You obviously haven't paid attention to what I was describing. The data is still kept in a relational database, easily accessed by users and tools who need to bypass the object persistence layer and get at the data itself. Torque doesn't require a change in the schema of the database, either. All Torque does is generate classes that make it easy for the developer to access the data from the application, it doesn't replace the database or even mangle the structure of the data in the database. If I need to access the data outside of the confines of the object hierarchy, I can use a typical JDBC call as well.
And I think you're being a bit too high-handed, though I understand your bias probably comes from your profession (noted in your sig, and yes I acknowledge that as an application developer I have my own bias). Not every business has a need for "direct" access, some simply care about the business actions, regardless of how they're implemented.
PS: as an example of how I agree with you, the company I am contracted to is right now trying to create reports from information kept in a Versant OODBMS, and it is a royal pain in the ass (I am the person working on it). Instead of being able to use Brio or some other reporting tool, I have to resort to writing a Java-based tool to extract the data, which is taking far longer than it would if the data were available as relational tables.
Yes, but object persistence frameworks are really cool! Get all the benefits of your relational database, but use only [Java] code to access it! SQL is great for some things (generating reports, data mining, etc), but often in an application you just want to map your objects to the DBs and back again.
Obviously. And they make some pretty sexy looking hardware too. Before you start shouting that the looks aren't important, take a look at the cars people drive. Take a look at the money they spend on curtains and carpets and non-essential items for purely aesthetic reasons.
It is the sole reason my girlfriend is getting an iBook.
I have used both NetBeans (the release immediately previous to this advertised beta) and Eclipse (2.1) on both Win2k and MacOS X on roughly comparable systems. I loved NetBeans at first, and used it a couple of small Java projects - on Windows, it is fast and responsive enough, and I am not one of those who doesn't like the look and feel of Swing's "metal" theme (because, as lifelong Mac user, all Windows apps look strange to me). However on MacOS X, the app is a dog. The ten-second wait you described is a typical lag time for the contextual menu to pop up ("right mouse button menu"). As far as I am concerned, it is unuseable. Perhaps things will change if it is ported to use the new Java 1.4.1 JRE for Mac, which uses Cocoa for windowing, but the version of NetBeans I was using uses the 1.3 JRE. Maybe that is one of the new features of this beta.
About two weeks ago I was persuaded to try Eclipse by someone on the Tomcat mailing list. I had always stayed away from Eclipse because NetBeans did what I needed (on Windows) and I was familiar with it. But I took him up on the challenge and booted up the newest release of Eclipse and went through the tutorial. Wow! This is one slick application. Eclipse offers so many niceties and little features above NetBeans, or at least that I never noticed in NetBeans. I'm not referring to the SWT-based responsiveness either, just the actual UI design itself. The various perspectives, etc. Features I never expected to see. I'm hooked, and was excited by the fact that perhaps Eclipse on MacOS X wouldn't suffer from the slowness, since apparently SWT is all about using platform-native display code.
Unfortunately, Eclipse is only marginally better on MacOS X than NetBeans. It is considerably slow, and there are missing features (perhaps only offered by the Windows version of SWT) such as dockable views, etc. Even an entire menu (the "source" menu) was missing. I'm not sure why. It pains me because Eclipse is possibly the best software I have ever used on Windows (remember I'm a Mac user, so I haven't actually used a lot of Windows software).
I have heard that the best Java IDE on MacOS X is IntelliJ's IDEA, and someday I'd like to try it out. But at $500, I think I'll have to wait until I get a better job. Something to look out for, at least.
Congratulations Apple, what a coup.... (Hey guys, add keywords for bookmarks so I can continue to google with "g keyword keyword" and I'll switch.)
Sounds like you already have -- it's not like you have to purchase Safari or anything. Moving over from another OS X browser to Safari still means you bought OS X in the first place.
Instead of trying to create software that piggybacks on GNU/OS X why aren't they working on GNU/Darwin?
You're missing the whole purpose of Fink. It's a porting project. Of course there's coding work involved, but the idea is to get software that runs on other unices to work on OS X / Apple Darwin.
You might be able to write a generator for Torque that can generate classes enabling you to communicate with your mystery format. Torque was recently refactored out of the Jakarta Turbine project so that it could be used independently as an object-persistence layer for any Java application. You define your database schema in an xml meta-file and Torque uses a generator to create the Java classes that you use to access the data store. In this way you don't have to muck around with JDBC. There are existing generators for most well-known databases already.
Why is it needed?
Peer to peer technologies have become mainstream over recent years, and there are already a significant number of P2P networks in various stages of development and operation.
This book is good for learning all of the bare necessities of how to use MacOS X. I haven't read the whole thing (sort of stopped reading it last fall), but some of the kinds of tidbits it offers IIRC:
Hold down command-option and click an app's Dock icon to hide all other running apps.
Holding down the command key while clicking and dragging a window behind the frontmost window lets you manipulate that window without making it the frontmost window. (I have even dragged hyperlinks from Safari into my RSS client [NetNewsWire Lite] using this method.)
Option-dragging icons in the Finder makes copies of the item rather than simply moving it.
The emacs keybindings work in Cocoa applications.
Holding down the Shift key while performing some kind of navigation shortcut (such as cycling through windows with Command-` or through applications with Command-tab, or scrolling down in Safari or Mail.app with the space bar) will do the reverse of whatever it normally does.
These are just some quick finder shortcuts that came to mind when I started this post, the tips in the book are far more diverse. No, it's not really a book for hardcore geeks who want to be learn how to use niutil to manage a room full of OS X boxes. But it does show the reader how to do things that are not necessarily immediately obvious, plus the things that are different on OSX from OS9.
DOM seems like a good standard to have around, but if you really want ease of use and don't have to worry about making your code portable across different languages, go for one of the more implementation-specific APIs. JDOM looks really cool -- at least, it looks very natural if you're a Java programmer.
Case in point: make's custom build file format vs ant's XML-based build file format. Better make sure you don't have any tabs in the first character column of a make build file!
I've just gotten interested in Jython, although I've been using Java and Python (separately) for quite a while. I can't believe I came to it this late. Imagine having the simplicity of an award-winning dynamically-typed yet fully object-oriented scripting language at your finger tips for busting out scripts and relatively simple code, but with complete "native" access to Java libraries. (Quotes because it seems oxymoronic to use the word "native" to refer to Java.)
It's not quite the same as VB or even JavaBean-based "programming" (using a GUI-based code generator), but if you need to glue some Java classes together and don't want to go through all of the boilerplate required by straight Java programming, it's worth checking out.
Re:And what is the target consumer?
on
Google Hacks
·
· Score: 1
It's not a user's guide, it's more like "Unix Power Tools". I bet they'd have called it "Google Power Tools" if it weren't for the fact that they're trying to position it into their "Hacks" series.
I think it looks pretty good, and I'm definitely going to check it out next time I'm at the store.
Dunno. I get turned off to think that if I miss a tab somewhere I'll get a compiler error. A brace, sure. But whitespace??
You shouldn't be using tabs in the first place, you should be using spaces. This is a pretty-near unanimous coding convention. And you won't "miss" a space since you'll instantly see that your code isn't lining up properly. Trust me, the Python whitespace thing takes about fifteen seconds to get used to.
What I typically hear and feel myself is that the php site documentation is sparse to a fault, with a great deal of useful information simply left out. Check out how many holes are filled in by contributors at the bottom of each page of the php.net site docs. These are glaring ommissions.
$your_comment =~ s/omm/subm/;
Those are glaring submissions! And a very integral part of said PHP documentation!
Um, that's one of the points that Joel makes in his article. I'm not sure about the version posted to the web (he says it's a toned-down version so who knows) but I read the emailed version and he does say that no one has time to click to each next post.
Personally, I have found the best web-based forums to be those used by Sun at forums.java.sun.com. Unlike the ZDNet forums you mention, you just read down through the posts linearly (though threads are kept separate). it's a pretty good system.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously haven't paid attention to what I was describing. The data is still kept in a relational database, easily accessed by users and tools who need to bypass the object persistence layer and get at the data itself. Torque doesn't require a change in the schema of the database, either. All Torque does is generate classes that make it easy for the developer to access the data from the application, it doesn't replace the database or even mangle the structure of the data in the database. If I need to access the data outside of the confines of the object hierarchy, I can use a typical JDBC call as well.
And I think you're being a bit too high-handed, though I understand your bias probably comes from your profession (noted in your sig, and yes I acknowledge that as an application developer I have my own bias). Not every business has a need for "direct" access, some simply care about the business actions, regardless of how they're implemented.
PS: as an example of how I agree with you, the company I am contracted to is right now trying to create reports from information kept in a Versant OODBMS, and it is a royal pain in the ass (I am the person working on it). Instead of being able to use Brio or some other reporting tool, I have to resort to writing a Java-based tool to extract the data, which is taking far longer than it would if the data were available as relational tables.
Yes, but object persistence frameworks are really cool! Get all the benefits of your relational database, but use only [Java] code to access it! SQL is great for some things (generating reports, data mining, etc), but often in an application you just want to map your objects to the DBs and back again.
Obviously. And they make some pretty sexy looking hardware too. Before you start shouting that the looks aren't important, take a look at the cars people drive. Take a look at the money they spend on curtains and carpets and non-essential items for purely aesthetic reasons.
It is the sole reason my girlfriend is getting an iBook.
I have used both NetBeans (the release immediately previous to this advertised beta) and Eclipse (2.1) on both Win2k and MacOS X on roughly comparable systems. I loved NetBeans at first, and used it a couple of small Java projects - on Windows, it is fast and responsive enough, and I am not one of those who doesn't like the look and feel of Swing's "metal" theme (because, as lifelong Mac user, all Windows apps look strange to me). However on MacOS X, the app is a dog. The ten-second wait you described is a typical lag time for the contextual menu to pop up ("right mouse button menu"). As far as I am concerned, it is unuseable. Perhaps things will change if it is ported to use the new Java 1.4.1 JRE for Mac, which uses Cocoa for windowing, but the version of NetBeans I was using uses the 1.3 JRE. Maybe that is one of the new features of this beta.
About two weeks ago I was persuaded to try Eclipse by someone on the Tomcat mailing list. I had always stayed away from Eclipse because NetBeans did what I needed (on Windows) and I was familiar with it. But I took him up on the challenge and booted up the newest release of Eclipse and went through the tutorial. Wow! This is one slick application. Eclipse offers so many niceties and little features above NetBeans, or at least that I never noticed in NetBeans. I'm not referring to the SWT-based responsiveness either, just the actual UI design itself. The various perspectives, etc. Features I never expected to see. I'm hooked, and was excited by the fact that perhaps Eclipse on MacOS X wouldn't suffer from the slowness, since apparently SWT is all about using platform-native display code.
Unfortunately, Eclipse is only marginally better on MacOS X than NetBeans. It is considerably slow, and there are missing features (perhaps only offered by the Windows version of SWT) such as dockable views, etc. Even an entire menu (the "source" menu) was missing. I'm not sure why. It pains me because Eclipse is possibly the best software I have ever used on Windows (remember I'm a Mac user, so I haven't actually used a lot of Windows software).
I have heard that the best Java IDE on MacOS X is IntelliJ's IDEA, and someday I'd like to try it out. But at $500, I think I'll have to wait until I get a better job. Something to look out for, at least.
I'd be using -- in fact am using -- OS X regardless of Safari.
Amen, brother. I'm trying out the second public beta as I write this.
Congratulations Apple, what a coup.... (Hey guys, add keywords for bookmarks so I can continue to google with "g keyword keyword" and I'll switch.)
Sounds like you already have -- it's not like you have to purchase Safari or anything. Moving over from another OS X browser to Safari still means you bought OS X in the first place.
Yes, but is that Milli Vanilli's ghosts I see in this movie?
Hm. I never heard that before. I think I've been waiting for the white knight lately. Thanks for the wakeup call.
All good points -- I had never thought of it this way before. Incidentally, what does it mean, "kill the white knight"?
Instead of trying to create software that piggybacks on GNU/OS X why aren't they working on GNU/Darwin?
You're missing the whole purpose of Fink. It's a porting project. Of course there's coding work involved, but the idea is to get software that runs on other unices to work on OS X / Apple Darwin.
You might be able to write a generator for Torque that can generate classes enabling you to communicate with your mystery format. Torque was recently refactored out of the Jakarta Turbine project so that it could be used independently as an object-persistence layer for any Java application. You define your database schema in an xml meta-file and Torque uses a generator to create the Java classes that you use to access the data store. In this way you don't have to muck around with JDBC. There are existing generators for most well-known databases already.
it's been said here before I think, but this [macosxhints.com] is a great site with tons of usefull (also sometimes stupid) osx info.
And, interestingly, that site's editor has written an O'Reilly book himself, that is due to come out shortly, titled "MacOS X Hints".
Or better yet a set of simple, concise data files and a batch method for converting it to static HTML after updates for display on the web.
Sounds like you're talking about Bloxsom.
Here in Japan, Massive Attack's latest release was DRMed. I don't know if it was in the states.
If you mean 100th Window, the first thing I did was rip it to MP3 (for my player) and to Ogg (for my computer) and it worked fine.
Oh, this is a great reason!
Why is it needed?
Peer to peer technologies have become mainstream over recent years, and there are already a significant number of P2P networks in various stages of development and operation.
Translation: because it's inevitable.
Let me guess... you use... Mulberry?
This book is good for learning all of the bare necessities of how to use MacOS X. I haven't read the whole thing (sort of stopped reading it last fall), but some of the kinds of tidbits it offers IIRC:
These are just some quick finder shortcuts that came to mind when I started this post, the tips in the book are far more diverse. No, it's not really a book for hardcore geeks who want to be learn how to use niutil to manage a room full of OS X boxes. But it does show the reader how to do things that are not necessarily immediately obvious, plus the things that are different on OSX from OS9.
DOM seems like a good standard to have around, but if you really want ease of use and don't have to worry about making your code portable across different languages, go for one of the more implementation-specific APIs. JDOM looks really cool -- at least, it looks very natural if you're a Java programmer.
why not just have a stand XML scripting language
You mean like Jelly?
Case in point: make's custom build file format vs ant's XML-based build file format. Better make sure you don't have any tabs in the first character column of a make build file!
I've just gotten interested in Jython, although I've been using Java and Python (separately) for quite a while. I can't believe I came to it this late. Imagine having the simplicity of an award-winning dynamically-typed yet fully object-oriented scripting language at your finger tips for busting out scripts and relatively simple code, but with complete "native" access to Java libraries. (Quotes because it seems oxymoronic to use the word "native" to refer to Java.)
It's not quite the same as VB or even JavaBean-based "programming" (using a GUI-based code generator), but if you need to glue some Java classes together and don't want to go through all of the boilerplate required by straight Java programming, it's worth checking out.
It's not a user's guide, it's more like "Unix Power Tools". I bet they'd have called it "Google Power Tools" if it weren't for the fact that they're trying to position it into their "Hacks" series.
I think it looks pretty good, and I'm definitely going to check it out next time I'm at the store.
Dunno. I get turned off to think that if I miss a tab somewhere I'll get a compiler error. A brace, sure. But whitespace??
You shouldn't be using tabs in the first place, you should be using spaces. This is a pretty-near unanimous coding convention. And you won't "miss" a space since you'll instantly see that your code isn't lining up properly. Trust me, the Python whitespace thing takes about fifteen seconds to get used to.
And yes, you can still do one-line if blocks:
What I typically hear and feel myself is that the php site documentation is sparse to a fault, with a great deal of useful information simply left out. Check out how many holes are filled in by contributors at the bottom of each page of the php.net site docs. These are glaring ommissions.
$your_comment =~ s/omm/subm/;
Those are glaring submissions! And a very integral part of said PHP documentation!
Um, that's one of the points that Joel makes in his article. I'm not sure about the version posted to the web (he says it's a toned-down version so who knows) but I read the emailed version and he does say that no one has time to click to each next post.
Personally, I have found the best web-based forums to be those used by Sun at forums.java.sun.com. Unlike the ZDNet forums you mention, you just read down through the posts linearly (though threads are kept separate). it's a pretty good system.