how to develop a self-updating, portable version control system for database schema. Once quite proud of the solutions I had come up with, I could never help the feeling that much simplier, "Egg of Columbus" style solution existed but I was failing to see it.

Now as I am working with the new EJB3/Java Persistence APIs I am starting to see a light in the end of tunnel... There is no longer need to maintain the database schema and application sources separately. The latter can be generated automatically from the sources. The consequences of this fact are depeer than just saving the time needed for manual schema creation - the source code duality problem (DDL SQL vs logic language like Java or PL/SQL) disappers, it is easier to handle sources manually as well as using modern, static analysis based tools.

I can imagine design patterns like "Versioned Entity Manager" that would look up and persist entities in a schema version dependent way. The mechanism could be possibly transparent to the developers and upper architecture layers. Perhabs one day such a mechanism could be incorporated into a standard application container...

A common database application development scenario is that the ORM mapping is pretty straightforward in the beginning and then gets complicated as the system is optimized for performance and is updated to keep some additional data. This case seems to be able to be handled very nicely. However there are still many corners (like renaming/removing tables/columns) that at least for now would require some special, conscious handling.

I wonder if anyone has come up with/is working on some smart ways of handling such problems. Looking forward to your comments!

Tuesday January 10, 2006

Hello, world!! I’ve spent a week working at Sun development site in Prague and I feel it is a high time for creating my own blog.. I found out about Sun opening an office here reading a blog and it was the culture of openness that attracted me the most. I am no longer the idealist I used to be a few years ago, but I still find working full time on mass-market, open source projects very rewarding. I do enjoy sharing, even though some claim altruism to be the highest grade of selfishness ;-) Posted by tomslot ( Jan 10 2006, 09:54:48 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]