Insert Witty Irony Here

Wednesday January 16, 2008

Is Javascript the C of the Web

Last night, while the wheelers and dealers of MySQL, Sun, Oracle and BEA were signing on dotted lines the tech crowd was at Google's building 43 for the Silicon Valley Web and Java Users group meeting to hear a presentation about GWT.

Bob Vawter's presentation was excellent. He covered the basics quickly and took questions. His presentation provided answer to some of the things that make folks go, "Hmmm", when they look at the output of the GWT compiler.... Like, "What are all those obtuse numerically named files all about?"
Short answer (heavily paraphrased): They are the Javascript of the UI that you created in GWT, pretailored for each of the four major browsers out there today. The names are created from a hash of their content and are safe and easy to cache. When you change the UI, the name of the files will change, so folks don't keep seeing an old UI and have your server side processing freak out because of missing data.

There was a raffle for a number of books. I won a book.

Why does this entry have its title?

While Bob was talking about GWT, it reminded me of working at Interactive Software Engineering, now known as Eiffel Software. The Eiffel compiler used a similar "trick" of transforming a strongly typed language (Eiffel) into a weakly typed language (C). From the outside, it looks like GWT is doing something similar with Javascript playing the part of C.

Another parallel between GWT and the Eiffel compiler was the amount of optimization it could do. After expressing his sample in a rich language, Java, the compiler optimized almost ALL that richness out of the resulting Javascript code... making it much leaner.

(2008-01-16 21:18:17.0) Permalink

Monday January 14, 2008

NetBeans 6.1 and Project Sailfin

While work is being done on the modules that let users create and test SIP Servlet applications that can be deployed to a Glassfish domain that has been extended to support SIP, one of my teammates has been working on making these applications "visible". We have also been working on making the choice of which type of server to register in the IDE more obvious.

We committed many of the necessary changes over the weekend. If you get a recent nightly build of NetBeans 6.1, you should see the following changes:

1. Explicit reference to Sailfin in the 'Add Server Instance' dialog.
   
2. SIP Servlet applications are now visible in the Services explorer.
   

I was also able to install the latest available builds of the SIP Application Development module and the SIP Protocol Test Agent module into the NetBeans 6.1 build.

There is a fair number of code changes that have been going into NetBeans 6.1 to hit Milestone 1. These changes should finish baking this week. If you want avoid being on the absolute bleeding edge... you may want to wait for the NetBeans 6.1 Milestone 1 release. If you have serious thrill issues: Download, Fire up and Save Often.

(2008-01-14 22:40:58.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Friday January 11, 2008

Cannot edit entries on the GlassFish wiki?

You may run into this message when you try to edit a page on the GlassFish project wiki site:

Forbidden

Sorry, but you are not allowed to do that.

Usually we block access to something because you do not have the correct privileges (e.g., read, edit,
comment) for the page you are looking for. In this particular case, it is likely that you are not
listed in the page’s access control list or that your privileges aren’t high enough (you want to 
edit, but ACL only allows ‘read’).

It is also possible that JSPWiki cannot find its security policy, or that the policy is not 
configured correctly. Either of these cases would cause JSPWiki to block access, too.

Better luck next time.

You may ask, "Why can't I add or edit a page on the Glassfish wiki site after I have logged in?"

Due to spamming and wiki vandals, the folks in the GlassFish project have added an extra step to the authoring process.

You may ask, "How do I get permission to add and edit pages on the GlassFish wiki site?"

It is explained in a FAQ entry.

I hope this entry will provide you with "Better luck next time."

(2008-01-11 09:39:14.0) Permalink

Monday January 07, 2008

SIP Application Development Module version 0.4 for NetBeans 6.0

Now that the holiday break is over, it is time to release a new feature in the SIP Application development module: the SIP Listener wizard.

You can find the wizard in the list of items that you can add to a Converged Servlet Application project, via the project's right click menu.

This is what the wizard looks like.

Here is a sample of the code that is generated, if you set the package to "a" and select the SipApplicationSession Listener check box and the SipServletListener check box.

package a;

/**
 *
 * @author vkraemer
 */
@javax.servlet.sip.annotation.SipListener
public class NewSipListener  implements javax.servlet.sip.SipApplicationSessionListener,
	javax.servlet.sip.SipServletListener 
{

    public void sessionCreated(javax.servlet.sip.SipApplicationSessionEvent sase) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

    public void sessionDestroyed(javax.servlet.sip.SipApplicationSessionEvent sase) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

    public void sessionExpired(javax.servlet.sip.SipApplicationSessionEvent sase) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

    public void servletInitialized(javax.servlet.sip.SipServletContextEvent ssce) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

}

The new build is available in the project's "document list" as version 0.4.

It has been tested a bit with NetBeans 6.0 and Sailfin build 15.

(2008-01-07 18:48:29.0) Permalink

Wednesday January 02, 2008

Another Witty Ironic Observation

I was looking through the UC Extension, Santa Cruz catalog and discovered a course with a title that just drips witty irony.

UCSC has a a counter-culture reputation, so I have to wonder if they were just trying to milk that... or whether this was just one of those Great Moments in Copy Editing.

(2008-01-02 21:10:52.0) Permalink