Friday, December 09, 2005

The mule in the hive

I'm glad to have had Mule to support HiveMind as a container context.

Now I'm alble to use all my services easly, just have to drop my jar packaged service in the mule classpath and it will be published in the registry for me to use it at my will. That's neat.

Funny is that I've never really understood what the name HiveMind was referred to but after have built some services it seems to me to suite perfectly with what the framework actually does, my services act as bees in a hive each coordinated with every other bees in the community.

I'm really pleased to work with this framework.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Analytics... flooded

Well, that's a very smooth service and as result they have been flooded by an amount of request they've been not able to fullfill.
That's what happen when you have cool idea and are able to put them to work.
Now they stopped the service for new users till they add more power, i was lucky enough to have signed up an account early.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Get rid of HTML stuff...

It's time to do some patchworks with Tapestry. Prototyping is finished the time to get dirty fingers is arrived and i get my own fingernails to scratch it.

I've always think to have my web designers produce HTML and sign a contract with them on the ids components should have to let me manage it, but I've found some practice (best one?) from Howard examples show a way to work which makes this impossible.
Let take the Border components from the template guide which everyone should use, i agree that's a good practice from a programmer perspective but my web designers would really like to see their own templates on every browser variant so they've to have the full template not just the snippet one, this cause me work when they produce new HTML output or they slightly modify one.

I'm starting to think I'll never get rid of this...

Sunday, August 07, 2005

To embed the creepin thoughts

Well i recently have found time to conduct a very interesting survey on embedded system and solutions.

I've focused my time on OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems as they are the most familiar for me and as they both provide the necessary tools to build (easy) custom systems for embedded environment.

I hope to be able to share my experience, even if not completely.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

By by Mac

My new and flashy iMac G5 leave me alone last Saturday morning.

Now it don't even boot, it just stop with a blank black screen, now i've to try some vodo from the Apple Care Service which point me to and (not so) hidden vodo-formula to make the mac come back to life.

I'll tell you.

Voodo is always voodo!

Friday, June 10, 2005

What's up?

Apple get Intel-ized ? Really ?

Did you tell them i got an iMac 15 days ago ?

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Getting iMac-zed

Well after more then 4 years i got my OS X.
Ordered on monday arrived on friday, cool.
Opened the box plugged two (yeah i said two) cables and switched it on, it has found all my tech stuff (even the mobile phone), cool.
Never had the experience of using a Mac so i've to get used to but the feelings are cool.
The iMac is decidedly cool, and the OS even cooler.

I even wonder why it takes me so long to get one.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Busy time

I've been busy working a completely different project, just a no java project.
I've been working on making an embedded solution based on OpenBSD.

This is a completely different kind of project, just not a typical programming job, I've just had to be sure a wide variety of stuff work together, the big part of the work has been done by others.

I've said "just" but that's actually a not easy work and definitely not a java project which was my kind of typical project for the last 4 years,this is also the reason it takes me some time to get rid of some strange behaviour but now the work is almost done and i can come back to what i was doing before, port a java app from BarracudaMVC to Tapestry/HiveMind.

For quite a while i will be working on both projects, since working on a project to produce embedded system has made me more and more curious on this kind of job, i must say I've liked that job.

Friday, April 15, 2005

To AJAX or not to AJAX

Creeping around a bit i think it's definitely time to ajax.
I'm following tapestry development which focus on implementing portlet support as the main new feature, well i can say the ajax examples that are popped up in the near past on the tapestry-user@ are very good and very promising, they show how to handle ajax in a pure tap-alike path.

Having a progress bar indicating how far your jobs is going without forcing you to reload the entire page is one of the most interesting thing i could ever wished to have, i even think this is better then portlet support (at least in my web apps world), and it come almost with no cost.

The result is pretty neat and show, once again, how tapestry is well designed and constructed.
More to come...

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

80% of the problems

I'm almost sure.
80% of problems in custom software development are derived by interface problems. I mean interface by humans.
Don't trust or (even worst) don't understand how custom users wish their program to behave is, by large scale, the first cause of software failure.

So before to look for good developments policy, strategy, tools and programmers just be sure to have the right interface with your customers.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Looking for lighter desktop

I've always used GNOME as my base desktop system but recently i was told to give XFCE a try cause it should be more lightweight and, by consequence, faster.
So i've switched to XFCE 4.2.1, well fonts are smaller and they looks cool but beside that i cannot notice that amount of speed i was told, i'll look further.

Exception day...

Today seems to be like the Exception day for some of the well known java site around.
Forrest gives you welcome with a 500 Internal Server Error while TSS expose you some gateway problem with:

An application exception has occured.
java.rmi.RemoteException: EJB Exception: ; nested exception is: kodo.util.DataStoreException: ERROR: canceling query due to user request {prepstmnt 3446 SELECT t0.threadpk, t0.jdoversion, t0.creationdate, t1.forumpk, t1.jdoversion, t1.rssfeed, t2.categorypk, t2.jdoversion, t2.imagename, t2.summary, t2.title, t1.forumhref, t1.imagename, t1.lastupdated, t1.messagecount, t1.sitepk, t1.summary, t1.threadcount, t1.title, t0.hot, t0.imagename, t0.lastupdated, t0.messagecount, t0.subject, t0.summary, t3.messagepk, t3.jdoversion, t3.body, t3.creationdate, t3.noiselevel, t3.replycount, t4.messagepk, t4.jdoversion, t4.body, t4.creationdate, t4.noiselevel, t4.replycount, t4.parentmessagepk, t4.subject, t4.summary, t4.threadpk, t4.userpk, t3.subject, t3.summary, t5.threadpk, t5.jdoversion, t5.creationdate, t5.forumpk, t5.hot, t5.imagename, t5.lastupdated, t5.messagecount, t5.subject, t5.summary, t5.messagepk, t6.userpk, t6.jdoversion, t6.address1, t6.address2, t6.admin, t6.budgetcode, t6.city, t6.company, t6.country, t6.created, t6.developercode, t6.email, t6.employeecode, t6.fax, t6.firstname, t6.industrycode, t6.interest35, t6.interest21, t6.interest30, t6.interest17, t6.interest2, t6.interest13, t6.interest37, t6.interest34, t6.interest32, t6.interest33, t6.interest22, t6.interest11, t6.interest10, t6.interest9, t6.interest24, t6.interest19, t6.interest12, t6.interest36, t6.interest25, t6.interest16, t6.interest4, t6.interest8, t6.interest26, t6.interest7, t6.interest20, t6.interest31, t6.interest6, t6.interest15, t6.interest5, t6.interest23, t6.interest3, t6.interest28, t6.interest14, t6.interest29, t6.interest18, t6.interest1, t6.interest27, t6.last_login, t6.last_modified, t6.lastname, t6.password, t6.phone, t6.province, t6.scopecode, t6.state, t6.title, t6.titlecode, t6.username, t6.verified, t6.zip FROM public.threads t0 INNER JOIN public.forums t1 ON t0.forumpk = t1.forumpk LEFT OUTER JOIN public.categories t2 ON t1.categorypk = t2.categorypk LEFT OUTER JOIN public.messages t3 ON t0.messagepk = t3.messagepk LEFT OUTER JOIN public.messages t4 ON t3.parentmessagepk = t4.messagepk LEFT OUTER JOIN public.threads t5 ON t3.threadpk = t5.threadpk LEFT OUTER JOIN public.users t6 ON t3.userpk = t6.userpk WHERE (t1.forumpk = ? AND t1.sitepk = ?) ORDER BY t0.creationdate DESC LIMIT ? } [code=0, state=57014]

Even if TSS is running Tapestry...

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Will java go for *BSD

I really cannot get why we cannot get a good binary ready version of java on BSD.
I really cannot get which the problems are, it's really a matter of technical issues ?

I've followed the road of java on FreeBSD since ealry 2002 and now almost three years are gone but there's no light in the tunnel.

Are actually the guys at apache eating their own food ?

Monday, February 28, 2005

To maven or not to maven

I really don't understand why people get pissed off by "new tools gettin a lot of attention", probably the get pissed off by people looking at new tools like i was "the, almost totally discovered, plethora", well that get me pissed off too.

Anyway i found maven to be an usefull tool to which work with.

I've gained productivity, well not writing codes for my projects but handling typical tasks each project has, releasing is a matter of fire a command and set some properties, i know i could achieve the same with ant as i did it before start using maven, but maven was easyer to adobt for my co-workers so i'm more happy with that.

I've also faced typical maven issues like doing stuff when a plugin wasn't available and the ability to use ant task and just few lines of xml code did the rest.

Jelly is a fuzzy mass ot stuff i know and i agree but i don't understand why people don't like maven only cause it's not cool to build project with that.
I really would like to have constructive discussion with those peoples.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Web, exposed or not it's a issue

I've been developing web apps for 4/5 years and since my first approach i always have had concerns about separation of task as i've never loved to produce fancy html code.
I even don't consider myself a web designer nor have the skills a web designer should have, so i have worked on other's html codes.

That's make me look for tools or framework that make my life easier and came across XMLC from Enhydra (formerly owned by Lutris) then learn Barracuda . Since then i've always used Barracuda/XMLC to build up my web apps then lately i hit Tapestry and want to look at it more deeper just after reading some spots on it.
Well Tapestry and Barracuda have a lot in common while still have a lot of differences, their main approach is similar since both leverage a lot on components.

Barracuda provides just the core components useful for every app since the embrace all the typical html tags/object, the barracuda's components model is tight to DOM api and i guess this is the main reason why it has not been so extended by the community (DOM api looks complex) like tapestry one, but the use of DOM api enforce a clean an good separation of tasks from web designers to web developers and i like it very much.

Tapestry components could have their on html templates which is a "good thing TM", more separation and more isolation.

Tapestry components model is specifically designed to be extended and to provide powerfull ways to build components while Barracuda components model is designed to be used and (probably) extended by Barracuda's core developers only

Another things to note they have in common is the use of external file for page specification, .page within tapestry .directives (my own name) within barracuda, where developers put logic binded to presentation objects, barracuda use standards "id" attribute to bind page directives to html tags while tapestry use "jwcid" attribute so from a web designer point of view barracuda makes it simpler to develop web pages you can use any kind of WYSIWYG editor. Tapestry support another kind of binding components that they call implicit which are completely declared in the html template, this way a web developer with some capabilities of web designer could speed up a lot the work necessary to start a project or could use this features if the "project" is not so big, thinks about the quickness scripting language gives to you for small pages. That's a think i like from tapestry.

Tapestry has more of a "complete" framework since it own concept about services and all the features necessary to integrate services together, makes you work with abstract classes cause it's the framework that build up concrete classes at runtime so you don't need to write every single properties a page should have and it's own getters/setters method, the framework does that for you just declare that properties in page specification and you're on.
That's really great about tapestry!

Both have "problems" with friendly url (search engine wise) but in both case you could solve the problem with servlet filter or similar (i've done myself for barracuda and seen from a tapestry developers how to do for tapestry)

My more experience with barracuda make me appreciate some features of it more then tapestry but i'll dig it more with tapestry to understand more this great framework.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Why & Where

Well, actually i really don't know any of the two, but we all take it as it comes so give it a chance.
I'm italian so i like to write in my own language even if i spoke english here, so you'll find some italians here.

So here it comes. I'll use this post to choose the template for this blog i just need to type some words to get something to look at.