Thursday Release Party

taktile writes "I started the project about a week and a half ago after learning about Apple's ASCIIMoviePlayer. QuickASCII is an Open Source project to add improvements to Apple's player." Another user writes, "There is a small group collaboration program called iStorm that is out. It anyone gets tired of severely delayed collaboration over the Internet, maybe he should try an almost telepathic experience with this program." ludeyork writes "I just saw that BBEdit 7.0 has been released and it's got great new features." It's very cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet. The CVS integration is worth the upgrade for me. yuck72 writes "Apple has just released version 5.2 of its WebObjects application server. Improvements include better J2EE integration, easy tools for building SOAP-based web services and Java Webstart support. Applications can be deployed on any machine with a Java 1.3.1 compliant JVM. Apple's 'best-kept secret' really deserves more attention than it currently gets considering that it plays in the same league as Websphere and Weblogic." Oops, maybe I should have given it its own story.

Comments

All are missing the one thing I need (Mac OS X)

[BoomerSooner]

SFTP access. I use dreamweaver and golive and both cannot connect to a CVS or SFTP based server.

I know there are third party tools but I want the whole thing integrated.

If BB has it i'm dropping Dreamweaver and GoLive, if it doesn't it's wait as usual. Since I didn't see it I guess I'll keep waiting.

BBEdit 7.0 First Look

[Slur]

For web development my tools are BBEdit, MacCVS Pro 2.7b2, and Transmit 1.7b2. It goes without saying that BBEdit is by far the best editor in any class for making dynamic web sites involving PHP, perl, shell scripts, and SQL. The way I usually work is to maintain my local repository with MacCVS, edit with BBEdit, and use Transmit to FTP files to the remote development servers for testing.

I've been using BBEdit 7 for about a day, especially testing out the CVS integration. It's really good, but there are some things I miss about MacCVS Pro.

- BBEdit lacks tag, edit, and watch commands.

- Although you can do some CVS operations in the BBEdit File Browser (and File Groups) you can't do certain operations when multiple files are selected (including "commit file" oddly).

- BBEdit doesn't show the status of files in the file browser, file groups, or in window headers. The only way to get revision information is to "Get CVS Status" and read a modal dialog. ...And then dismiss the modal dialog.

- BBEdit's CVS operations tend to be slower than MacCVS, or seem so, because MacCVS is robustly threaded. BBEdit puts up modal "wait" dialogs every single time it has to contact the remote CVS server.

- If you're going to do secure CVS BBEdit requires you to set up one of SSH's auto-authentication methods (The whole "ssh-keygen -t dsa" rigamarole). Once the authentication is set up BBEdit's CVS integration is compatible with MacCVS, and the combination is much better than either one by itself.

- On the positive side, BBEdit's diff function was meant to be integrated with CVS. (BBEdit does the diff itself without using CVS's diff command.)

The geeks at BareBones have done a great job so far. They're doing the right thing by adding new features gradually, releasing just what works. Obviously they don't want to turn their editor into bloatware. Being able to checkin or diff without leaving BBEdit is a great bonus. If they are able to make BBEdit more threaded and add CVS features to the File Browser (and make it hierarchical for goodness sake!) I might finally be able to give up MacCVS Pro.

But not yet.

WebObjects is Web Applications done right.

[BitGeek]

Ok, you can use WO in collaboration with the J2EE way of doing things. They have built in support for tomcat etc. I haven't used it, and you shouldn't either, though.

You see, WebObjects predates the web by a couple years-- it started out as EOF and enterirpise object foundation that allows you to deal with any RDMS as objects. When the web came about they added a webfrontend, and really did it right (The WOF).

Here's an example. I could create all of the functionality of slashdot, from scratch, including users, moderation, friend/foe, story posting, etc. in about 3 weeks. FROM SCRATCH. Oh, and it would have a hell of a lot better performance and scalability than slasdot has now.

When you want to list the comments on a story, that is merely a query on the DB passed to a repeating object, which has a template in HTML, and thus you have story comments- 20 minutes of work. The query handles ranking, the links are automagically generated, etc.

It simply is the easiest, most effective, and best product ever put out by Apple or anyone in the web applications / database backed website space.

It looses, just like the Mac did, because its competition is very difficult to implement, requires consultants, and the sell the $5 million with consultants included solution, and so everybody tries to sell that cause they get a huge markup. (And the companies that uses htese products never can get their sites updated in time, and thus we had part of what caused the dot-com crash.)

If you're doing any kind of a dynamic or DB backed website, you should learn WO-- at $700 its cheaper than anything that's not free, and if you include your time, its still a LOT cheaper than the free stuff.

It really is the best kept secret in apple's product line.

Re:WebObjects is Web Applications done right.

[kwerle]

No, WO does handle this.

Pronoun trouble: if by 'this' you mean updating objects between sessions, then ... well, you can do it, but it's not graceful out of the box - unless you're using a big shared editing context, which is possible, I suppose.
If by 'this' you mean multiple connections to the DB from the same app, then no, WO does not do this out of the box.
Which isn't to say that it can't be done - I've seen it done at a previous job, but it wasn't pretty, and it wasn't clean, and it probaly didn't help them. ... and it can distribute updates between the caches across many machines.

Yes, it can, but it does not out of the box. What's more, with the number of updates /. sees, I'd have to think it'd be a fair performance hit to keep them all in sync under WO.

If /. were written in WO (And running on the same number of machines it runs on now, etc.) it would be better performing.

I just don't believe that, as much as I'd like to. PERL is damn fast, and damn light. I gotta think that Java and WO add plenty of overhead just because it's OO. Which is great for dev and most applications, but generally means you do take a performance hit. Not a big one, but some.

But once you did, you could do it. (I'm not taking into account time to create art, and content, just the code.)

Are you also taking into account all the /. that normal users don't see? All the admin crap, etc?

Re:BBEdit overpriced?

[analog_line]

Or pay $80 for the educational discount.

I've been a fan of BBEdit since I first touched BBEdit Lite in...what was it...1997? Even when I stopped using Macs for awhile (because I couldn't stand OS 8/9 and I wanted games) the one thing I really missed about MacOS was BBEdit, and version 6.5 was the first piece of software I bought when I got my iBook with OS X. I use BBEdit for everything text related, rom coding to word processing (I so much prefer it to MS Office). Nothing else compares. Emacs is a overly complicated, bloated, ugly piece of crap. vi is nice enough, but only if strictly necessary, and it doesn't have all the little features that BBEdit has. Pico is actually my preferred console text editor because it's nice and simple, and doesn't require a manual to learn how to use. But none of them stand up to BBEdit in my humble view. More than worth the money I paid for it. Worth double what I paid for it. Hell, I like BBEdit so much, I bought Mailsmith so I could use a BBEdit style interface for e-mail.

BBEdit. It (Still) Doesn't Suck.