Office 2007

Office 2007 is a major interface change. Changing an interface that people are used to is always an issue. I admit, I hate it, its only purpose seems to fill more space on screens that are getting bigger...

Today I wanted to change the outline numbering of my paragraps, so paragraph numbering would look 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 - 2, 2.1 etc.

Where is that? First difficulty is finding the Modify Style dialog. The good old menus are gone...

Finally a right click on the Style Toolbox/TextBox on the ribbon (I did not first, this was calle the style gallery...) starts the dialog. Having spent one hour on this dialog (productivity gain announced by MS seems a joke), I could not changed the outline numbering.

Finally I Googled, and found http://kitss.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/word-and-numbering-2-outline-numbering/
.

Well, select your style on the Toolbox then click on the Drop-dow (multi-level level) in the group Paragraph and yes... there you can change this outline numbering!

Do you know other way of doing it? Let me know.

Netbeans 6.x as a PHP IDE

As I am currently working with a PHP written CMS - Joomla - I tried the new beta plugin for Netbeans. With this extension you can create PHP projects and get code completion. Debugging in the IDE is possible provided you install the xdebug extension on the server.

As usual the Linux distribution is done through source code, it tooks me around 20 minutes to get the build process up and running. Debugging worked fine for simple application but for Joomla the debugger started but the resulting page was always blank.

I finally give up and used Wamp server on windows, there is worked perfectly. I still don't know why I can't get it up and running on my Linux machine. Among the difference : wamp comes with php 5 per default.

Links
The extension for PHP editing in Netbeans : php.netbeans.org.
Debugger for PHP : www.xdebug.org.
Apache + PHP + MySQL : www.wampserver.com.

Mail server crash

This week-end, our mail server crashed. I must admit this is only a half surprise, as strange noises were heard from this server since a few weeks. Unfortunately the largest (and newest – but still old) hard disk crashed, bringing our Exchange databases to the world of lost data.

In fact I have plans to replace this Microsoft Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.0 by something else since a few months. Since two years I am trying to consolidate our servers on a bigger Fujitsu-Siemens Tx300 S2 with Novell SLES 10.x and VMWARE server. So my idea was to find a free (or cheap) alternative to MS Exchange working on Linux.

There are many such applications on the market, all claiming to be the perfect replacement for the market leader (or at least the reference).

Open-Xchange

A month ago, I evaluated Open-Xchange for that purpose.
My first remark is about Open Source and business model. How can a company make money with free product ? There is a trend to provide a community version (with source code) and no support and to sell or rent an enterprise class product. What is usually unclear is which version of the Open-Souce code correspond to a stable product (if any).
In this case, you have the choice of a community product, an Express product and an enterprise product. Licensing of the open source, community version could be subject of an article as the Web GUI has not the same license as the rest of the code (smell bad). There is also a huge difference of price between Express edition (starting 5 users) and Enterprise (25 users). Also the pricing is under a yearly subscription basis (MS is priced for life) so a comparison need to be done on several years and take account how often you will upgrade (if you know..).

Finally I give up with Open-Xchange :

• first, I found the handling of international locale very poor (I could not find an easy way to display date in European format yet having the interface in English).
• second, the support for Outlook is very basic with calendar sharing but e-mail is available as an IMAP/POP mail server instead of a unified/synchronized folder within Outlook (as Microsoft Exchange does).

Scalix

A customer pointed me to Scalix a few weeks ago. This is again an Open-Source Linux based challenger for Microsoft Exchange. There is also here some questioning about the Open-source licensing (you can find articles on the web - the Scalix licence could be not OSI approved - I think this requires a serious study), but at least you have a free community edition with all the functionalities – including Outlook integration (but for 10 users – enough for me).

I must admit the condition of test are not ideal, I created a VMWARE virtual machine with around 512 MB of RAM and OpenSuse 10.2 (I known 10.3 is out but 10.2 is in the Scalix supported list). It worked ! I have been first very impressed by the Web interface, it is very similar to a desktop application, you can even use drag and drop ! The installation of the Outlook connector went also fine, the functionality is comparable to the original MS Exchange. So I used this Outlook connection to load my personal contacts (around 400 records). Starting there, there has been a permanent disk activity and the web interface which was good but slow became very very very slow.

Again I admit the virtual hardware I provided is minimal. After a while, popup errors started on the GUI, at that stage the thing went unusable. I tried to extend the VM memory to 700 MB (more would result in swapping), I still noticed permanent disk activity on the server – related to the VM running Scalix.

Also that day I also tried to use my backup of the Exchange database, I could recover the directory, private and public databases but the MTA could not start – I did not backup that part !

After my Scalix investigation, I went to bed.

The day after, I restarted the Scalix VM. The thing was still very slow for the Web GUI but again more or less workable and the Outlook connector behaved very properly. So Scalix was my temporary saver.

Exchange is back

Surprise ! My colleague congratulated me for putting back the Exchange service ! Well, it appears that the MTA restarted by itself – there is a service agent permanently trying to restart other services. How it did, mystery ! Since day 0, I have always been impressed by the reliability of MS Exchange – at least the old version. Here again “bravo”.

Still digging in Scalix

The “by chance” recovered Exchange is not going to stay as our mail server. It is 10 years old and I am sure one day or another the other disks will fail. So I tried putting the Scalix software directly on SLES 10 instead of being hosted in a VM. Unfortunately my TX300 is a 64 bits machine, but the Scalix install process asked for some 32 bits libraries. I found an indication on a forum to install the 32 bits version of the library – it seems to be a know Scalix issue-, but I did not tried. Why ? Because with my mail server crashed I did not want to endanger our main remaining machine.

So I decided to buy a new entry level server, for mail purpose. My idea was to check first for Dell, I found the server page, small business etc and there I saw an arrow… “Start configuring” but I could not start anything (nor with Firefox nor with IE). So I give up. My opinion, one more damned Javascript stuff not working... Finaly I ordered a new Fujistsu-Siemens Primery Econel 100 S2. It is there, but not yet installed.

Will I keep Scalix? I don’t know, I am going to give it one more try with the new server. One thing , we remarked incompatibility between the web GUI and some version of IE (including version 7). Of course, I can install Firefox everywhere, but I cannot be sure to find it everywhere when I am outside of the office…

My conclusions for today

• a lot of companies are saying they are Open Source, but they seem to have priced products and they are not always clear about it, it is still worth checking but you must think before going ahead.
• AJAX web based client applications are very trendy but I am still waiting for one that is nice and stable in production use.
• don’t forget to make good, regular, tested backups.

Back to blog - GWT stuff

No this blog isn't a dead!

So, yes! I did a small application using GWT for one of my customer. Basically a small alarm panel for a backend process. Deploying was only a matter of copying files.

Since then the compiler itself went open-source, the most serious concern for the adoption of GWT has been removed.

Yet my tech-support experience dislike the idea of developping in a language for debugging and testing then translating into something else for production. What if the translation isn't correct, how can you debug life with a customer, how will you work with your code integrated in a complex web project?

The best thing in GWT is that your code manipulate the native controls provided by the browser. That's the point, this is exactly what Sun should do instead of Java applets that live in their separate containers, the Java code should be easily able to manipulate the web browser content like Javascript is able to.

So lets hope GWT will make Sun rethink about the Applet technology to make a it a first class web browser citizen.

Java is now Open Source

It is better than never.

My opinion:

• this is a very late initiative,
• yet I think it is the best news concerning technology evolution and innovation in the Java marketplace.

Java is becoming an Open Source initiative!

For more information www.sun.com/2006-1113

TIOBE Programming Community Index

Reading a summary of Linux news from Oreilly. I discovered this site rating programming language popularity: TIOBE Programming Community Index.

Funny page to see with trends etc. The article pinpointed the appearance of Ruby among the mainstream languages.

Introduction to the Google Web Toolkit

Since a couple of weeks I am looking at the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). I think there is a lot to say about this piece of software and I will try to share my experiences and opinions about it.

What it is? Simply said, it is a set of API and utilities that enables you to write Java programs that can be converted by a special compiler into Javascript! So GWT makes your code runnable into the most recent browsers without requiring the user to install a plug-in (assuming Javascript is enabled).

GWT belongs to the family of AJAX technologies (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) that are becoming common for building applications on the web. Using AJAX, the user’s experience is closer to a “normal” software utilization than web pages surfing. Local processing by the Javascript gives more interactive applications and avoids the entire page reloading syndrome.

A first remark, although the term is recent, AJAX is everything but new from a technology perspective.

Why converting Java into Javascript versus writing Javascript code directly?

• you develop in one language (good for me, I have always difficulties mixing languages).
• you can easily cross-debug in one debugger – GWT fits well into Eclipse – in a so called hosted mode.
• you benefits from the Java compiler and syntax controller tools.

So only goods in GWT?

• Only a subset of the Java runtime is available and developers have to learna new set of objects of interface programming – one more: it is not Java Server Face, it is not Swing nor SWT. Well, it is GWT.
• Because it is Javascript and requires the compiler, forget about transferring serializable objects from a server to the client.
• You have great debugging, but what you debug (Java in hosted mode) is not what you deploy to your users (code compiled into Javascript running in various Browsers).

Next I will explain you a bit my first experience with GWT…

Goodbye Delphi

Yesterday, we changed our company web site. The time of our Delphi based services offering is over with the remaining mention “end of life”. May be, we should do a farewell party. Yes, it is time to say goodbye Delphi, BDE, ClientDataset and beloved Data modules…

Simply said, finding Delphi jobs is becoming difficult and built with Delphi is more an issue than an argument…

When we started using it, we loved its clean Pascal syntax, the easy database connection, the data bound components and the overall RAD approach. Productivity was much better than with C++ and the language was largely exceeding what was possible with VB.

So, why leaving such a perk for things that are not obviously better and surely not simpler?

I could discuss during hours, about facts, and stories like absence of compatibility between releases, competition from VB or C#, price, poor support, stretched and wacky documentation, mysterious BDE options, clueless examples, numerous way of doing the same thing in one tool (DB, internet controls etc), features that revealed to be demo versions of third party offering. But I think the main reason is Inprise strategy and focus towards inappropriate marketing techniques. Selling compilers and IDE does not follow marketing recipes applicable to public electronic or ice-cream.

Delphi will remain known for its complicated and arbitrary product ranges segmentation. In my opinion this was more a sign of inability to price properly the entrance into a development ecosphere than anything else - provided somebody heard there what was an ecosphere for software developers. This also led them to add more features that could differentiate between versions– yet without improving the base useful functions… All that for a price difference near 1 to 10!

There must be somewhere a marketing school for corporate products name changing! Borland people, attended the class for sure. Once was Turbo Pascal, then Delphi (why not Turbo Pascal for Windows) then Kylix (Delphi for Linux) and now they are just popping out Turbo Delphi! Sorry I will not wait for Turbo Kylix on Windows. One the same road, the company name moved from Borland to Inprise then a year later they changed back calling the development products Borland from Inprise… Does this make selling IT products? I think no.

All these efforts were spent instead of asking developers what they needed to push Delphi in their offers and trying to consider them as partners. It is a shame to see such good stuff wasted for nuts. This is not a première unfortunately; remember Sprint, Turbo Pascal, Paradox, Report Smith…

One great mistake in my opinion is probably Kylix. I remember a marketing session where they explained us that Delphi was so tight to Windows that it would never run on anything else! A few years later we had a Delphi clone running on Linux - Kylix. So the impossible became possible.

Yessssss, that was nice to see and helped us a bit selling Delphi with the argument that it would be possible to port code easily from Windows to Kylix.

Unfortunately it turns out quickly that we had to rewrite everything with new components! While these components were based on the Qt set that runs virtually on anything with a screen and a keyboard, nobody though about supporting MAC OS or extending the range of supported Unixes. Instead they put the price of the product so high that they could not sell one box (at least I don’t know somebody who spent money on it). Finally they concluded there was no interest for the product. Then they bundled Kylix with another version of Delphi and finally remove it… That’s how a key differentiator between Delphi and VB vanished! And Linux still miss a good RAD product…

Honestly I think that supporting a clean emulation like Wine on Linux would have been enough to help tremendously Delphi developers promoting their tool and skills. Others will continue regretting the almost unaffordable Kylix pricing while on Linux most development tools are free!

So, goodbye old buddy, it is time to move on and one more thing – I will never regret this @![ù£ of TeamSource!

Welcome on fairITale

Welcome on this Blog

Findig a name is always difficult. At least FairITale sounds funny for a native french speaking trying to write in English.

I am poking computer systems since 1979. This was long, long time ago when 16K of ram was considered a fair amount of memory - yet trolls and witches were already gone. Since that time I am following a non conventional IT carreer path, ruling my own business, sniffing technologies and trying to be as useful as possible.

So, let me share a few thoughs with you on this web space... I hope you will enjoy these little chronicles.