The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee

I think this is very bad news for Java supporters and users. Making the JCP process open, and making possible for multiple open-source implementations of the JVM/ JDK was the best guarantee of future for Java users and developers. 

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_asf_resigns_from_the

I regret this very much and hope that this will not impact hardly the future of excellent stuff provided by the Apache Software foundation - tomcat, Java DB, Velocity, Pivot, Log4J etc etc

For ope-source, community driven development, this type of news give them reason to stay away from the Java world...

Great compilation of Java Swing stuff

If you are searching nice widgets, docking frameworks have a look at this page:

http://www.tutego.de/java/additional-java-swing-components.htm

OpenXava

OpenXava (www.openxava.org) is a model driven application framework.The idea is to build your application using JPA and enrich entities by extra-tags so openXava can generates screens.

The core idea is excellent because it throws away the MCV things and centers development around core business objects.

My first exposure is through their book on lulu - see http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=openxava.

This book is clearly worth the requested 9$. My only regret, internationalization is not covered - but OpenXava does support at least label translation.

OpenXava itself looks promising however it relies on Java portal (e.g: Liferay) to provide an interface shell and security. Obviously the portal aspect can be seen  as a benefit, but it means also that you need a strong hardware platform to go ahead.

Security management through the portal is may be also a bit short, just granting access to screens will probably not enough for serious enterprise application.

The look and feel is also very rough although they support Ajax making a really appealing product from it will be a challenge.

Summary compare to OpenObject:

+ JAVA
+ JPA / HIbernate
+ J2EE application without a hammer in your head
+ High potential in productivity
+ What you cannot do with it, you can do it using JSP...
= I18n features basic but present
= Portal (nice but imho heavy tech and a bit old-fashioned because portals were designed before Ajax)
- Rustic look & feel
- Elementary security through portal
- Internationalization does not take care of domain / fields translation (e.g: multiple names for a product)
- No reporting (need to use something else, no hint about integration put feasible)
- No deployment concepts as in OO

So if you forced to use Java, if you like using a strong ORM... it is worth looking at. But don't forget that the net result will be the deployment of the full Java stack which for small business remains a pain.

A small but nice article about some MDA Java Framework

 http://www.tikalk.com/java/domain-driven-java-frameworks-review

Well may be when I get tired of Open ERP...

Dream is not reality

Well I tried to build a web service returning a JFrame... isn't that the cool thing about Java reflexion / serialization.....


SEVERE: Cannot initialize endpoint  : error is :
javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContext


Blah blah

Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 21 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptions
java.awt.LayoutManager is an interface, and JAXB can't handle interfaces.

Well the least I can say, making Swing and Server based Java is not always simple...

JPA, JAXB ... not finished yet

I could indeed load one entity... but

Here is my result

   

     
Clearly the actor is not passed in the response and so my graph of object is not passed...


Here is the thing I overlooked... https://jaxb.dev.java.net/guide/Mapping_cyclic_references_to_XML.html

"There are a few things to consider when you do this. First, the object to be referenced must have an ID that is unique within the whole document. You'd also need to ensure that the referenced objects are contained somewhere else (like in the Root class in this case), or else Bar objects will never be marshalled. This technique can be used to remove the cyclic references, but it's only possible when your object model has an easy cut point."


So...

Java RIA... getting impressed by... Apache Pivot

More than a year ago, I wrote a few articles on Apache Pivot. Well, my enthusiasm was very limited.


We are now in the process of re-writting a Delphi based application. Ideally using Java...

We could use simply Swing. But note, that the Swing application framework went back to life before to re-die again...

We checked OpenSwing. It is a good library, which adds a lot of good things on top of Swing. Useful but the look & feel... and a lot of code for just a little app.

To ease things, I looked at Netbeans as a platform. Overkill in many cases and it solved many problem we don't have and ignore those we have... Including we need a short learning curve and  among the big issue dynamic localization - language switching http://netbeans.dzone.com/multilingual-netbeans-platform-applications.


Also I spent a bit of time reading about JavaFX. Nice little language, but I cannot find anything that looks like an enterprise feature. Again the old Sun syndrom, we found a nice idea, lets market it against inacessible competition and consider our installed based as supreme idiots... bringing them features they never asked.


So I checked again Pivot - now version 1.5 and I AM IMPRESSED.

Documentation is very much improved, so that makes the purpose very much understandable.  Plus you have a bunch of very good examples.

The graphical glitches are gone ! Performance looks pretty good.

Most of the things are there and well designed, Web services, binding, event handling, scripting in the UI definition (any JVM language...).

And yes, a good looking mechanism for static localization.

The design is clean and nice (not very fancy but it is good loooking). It is designed to be skinnable, so we can expect much more funny things sooner or later.

You can build GUI using a straightforward XML based language (the layout can then get transferred to the client and transformed into GUI -> yes in fact this what Open ERP Python APP does...) .

So it is a cool toolkit and it appears much more oriented towards enterprise apps than FX. So my new acronym Rich Enterprise Internet Application that fits for Pivot but no go for FX.

The unfortunate thing... it is not compatible with Swing (I can live with that) but I need a minimal kind of word processor for my app (that I have with Swing and EditorKit stuff). Too bad, nothing is perfect... But keep going Apache Pivot you are heading to the right direction. At least I am getting convinced!

Just a link so you can check (you need Java plugin to get the examples running): http://pivot.apache.org

Installing Java Plugin for Ubuntu on 64 bits install

By default Ubuntu will install the Open-JDK in principles it is fine but practically it seems not that well working. What about the Java plugin ... hm not so easy.

The Java plugins for 64 bits architectrue is not in the default repository...

1) So enable the alternate repositories... see the link to info on what to change in Synaptic

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu#Adding%20Canonical%20Partner%20Repositories

2) Then follow the isntruction for java in the following link

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMD64/FirefoxAndPlugins

3) Close all Firefox Windows
 

Publier le message

4) good trick for the road... enter in the url text box: about:plugins

Java should now be listed...

Why that? Hm, I swapped the damned fan noisy Vaio CS/31 against an HP Elitebook 8540w. Dual boot + shared /gome using vmware under Windows 7 - I love it... And I am back to evaluation of Java GUI alternatives.

Open ERP xmlrpc protocol is not respected

I am working on a small lib to ease Java applications integration with Open ERP.

It works but... in case of error there is no clean error handling and the Apache xmlrpc lib fires an exception. The problem being it cannot cast a String into an int.

Well it appears that Open ERP does not follow the xmlrpc protocol...



https://bugs.launchpad.net/openerp/+bug/257581

The 'worst' is there

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/31048347/xmlrpc.patch

which gives the following

=== modified file 'bin/netsvc.py'
--- bin/netsvc.py 2009-08-28 16:50:27 +0000
+++ bin/netsvc.py 2009-08-31 10:11:37 +0000
@@ -262,7 +262,10 @@
             service_name = self.path.split("/")[-1]
             return self.dispatch(service_name, method, params)
         except OpenERPDispatcherException, e:
-            raise xmlrpclib.Fault(tools.exception_to_unicode(e.exception), e.traceback)
+            if 'xmlrpclib' in self.headers.getheader('User-Agent'):
+                raise xmlrpclib.Fault(tools.exception_to_unicode(e.exception), e.traceback)
+            else:
+                raise xmlrpclib.Fault(1,tools.exception_to_unicode(e.exception))
 
 class SSLSocket(object):
     def __init__(self, socket):

So somebody provided a clean fix and nobody cares !

Rich web frameworks for GlassFish v3 (ZK, Vaadin, ...)

 Just a link to an aquarium post...


http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/rich_web_frameworks_for_glassfish

May be my next app application framework...

Back from the Java Roadshow 2010

Here is a quick, incomplete summary of what I saw, heard with a touch of personnal  feeling...

Remark number 0: there was a limited audience that day (compared to previous venues). Lack of 'announcements' or economic crisis ? Probably a bit of both...

Sales of SUN clothes and gadgets have soared as they will not be available anymore.No hope to get a mug with the SUN logo... So the merge with Oracle was at least good at that...

The acquisition by Oracle is being finalized now.

JDK 7
There has been a short review of JDK 7. Not Java 7 yet because that would require to go through the JCP - it seems there are currently some conflicts/problems on the process itself. Ultimately this will become Java 7 when these 'political' issues are solved.

Here are a few things:

- more annotations (now also on base type).
- modularity - JSR-294. This will help specifying dependencies to module. With range of version etc. Compile will typically check against the lowest version of each version and runtime linking will take the highest (most recent one).
- various language extensions (switches on String - got great welcome).
- simpler resources cleanup (object that inplement a closable interface will get closed when exception occur) thus simplifying resource protection code.
- improvement for dynamic language support
- compressed 64 bits pointers.

JavaFx
- Ok, nice idea. Variable binding looks great. Demos was ok but not that simple to write.
- Where can it be used ? Well on any phone Java enabled etc - sorry I missed the reference (Java ME 2?). So forget IPhone (?) and Android (more or less sure) - but should be ok on Windows Mobile (ah great).

JEE 6
- Improvement, and new concept of 'profile'. So you can be compliant by implementing a subset of it.
- Single WAR file.
- New servlet API - and yes possiblity to upload file in a standard way !
- New JPA.
- EJB 3.1 (Light = can be used outside a container).
- Dependancy injection (very, very good point - lets get away for the JNDI horrible stuff).

Glassfish V3 

GlassFish continues to be the reference implementation of JEE6 and looks like a geat product that will continue to be the reference implemenation and is announced as 'production ready'. It seems fast and easy to embedd. Session preservation (accross restart of the container) is great (for end-users) and truly good for developpers (simplify testing your changes)

Glassfish incorporate Apache Felix and so is OSGi compliant !


Java tip & tricks

Well I learn that there are 480  (-XX) options on the Sun JVM. Don't ask me them all. We had a good presentation on the garbage collector. A nice peace of software that tries to adapt memory allocation to various circumstances... With some option again for tuning - for example if you have many threads and performance problem related to contention...

Note that there is a new Garbage Collector (G1) since JRE 6u14 (so a motivation to upgrade to the latest JVM).

For info http://java.sun.com/performance/reference/.

Profiling with visual VM http://visualvm.dev.java.net/

Note that the Garbage Collection was there when the language started (in 1996). So making it a hot topic for the yearly roadshow...


Java for Business
Basically support proposal for the JVM with 3 level of services. Please call for prices...

Embedded Java
Basically Java SE but tailored by modules to get a smaller footprint. Good if you are in the appliance business.

Real Time Java
On realtime Linux or realtime Solaris, Java real time extensions enables to control the throughput and / or predictability of your application (a new range of business for sure).

The last tree points means IMHO : lets try to find a way to get finally a bit of money from it.

But it is not so simple. See for example the way Google used the language for Android without using the runtime to get away the licensing fee...

One more for the road. I will post the link to the presentation slides when they are available.

My final, last point... Walking dinners with hot lunches are not compatible...

European Java Roadshow this Friday

Friday I will be attending the European Java roadshow in Brussels:


http://de.sun.com/sunnews/events/2010/jan/java_roadshow/brussels.jsp.

The morning agenda is more marketing stuff. The afternoon will be more technical with Java EE 7, FX etc

The lost decade for IT? Best wishes for 2010 !

As we celebrate new year and also the start of a new decade, a lot of reviews article flourished on the net. There, you may rank your favorite gadget, technology or fashion device. Other articles review historical events or political trends, many follows the Top xx scheme.
 

So far, the best I saw is is on Der Spiegel online The Lost Decade - What the World Can Learn from 10 Years of Excesses). It is worth reading and basically shows 2000-2009 as a lost decade marked by 9/11, wars (against terror), the regression of civil rights, the lost of brilliance of democracy, the cut between real street and Wall street… this is a worth reading article. So what about me and IT ?

Personal changes

For me this decade has been astonishingly short. Obviously these dramatic changes in the global geo-politic context have taken some mental energy and promoted a kind of day to day survival attitude. The arrival of two kids also changed a lot my priorities and way of living. Much less travel and more home based work have been my new standards. The Internet with VPN connections made this possible.

Java

Professionally this decade has been Java based. I enjoyed the language and I enjoyed even much more not being dependent of a single vendor like I was with Delphi. However I continue to think it would have been possible to make much more, much better with a bit of effort and much less arrogance from the Java camp and its historical steward – aka SUN. Announcing less and delivering more that would have been great!

Internationalization – productivity

This decade has profoundly changed the economic landscape with globalization. Nearly all sectors have seen their organizations changed as China, India and a few other countries entered on the global market. There is no reason why one can earn his life here and not there. I remark otherwise that the price reduction related to off-shoring is sustained by lack of productivity improvement. Nor the methodology camp (e.g: UML) nor the agile camp provided a serious relief. Moving to dynamic language on the argument to save time on compile is far from what I call productivity improvement. There is still a lot to go to improve software developer productivity.

Google but not the semantic web

On the side of the best invention that changed my day to day life. I cannot forget Google. Yes, I Google a lot. Error codes, product numbers, technologies, bugs  etc There is no day for me without Googling anymore. Truly a good thing, I think. ..

On the other side, this Googling attitude reflects some failures in information organization. Web sites are very often focusing on the flashy side of the communication more than on real information organization, functionality and accessibility.

A bit more than 10 years ago, first web sites were usually built by IT departments focusing more on the web server stuff than on the message to convey on the web. Shortly after, this decade started with the raise of glossy marketing based web sites. That’s a pain and it seems to continue hopelessly. Only those sites that merged information culture, sharp technical design and sense of usability emerged: Google, Wikipedia, Amazon…

We can see in the Google success a global failure to extend the semantic web which was an attempt to build interoperability to classify information and link things intelligently…

Abandon of interoperability and of our citizen rights

The abandon of interoperability is a general and dramatic turn of the end of this decade in IT. When I started looking at the Internet protocols – that is back to 1985. Interoperability was the top subject among networkers. Asking everybody to connect to the same system / provider to exchange information (at that time messages) was considered an obscene non-sense. These were the years one of the most original IT fair / get together was called ‘Interop’.

Dreaming an ideal interoperable world made an entire industry and changed the world

From this seek of openness and interoperability, we have seen emerging the Internet, the web and all the things that go with them.

Unfortunately business centralization powered by an aggressive capitalist seek of immediate profitability has turned the focus on central, closed, non interoperable systems.  I am not writhing anything against capitalism or profit but against a closed, non-democratic, unfair short term minded approach.

Typically that’s the so called ‘social networking / twittering ‘ things. Technologically that’s nothing, functionally not that much either but the surrender is enormous as we give up our private information, liberty, freedom of speech and intellectual property to (commercial) entities.

Security acts excessively affected citizen rights but are unable to grant a risk free world

This trend is accentuated by national security laws issued as a consequence of terror acts. All democratic countries have seen their civil right decreased. In a few cases for the good (may be) but in most cases for the bad. The recent terrorist attempt shows clearly that the loss of privacy in communication has done little to improve security yet the attacks against the independent press and the non-governmental associations continue to surge. The danger is serious to lose much more than we can win.

The 'one way of thinking' dominated and pushed the press of the largest and most established democratic country to support the war in Irak while the so called evidences of the Weapon of Mass Destruction were nothing more than (poorly) animated Powerpoints.

Media decoding in the human sense need to be explained to our children but more unfortunately to most citizens and I am afraid even to a lot of professionals.

Intellectual property & centralizing trend

February first, Belgium will extend its taxes on various media storage devices in order to reward musical artists. In spite of what some says (for example Chris Anderson with its book Free), the issue of intellectual property rewarding is far from being solved. Wikipedia authors are not paid by Wikipedia, but how do they live? Somebody must pay them for what they do. Why not for their expertise? The so called free model seems to be supportable only by huge market and giant operators.  In any case the Belgian taxes looks like a tax on electricity to support gaz lamp lighters…

 

Until now, intellectual property protection for software had little success to establish copy protection or fight reverse engineering. The centralization / software as a service / cloud computing stuff is an attempt to keep the software source inaccessible to users.

While understandable, this is not acceptable if we cannot masterize the life of our own data. Interoperability and privacy are simply implemented with personal devices (this was the great expectation from personal computing at the end of the seventies) but are technological challenges for centralized systems.

We should not surrender or give up on that. This is a call against tyranny, for democracy and civil rights.

Reasons to hope at least to act

A few weeks ago, the Copenhagen submit closed without concrete decisions. I remarked in my surrounding some climate-change skeptics . Everybody has the right to his own opinion. But their arguments are globally not scientific but sophist. Arguments against smoking restriction and creationist are very similar. Again that’s frightening….

Ecologists are usually standing on the left side of the political scene and took global posture against the capitalist world because of devastating industries. Again that’s understandable, although observance of nature destruction by socialist and communist countries should merit serious investigation from most ecologists.

My conviction is that a new economy has to be rebuilt not by re-engineering finance but by enforcing global, multi-factors ethic decisions processes in all our economic and social behaviors. Intense analytic decisions and global transparency will be needed, there IT may help.

Independently of any arguments for or against climate changes. I am convinced that doing anything cleanly is better. Some pretend that this new ecological target will prevent business and will cut jobs. I don’t agree, new industries have to be built; they will bring new jobs and opportunities. Being able to bring wealth to all human instead of a minority will be sign of success.

Helping modestly to build the necessary network of knowledge will be, I hope, on the roadmap of my next decade.

Best wishes for 2010!

Christophe Hanon

Dzone article about Java missing features

I could not resit to reply to this article on Dzone about Java missing features:

http://java.dzone.com/news/java%E2%80%99s-missing-features#comment-21249

Well, this is more student work than anything else. So for me Java, the language is fine.New things are nice, yes. Don't take me wrong. But I don't think productivity will dramatically change thanks to closure or anything else in the list.

Java the platform is more a problem.

What am I missing from Java :

• Simpler persistence (I know each version makes it simpler but it is still too complicated).May be a pure standard object oriented database with an integrated reporting...
  
• Better, much better Swing, an easy Desktop application framework (I know it is coming, just cannot wait).
• MS (or OO) Office like components (a word processor; a spread sheet,...) easy to embbed and to enhance. All in Java please.
• In the same way, a Java based web browser component. Or merge Mozilla in JVM.
• XUL like language for interface building.
  
• Plenty of bug fixes and performance improvement.
• Better integration with Desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• A standard ZK like web development framework.
• ...

Well plenty of things to make it a good client application builder. And simpler enough to be effective on small size project.
Also political and commercial aspects matter:

• Truly OpenSource I mean the real JDK not a //  product.
• Bundlled and distributed in all Linux distro.
• Popular as PHP among hosters with prices comparable to PHP.
• Nice really Open Source apps -for example CMS - not these open-source-for-the-basic-stuff-and-need-to-pay40K$ -for-getting-still-less-than-joomla.
• transparent market place not the -if-you-want-to-know-the-price-write-us.

So these are my dreams. And be sure that if I find something open and multi-vendors like this, I will consider to move on.

Two busy weeks - back from Milan - Number portability - the Belgium case

Last Monday, I did a one day trip to Milan to give a class about our middleware for number portability. A big piece of Java work that would have very much benefited of Spring.

In fact I solved the beans configuration exactly the reversed way Spring does. Basically I stored all the configuration stuff in a single object for each sub process and every component take what's relevant for its job.

I know this make all this code dependent on this big fat object. I think some people call that a white board design. I agree this lack elegance and hinder re-usability. On the other side it simplified very much configuration and because objects share the config info it is naturally consistent. The same object also implemented a factory pattern, creating and initializing most of the objects (a better part of my design).

Most of us keep looking forward, but I think checking what happened backwards brings also some values.


There is a lot to say on this project not only on the Java side but also project wise.

Number portability (moving from one operator to another but keeping your number) has been implemented in most European countries (because of European market regulation). Yet each country had the freedom to implement it its own way. This has been for me an opportunity to work many times ( for Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary Finland, Latvia, Nederlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary ) on similar but different projects.

Typically, number portability is solved by a central database that lists those numbers that have been ported to another operator. An administrative process - kind of work flow -  has to be implemented, usually with time constraints. Once porting is agreed between the donor and the receiving operators, a technical phase propagates the porting information to all operators. The net result being that all operators own a copy of the central database that feeds the operators switches (usually trough what is called an Intelligent Network platform).

Belgium was the first process I developed. The central database project was outsourced to a contractor -  a very  big, well known international software house.

The entire process was driven by a committee piloting the contractor. That generated what committees like to get: papers (probably also a lot of meetings and a high volume of coffee breaks).

The full documentation filled an entire CD (for comparison I received the Spain technical documentation - a single file format description - on one page).

Technically this was my first exposure to Web services (more or less 6-7 years ago). That part was great. However the web services was described as an XML schema - no WSDL. So I had to use an XML parser,code and decode the messages.

The rest of the project was 'nuts' and was a school case on what not to do.

The committee-contractor tandem generated a lengthy and mostly absurd acceptance process, so we had to simulate business transactions of all kinds in an absurd repetitive fashion. Testing and preparing acceptance reports took finally 3-4 times more resources than developing the Web services.

More funny was the total absence of service oriented attitude of the contractor. The idea of giving an easy test platform, a reference implementation, or any basic tools (e.g: raw messages) for developers was out of their mind. Just for one reason. Not only they got the contract for the central database, they also expected to take the business of all the connecting operators. So the motivation to help anybody was naturally extremely low.


They also provided a web based application. They used Java and the most modern computers stuff at that time - multi-processors Sun servers, clusters, Oracle, Nokia Checkpoint appliances, load-balancers etc This was very professional. Unfortunately the application quickly turned out to be a pig. Users started to complain from availability, performance , error messages, failling transactions etc.

In my opinion, this was due to the inexperience of the programming staff and finally a very poor design.

A constant problem of big consulting companies is that they send their senior people to win a deal and send junior staff to implement it. As the amount of problems became important, their support staff could not follow anymore. They entered into crisis management by the book - thus delivering an help-desk procedure that requested a complete network description just for asking a password... Of course, this exasperated their users more than it solved problems.

I never attended these comittee meetings. The specs were done when  I started the project for my customer.Why have they decided to build their on messaging infrastructure on top of relational database using Soap. I don't know. However I saw later similar designs and it seems they copied a system developed in the UK.


In a search to create additional work, they decided that a VPN was not enough. SSL certificates were used between all parties. Good. Obviously they created their own certificate request process with conventions about what to put in each field of the certificate - this was described in a 20+ pages document (all other countries I saw after, simply ask to exchange public certificates between the operator and the central database - final point). In fact their policy and certificate distribution could have been meaningful if the transaction had to be secured end to end - operator to operator - which they did not.

In the line with their policy to create work, the certificates were issued for a single year, this created a permanent state of maintenance multiplied by two (test and production had to be renewed). The funniest thing was when I setup our messages reception point. The only way I could setup the server to get messages was turning off client certificate authentication! Half of their stuff did not work because they were not providing a complete certificate chain. When I discussed that with the contractor security 'expert', I could measure a long silence that finished by  'what's important is that it works now'. Indeed but  as far security is concerned...

A few years later, the outsourcing contract expired. The operators committee took the decision to swap the contractor and the entire application! So the new contractor re-implemented the entire system ! Their implementation had to be identical for the Soap transaction and they decided to keep  the SSL security system, unchanged...

No securemote on 7 64 bits

I checked and Checkpoint Securemote is not available for 64 bits architectures (and will not be). I have not tried anything more as all my tests with vista 64 bits were negative (more or less one year ago).

Checkpoint has released a new end-point client called 'Endpoint Connect R71'. This one installed pretty well and seems working except that the customer I am connecting to does not have the latest firewall to support this new client.

Practically this one is a big typical gotcha for anybody planning a migration!

Browsing about this, I read a few things about Virtual PC and XP mode (XP mode seems to be a Virtual Machine capable of installing old apps and publish them to the Windows 7 host - kind of screen less VM). This is my next target for the Vaio. If  I can get securemote working from there, I am done.This will be an opportunity to look at Microsoft virtualization solution.

On a higher point of view, all this make me a bit laughing at our industry. A properly designed architecture should have isolated developers from this 32-64 bits issue. I understand that this affects some critical spots in an OS but why a printer driver or a network application (even if it is a driver or service) needs to be aware of that silly detail (they don't address more than 3GB as far as I know) that's a key problem. The second major issue is that most people including experienced professionals find this absolutely normal. It is NOT. OS, VM, interpreters etc should shield us from these craps: we should be in the street protesting about these nuts designs!

Think again,was all that Java and .Net fuss not about this?

You think that's not possible? When Apple migrated from the Motorola 68000 processor to the Power PC most parts of the OS was running in an emulator. So why not doing today most of this coding so it would run in a Java VM (or .Net for Microsoft)?

Frankly there is an habit here for not looking at all these undelivered promises! Why? In my opinion because the industry analyst have an over sized ego and exhibit the common weakness that sustains major failures: the inability to recognize their own mistakes.

By the way I did one on this blog. I read that 7 has a disk burner application. I will try this later.

Back to Joomla - Cake -PHP

So after a long Open ERP period I am back to the Joomla world.

Almost a year ago I setup for one customer an application built around JQuery and Cake PHP. A bit later the customer asked for a web site which has been built with Joomla. It would be perfect if the the web site and the application could share the same look and feel. I feel a bit faulty : at that time using Cake was for the simplest way (for me) to structure a small PHP app... but I did not plan anything concerning the web site - at that time his web site was made (by somebody else) with Wordpress - excellent for making a blog but terrible for making a web site...

My first steps today are basically to get back a development environment, the web site, (joomla,db...) the app etc. As usual I use Netbeans, here 6.7 - the PHP support is now stable and official.

Following Netbeans recommendation, I picked XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org) to install PHP and MySQL - I am working on my HP XP portable (Paddle).

After having transferred the web site I got an error message in a few modules positions. I then restarted a fresh Joomla install - same result.

Warning: Parameter 1 to modMainMenuHelper::buildXML() expected to be a reference, value given in C:\xampp\htdocs\joomla\libraries\joomla\cache\handler\callback.php on line 99

Basically Joomla 1.15.xx is not compatible with PHP 5.30 (which comes with the currently latest XAMPP 1.7.2). So you need to get an older PHP version, thus an older XAMPP. Older release are not on the same site, so you need to go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/ to find what you need. I decided to go for 1.6.8 to be sure to get rid of PHP 5.30. Unfortunately I then hitted another issue with phpMyAdmin the MySQL tool I cannot live without...

Too bad. I did not investigate that one, I de-installed XAMPP again. So I moved to 1.7.1 which installed PHP 5.2.9. Proceeding with dichotomy for finding release that's the job I am in...

It is now working (after a small battle for setting up a user and a password).


The rumor says that this will be fixed with Joomla 1.5.15 to be released soon (october).

One more time, I regret the Java platform. Some so called Agile programmers believe that their productivity decrease because of compile cycles, I am laughing at that. These compile times represent little amounts of time for most programming jobs. For me, the Netbeans background compiler removed this concern entirely.

The key point for the pro-compiler camp is this for me : the semantic analysis is a job for developers not for users. When a code is compiled with Java 1.4 it runs on 1.6 just because the VM are backward compatible at the VM level and in spite the language continues to evolve. Language changes do not impact the compiled and so you can keep your olfd stuff working as designed on a recent platform.

At this stage the two interpreted language that I used exhibited the same poor facilities to handle changes in the language itself  : PHP & PYTHON.

So I move back to my stuff and still continue dreaming of the perfect environment for my job...

VMWARE acquired SpringSource

Strange but confirmed. VMWARE acquires SpringSource... I am on my hass !

The only understandable synergy at this stage is the Hyperic applications monitoring (that SpringSource acquired recently). VMWARE is eager to be a key player in vitual infrastructure - so called cloud. That makes sense. But what will do VMWARE with all this Java stuff?

I am a bit concerned about the future of the Spring container (and Groovy and Grails).

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/springsource.html

JavaFx 1.2 is out

I still don't believe in the JavaFx stuff - too bad, too late and not relying on the Java strong use in enterprise. Anyway the vesion 1.2 is out. Clearly they don't care that much of compatibility and you will recompile your code:

"The JavaFX 1.2 SDK release is not binary compatible with the JavaFX 1.1 SDK. This means that your application and all libraries that it depends on must be recompiled with the JavaFX 1.2 SDK."

Things like that, happens. But this confirm my opinion that SUN push out this product (as they did for Java) without finishing it.

My humble advise: wait for JavaFx 3.0 - if it exists.

Otherwise it seems to move to the right direction -- but at senator speed -- they now support text controls (hard to call it an innovation) and seems to support Linux (not sure what it means in this context).

There are obviously many other changes. Mostly in the graphical area, so they seems to continue competing with Flash...

What has not changed however is a clarification about why one would really desire using it.

http://java.sun.com/javafx/1.2

Spring for Python - Yes they can !

I could not believe my eyes... SpringSource did it again... translating parts of its framework to Python -- including the IOC ! Ok I am convinced, I will give a serious look at Python.

By the way, my OpenERP on my Ubuntu is fine. I will go through Python tutorial (I bought already two book in french, but I found them not that good) and build a first development environnment.