The most frustrating thing about responses like this is that NetBeans has no project model. NetBeans uses plain files and directories with the most common/default path structure appropriate for the selected build tool (Ant or Maven). If you have a Maven project, then you have a pom.xml in the project root; a src folder (with src/main/java, src/main/resources, src/test/java, src/test/resources, and src/main/web if it's a web application); and a target folder. If you're using Ant (the default) then you have src/java, build, and target (I think; I haven't used Ant in ages).
NetBeans is smart enough to know (just by looking for a build.xml or pom.xml in the project root) what build system you are using and display appropriate shortcut nodes in the project view. src/main/java becomes "Source Packages"; src/test/java becomes "Test Packages"; src/main/resources becomes "Other Sources"; src/test/resources becomes "Other Test Sources"; and src/main/web becomes "Web Pages". And if you don't like that, there's always the "File" view which shows you the raw directory layout (the tab immediately to the right of "Project").
Why is this frustrating? Because Eclipse does not use any kind of standard model. It has its own proprietary (hidden) IDE-specific artifacts without which it will not work *at all* (.classpath). The user has to go out of his way to use Ant or Maven (by installing and configuring plugins). And even in doing so, Eclipse still uses its incremental build *as well*. Eclipse is not able to automatically glean classpath info for it's internal incremental build system from the build tool artifacts (build.xml/pom.xml) despite that fact that all of the information is contained there, which means you have redundant (and potentially out of sync) classpath info in your project. And.classpath is usually excluded from source tools (as it references workspace-specific environment info or canonical path references) so each developer in a team has to build and maintain it. It's madness.
I'm curious about all of the NetBeans hate. NetBeans ships with:
- A standard Ant- or Maven-based build system with stellar support for both
- All kinds of VCS integration (CVS, SVN, Mercurial)
- Plugins for Jira, Bugzilla, and other ticketing systems
- Support for every major app server
- Very decent XML/schema editor with auto-complete and recognition of tags in context-sensitive help
- An incredibly powerful formatting and styling engine
- Has an integrated database query tool with SQL syntax highlighting
- Ctrl+o to quick-search any type in any project you have open (ctrl+shift+o for any file, period) with recognition for acronyms/camel case abbreviations
- Excellent integration wtih JUnit
- SVN revision highlighting with mouse-over diff and undo/revert (change by change)
- Incredible diff and conflict resolution interface
- WYSIWYG JSF editor
- JSF tag auto-complete (even with Seam and other third-party taglibs)
- A full-featured profiler with the ability to take snapshots the entire runtime
- JavaDoc validation and auto-complete
- Project groups so you don't have to close and re-open your IDE to switch "workspaces"
- Language support for Ruby, C++, PHP, and scripting languages (JavaScript, Groovy)
I can appreciate that there is a group of developers that prefer to use lightweight editors and command-line tools, and that's fine. But if you like big honkin' IDEs then NetBeans is a worthy platform, and I've found it to be a huge time saver.
It wasn't until very recently (first with JSF, and then with Glassfish) that Sun got into the business of providing any kind of reasonable implementations. Apache has been the defacto RI producer for as long as I can remember:
(Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head). Apache was also a leader in developing most of these technologies with projects like Struts, Turbine, Velocity, Log4j/commons-logging, etc.
The JCP and open-source RI combination benefited Sun immensely. First, most developers had access to most tools and platforms for free, so there was no barrier to entry. The result? One of the largest developer bases for any platform. Second, developers had access to the RI source code, which means they can trace through the framework code, find/fix bugs, and offer their own improvements. The result? One of the largest support bases for any platform (BugZilla, Jira, forums, blogs, etc.). Finally, both of these offer tremendous incentives for commercial third parties to create their own offerings, which has lead to incredibly diversity: RedHad/JBoss, IBM/WebLogic, BEA/WebSphere, Oracle/OracleAS, Apache/Geronimo, Sun/Glassfish, and tons other.
And all of this creates a positive feedback loop that builds on itself.
So where did Sun benefit financially?
1. They receive licensing fees from the commercial third parties and in handheld devices (JavaME) 2. Certification fees 3. Hardware/software/support in their integrated platform offerings (admittedly this has suffered due to the popularity of commodity OSs like Linux) 4. (Indirectly) Not having to pay development staff to produce and support implementations
Oracle is attempting to dam the river so they can sell water to people downstream. If they are not careful, people are just going to find another water source.
I don't see this as the "end of Java", but I do see it as the end of the cohesive, constructive community built around Java. I expect to see fewer JSRs being ratified, more independent third-party libraries being used, and a lot of fragmentation in the community like we saw with web UI frameworks before JSF was introduced. I think it will be up to the container providers to try to hold it together and provide a consistent experience for developers.
Why? I've been using JBoss for years and it seems to be a very robust, agile, and well-managed project, particularly after being acquired by RedHat.
Besides, I wouldn't expect "JBoss" itself to mess with the JVM. I would expect RedHat and SuSE to put effort behind maintaining/optimizing the free JVM, especially given their respective stances on free software.
Why would you have to memorize anything? In the video they have a very cool animation where the letters are magnified as the finger moves. Presumably the same kind of interface could be (or has been) developed to aid in memorizing the gestures. I absolutely cannot stand virtual touch keyboards on mobile devices--this on the other hand would actually make me consider a touch-screen device. (I currently have a e71x with a tiny little physical qwerty keyboard that I can almost tolerate.)
Oracle is not in the mobile market, except in the sense that they now own Java and want to collect royalties for the use of Java in handheld devices. Sun has always required royalties for J2ME (Micro edition) in handheld devices. The issue here is that Google tried to weasel out of royalties by making a Java-compatible VM based on J2SE (Standard Edition) which is GPL and open. The problem is that this move violates the *spirit* of the original Java licensing agreement, which as to open Java for desktop/server use and charge royalties for Java on handheld devices.
I listened to Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at Java One in 2005 and he made the claim that handhelds were the future and where Sun's focus would be. One of his statements was about how there were virtually no desktop computers or land lines in rural areas / developing nations (India, China, Africa) but cell phones were ubiquitous. J2ME (at the time) was on 1 billion handhelds (now over 2 billion I believe). Whatever the royalties are, it is a significant source of revenue.
The success of Oracle's lawsuit will depend whether the wording of the licenses is such that a derivative of J2SE on a handheld device can be considered to be essentially J2ME. I.e. does any flavor of, or derivative of, Java on a handheld require licensing and royalty payments? And it may come down to whether certain APIs or implementations are shared between J2SE and J2ME, which is almost certainly the case.
Google tried to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted the ability to leverage a massive preexisting class library and huge developer population without paying the royalties to Sun/Oracle. So they made a byte code translator to allow developers to build and compile using Java, and execute on the Dalvik VM.
Harmony is in the clear, because the Apache Foundation is not trying to sell handheld devices with Harmony embedded. (Same with OpenJDK, GCJ, etc.)
I think Sun could have successfully sued Google over this, but chose not to, probably because it would be messy and because the goodwill with Google was more valuable. For Oracle it's a potential revenue stream. The intent isn't to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but to get a chunk of each egg that comes out.
Break down your tasks into actionable items and ask management for a priority. When "Do X" becomes "Do I work on A, B, or C first?", and it is apparent that A, B, and C require nontrivial investments of resources, then it becomes more real to management. Further, in doing pieces A and B you can demonstrate progress toward completing X as a whole, whereas the nebulous "X" is either done or it is not.
This is an old technique for software project management. Take each requirement, break it into use cases, and put a level of effort next to each use case. A high-level requirement like "Add security to the app" becomes hundreds of "Restrict action A on target B to roles X,Y, and Z" use cases. Each one may take an hour. So whereas a manager might reject a blanket 100 hour estimate for "Add security to the app", showing him or her that there are hundreds of source objects to update, each of which requires checkout, modification, testing, and check-in, then the 100 hour estimate seem more reasonable. (This also shows that you put thought into the estimate and its not an off-the-cuff figure.) And if you get 8 use cases done per day, well that's measurable.
Also, if you can demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in your estimates then you will be taken more seriously. The smaller the unit of work, the more accurate the estimate. If you do 6 use cases in 6 hours (at 1 hour apiece), and then have 2 hours worth of meetings, you're still 100% accurate. Whereas if you estimate 100 hours for X and three weeks later it isn't done, then your credibility is shot. Meetings don't (usually) show up in the issue tracking system, so they aren't measurable. (The 50% or 75% devoted argument is not very effective in my experience.)
I used to say that I didn't have time to do the administrative part of development. But the reality is that I don't have time *not* to do it. Break it down and make it measurable, and then the demands (or at least the expectations) will become more realistic.
My point was that NetBeans and Eclipse are written in Swing and SWT (respectively). These, as well as SQuirreL, JXplorer, and a number of other Java client applications perform as well as native applications on Windows and Linux. Not so with OS X. And to make matters worse, the look/feel of the Cocoa bindings hasn't changed since the early 10.1/10.2 days, and the bubbly aqua stuff is really out of place with the rest of the OS.
I'm primarily a web-based applications developer, but I've done a few things with Swing. It has an impressive API and NetBeans/Eclipse are proof that applications written with these technologies can be made to perform well.
I can't think of a single reason to drop Apple _hardware_. Their hardware is fantastic. I have a 3-year old MacBook that has survived to major drink spills, being dropped many times on a tile floor from the arm of a couch, and being routinely trampled by a 1- and 4-year old. I love their hardware.
But if you are a serious Java developer, there are plenty of reasons to drop OS X, though, foremost being the performance of Swing/SWT and the version lag. I've always felt that Apple's support for Java was grudging and second-rate.
Java on OS X has always been a second-class citizen. Swing and SWT apps (read: NetBeans and Eclipse) have always been ridiculously slow and ugly on OS X compared to Windows or Linux on similar hardware and the OS X JVM/JDK is always months (or years!) behind the official version.
So as much as I like Macs and OS X, I ended up switching to Linux a long time ago. Cheaper, faster, better tools.
1. Massive standard class library covering everything from smartphones to distributed application servers
2. Huge amounts of third-party support. If you can think of it, someone somewhere has written a library for it, and chances are it's open source
3. The best IDEs in existence. NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc. all come with built in support for unit testing, dependency management, source control (mercurial, SVN, git, you name it), profiling, local and remote debugging, etc.
4. Agent support for instrumentation and runtime redeployment. Using tools like JRebel I can edit code in my IDE and see the results instantly in the application server, and *still* take advantage of strong typing, etc.
5. Object-Relation-Management (ORM). Tools like TopLink and Hibernate mean that you can reverse engineer a class model from a DB, or generate a DB from a class model, and use the ORM API to effortlessly add optimistic locking, transaction management, and object based queries to your app
6. Application servers support distributed transaction management (XA) and messaging (JMS) on top of a generalize connection management framework (JCA) in which any vendor can provide a standard connector (resource adapter) to their systems and participate in global two-phase transactions
7. Open driver support for virtually every data store; lots of choices for embedded in-memory SQL/RDBMS databases
8. Container-based pooling, caching, and transaction management
9. Dependency management and build systems like Ant, Maven, Hudson, and Sonar that enable you to very easily configure scheduled builds with static code analysis, automated unit tests, and concise reports of errors with references to changesets included in the build
10. Perhaps the largest collection of forums, blogs, and online documentation for any platform
11. Strong typing, API contracts, and runtime introspection identify issues at compile/deploy time, rather than runtime
12. Strong industry support from multiple vendors (Google, Oracle, IBM, RedHat, etc.)
So, if you're writing a little GTK widget for managing your MP3 collection, maybe Java isn't for you. But if you are a medium-to-large business chances are you either develop or administer an enterprise-scale Java application.
Another thing to consider is that the vast majority of Java tools and libraries are open source, and many of the specifications are formed once an open source toolset reaches a certain level of maturity/popularity. For example, Hibernate did most of the legwork for JPA; JSF was initiated largely due to the success of Struts; and WebBeans is a formal spec defining the basics what Seam provides. So all Oracle really has to do is keep the JCP going and publish the standards while RedHat (JBoss), IBM, the Glassfish development team, and everyone else provides the implementations. Oracle stays competitive with IBM and RedHat by offering a development stack (based on Oracle DB, Oracle AS, Oracle JDeveloper, etc. all of which use Java) *and* continues to collect licensing fees from the other players. Plus they have a little more say in the JCP process, which gives them a slight advantage when ratifying new APIs.
Not to mention that Java is installed in over 2.6 billion handheld devices, each of which pays a royalty fee to Oracle.
What surprises me is that Oracle is partnering with IBM on this venture. I wonder what IBM has on Oracle?
Not trying to be facetious, but this is the #1 reason I'm using Ubuntu instead of FC or OpenSUSE. (Not just Java specifically, but Java, restricted codecs, Flash, etc.) It also updates all of the relevant alternatives for me, as part of the package install, which is also very nice.
Write to your state legislature and request preferential voting ballots. The plurality system we have today causes people to vote for one of two candidates that is most likely to win and offends them the least. With preferential voting you can truly vote your conscience without "robbing" your second- or third-ranked candidate of a vote. Some states already have this; see:
Not sure what is meant by this, but at my local store they reintroduced late fees and they were harsh. Even for older releases you had 3 days to return the movie or it was automatically rented again ($5) and the cycle repeated until you paid the retail equivalent in rental fees at which point you owned the scratched, dented, smudged rental CD. The day the policy changed I started a Netflix account and never looked back.
I was using a self-checkout at a grocery store and was somewhat bemused when I was asked to put a helium-filled mylar ballon in the bag. Thankfully there was an employee nearby to override the machine's demands. I wonder what weight was associated with that UPC? Was it negative?:)
But it is in the best interest of merchants (faster flowing queues, less money spent on ink and paper), so perhaps we can appeal to their greed. This is basically most useful on a debit card; generally banks like it when you keep a positive balance and get really ugly when you overdraft.
However, even credit card companies wouldn't be hit that hard. Ever notice how your balances from them always shows how much *more* you have to spend and how payments are the parenthetical/red items on your statements? Same thing applies here. If you're apt to go into debt then *how much* you are in debt doesn't really matter until you're close to your limit, in which case credit card companies are more than happy to shut you down.
I'd love it if my credit card stored a history of my transactions and I was able to bring it home and upload them to my accounting software. That way I could easily compare the transactions my bank thinks I made vs. the ones I know I made without having to use paper receipts. And all those coupons you get from the grocery store could be uploaded directly to the card and automatically applied on the next purchase (provided they haven't expired). The cost savings on printer ribbon would be huge and the time savings at the checkout queue could possibly lead to a reduction in manual labor (and an increase in overall customer satisfaction). Survey codes could be embedded into the receipt as well, and could open automatically in your browser when clicked on.
If I'm not using cash I don't see the need to deal with any paper at all, especially not a meter-long strip of paper folded fifty times.
I'm a huge KDE fan and after getting fed up with Kubuntu I tried OpenSUSE. I really wanted to like OpenSUSE, and I did at first. I was very impressed with the LVM support in the installer and the ability to import my existing fstab settings. I have various data drives and Samba shares I like to have permanently mounted, and it was a pain to have to update these every time I do an install.
But after several days of frustration an automated kernel update botched and left me with an unbootable system, and rather than repair the OpenSUSE install I decided to go back to Ubuntu. After the magic of the initial install I got fed up trying to make it do the simplest things. For example, it wouldn't play MP3s out of the box (ridiculous!) so I went to the OpenSUSE site and found a very lengthy and poorly formatted forum-style wiki on setting up non-free decoders. I tried several of the different options and none worked. So after hours of hunting I came across a blog walking me through adding the gstreamer back end for Phonon and all of the restricted codecs, which were in a separate Packman repo with a dubious cert. After about 8 hours and a couple reboots I was finally able to listen to MP3s.
I also really dislike having to add all kinds of third party repos in order to install the simplest things. Yes it's flexible and free, but who do I trust? Will the packages and dependencies work together? Do these guys know what they're doing? Am I better of building from source? I don't want to have to go to some web site and search for an RPM, only to find several variations from various repos. How to I choose? And every time I opened the YaST package manager (which was frequently due to the spartan install) it would spend 2 minutes refreshing all of the packages. Installing Sun JDK 6 and updating the alternatives was a pain. Installing VirtualBox was a pain (it didn't add my user to the vboxuser group and failed with an vague error message.) Basically, it took me 3 whole days to get a system set up whereas in Ubuntu it's 3 clicks. Ubuntu even prompts you with a dialog if you try to do something but need a package that isn't installed (codecs, Samba, non-free drivers, you name it).
There's lots of other little irritating things too. Wireless didn't work, so I had to change to the other broadcom driver, which involved blacklisting kernel modules. I never got that working 100%... after every reboot I'd have to rmmod ssb bcwl wl and then modprobe bcwl before things would work. Also, KWrite was the default text editor and Kate wasn't even installed, so I hat to install Kate and update every single text MIME type to use Kate instead of KWrite. The menus are arranged so you have to navigate 4 levels deep to find anything, and the categorization is not intuitive. I also had to play around with ALSA to configure DMix so that sound would work. And for some reason you have to explicitly tell it you want 3D support and hunt down and install a bunch of non-default packages for that.
Other than the botched kernel update, these are the same issues I have with virtual every Linux distro. (Getting rid of noveau in favor of the proprietary Nvidia drivers on FC12 was a *bear*. No one should have to edit grub configurations and kernel module blacklists.) I've been using Linux for almost a decade, and it's still a pain to set it up. Ubuntu has its problems (pulseaudio stutters and has a wonky volume range; Ubuntu One music store is incredibly flaky) but its default configuration is much more friendly than the other distros, and the Wikis, forums, and bug tracking tools (and community) are outstanding. I much prefer KDE to Gnome, but I'd rather use the stable/clean Gnome on Ubuntu then KDE on another other distro. (I don't consider Kubuntu to be "stable".)
So kudos for Ubuntu... it's not perfect, but at least they make the simple things simple and have sane defaults.
1. Accept the terms under which the product is licensed 2. Purchase or lease a different product with better licensing terms 3. Write your own
Someone puts forth capital and offers a product under certain conditions. You agree to those conditions and then expect to be able to break them without consequence. This is breach of contract. I fail to see the issue. If you didn't like the terms, why did you enter the contract?
(And, as an aside, you can't have it both ways. Either software is a product you purchase and can re-sell, in which case patents are appropriate and piracy is theft; or it is "information" to which you enter into a contract to obtain the right to use under certain terms [GPL etc. included], in which case copyrights are appropriate and piracy is "infringement".)
And yes, if you were prompted with a EULA and you clicked "I agree" then you willingly entered into the contract. (The ability to reject the EULA and receive a refund is another issue and one in which I support consumer rights.)
Try opening Xine and going to Preferences -> Audio and changing "ALSA" to "Pulseaudio". That should make the Xine backend for Phonon pipe through PA now. The PulseAudio device shows up in the Multimedia configuration (provided you add "pulseaudio -D" to your ~/.kde/env directory to run before KDE starts), but I guess even if you output to that device it still tries to go through Xine, which could be hitting OSS or ALSA. (And I suspect that since the PA server is using the ALSA device already there is no sound unless you happen to have hardware mixing. That's all just speculation, but it seems reasonable.)
Of course, Xine+PA broke for some reason with the 4.5 update on Lucid. Supposedly it's fixed in Maverick, but won't be backported to Lucid. I spent a day trying to get DMix set up and reverting everything (Xine, VirtualBox, etc.) back to ALSA. Very irritating.
While I don't disagree with your sentiment vis a vis the meaning of life, it's far more likely that our ancestors cut down more trees than they ever planted. Perhaps this is cynical, but I tend to think that thousands of generations of people simply couldn't manage to consume what we have now. Every new generation just inherits the leftovers.
I'm personally of the opinion that if we can't get it right on Earth we have no hope (or business) in space. Plant trees, reduce consumption, live sustainably, and then we just might (eventually) develop the discipline required to cope with the scarcity we will be confronted with in space or extrasolar colonies.
Seconded. I've used them all, and keep coming back to KDE. SC 4.3 and previous were incredibly buggy, but 4.4.5 is a lot better and I expect 4.5 to be pretty solid. I can't live without Kate, and I much prefer Dolphin+kdesvn to Nautilus. Kontact/kdepim are not yet fully mature, but I still much prefer them to Evolution. Amarok, krfb, k3b, digiKam, ark, klipper, kopete, etc. are all as good or better than the Gnome equivalents. And this is in spite of the fact that there is very little support for KDE from the majority of distros and the development resources they have.
Yes, Akonadi, Nepomuk and Strigi are useless and aggravating at the moment, but philosophically both centralized PIM services and contextual searching are steps in the right direction (although the implementations leave a lot to be desired).
For everyone complaining about the emphasis on eye candy, have you even checked the release feature lists? Sure there are eye candy improvements, but those are very much in the minority. They just happen to be the most visible because when you show screenshots, that's all that really shows up. For every plasma improvement there are scores of tactical improvements that put KDE in a better position in the long term.
And keep in mind, a lot of the improvements are contributions from the community. If there is an active volunteer developer with a pet project (such as kdegames or whatnot) then its no surprise that these sorts of improvements make it into each release.
When I look at KDE I see a well designed framework of integrated and pluggable services, applications, and subsystems. When I look at Gnome I see a collection of do-one-thing-and-do-it-well applications scattered about. Purely a matter of preference, but if I had to place bets on the long-term viability of each DE, I'd put my money on QT/KDE, especially given QTs foothold in the mobile market.
Different things work for different people. I find that I organize files on my computer the same way I organize files on my desk -- in piles. If it's in a pile, it's important, and if it's on top it's *really* important. Every day or so I go through the piles and one of three things happens to each thing in the pile: 1) I deal with it (pay bill, file statement, etc.); 2) Decide it's no longer important and throw it away; 3) Leave it in the pile to go through later.
On my computer, everything first goes in the Desktop folder. Why? Couple of reasons:
1. It's staring me in the face until I file it away, delete it, or otherwise handle it
2. It's easy to find. Desktop search tools are slow and useless. grep "foo" in a single folder takes a lot less time than find . -exec grep {} \;
3. Most of my documents fall into several categories, and I don't remember where I put things. Did my SQL script go under doc/sql, lib/sql, examples/sql, snippets/sql, hotfixes/sql or what? Did my HR document go under company/doc, doc/company, etc.? I don't have time to obsessively categories and maintain consistent directory structures and cross-references.
Something like meta tags would be very useful. Something that says "oh, a.sql extension... let me automatically assign the tags 'script', 'sql', and 'txt'" and then let the user add, modify, and search that list.
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The most frustrating thing about responses like this is that NetBeans has no project model. NetBeans uses plain files and directories with the most common/default path structure appropriate for the selected build tool (Ant or Maven). If you have a Maven project, then you have a pom.xml in the project root; a src folder (with src/main/java, src/main/resources, src/test/java, src/test/resources, and src/main/web if it's a web application); and a target folder. If you're using Ant (the default) then you have src/java, build, and target (I think; I haven't used Ant in ages).
NetBeans is smart enough to know (just by looking for a build.xml or pom.xml in the project root) what build system you are using and display appropriate shortcut nodes in the project view. src/main/java becomes "Source Packages"; src/test/java becomes "Test Packages"; src/main/resources becomes "Other Sources"; src/test/resources becomes "Other Test Sources"; and src/main/web becomes "Web Pages". And if you don't like that, there's always the "File" view which shows you the raw directory layout (the tab immediately to the right of "Project").
Why is this frustrating? Because Eclipse does not use any kind of standard model. It has its own proprietary (hidden) IDE-specific artifacts without which it will not work *at all* (.classpath). The user has to go out of his way to use Ant or Maven (by installing and configuring plugins). And even in doing so, Eclipse still uses its incremental build *as well*. Eclipse is not able to automatically glean classpath info for it's internal incremental build system from the build tool artifacts (build.xml/pom.xml) despite that fact that all of the information is contained there, which means you have redundant (and potentially out of sync) classpath info in your project. And .classpath is usually excluded from source tools (as it references workspace-specific environment info or canonical path references) so each developer in a team has to build and maintain it. It's madness.
Oh well. To each his own.
I'm curious about all of the NetBeans hate. NetBeans ships with:
- A standard Ant- or Maven-based build system with stellar support for both
- All kinds of VCS integration (CVS, SVN, Mercurial)
- Plugins for Jira, Bugzilla, and other ticketing systems
- Support for every major app server
- Very decent XML/schema editor with auto-complete and recognition of tags in context-sensitive help
- An incredibly powerful formatting and styling engine
- Has an integrated database query tool with SQL syntax highlighting
- Ctrl+o to quick-search any type in any project you have open (ctrl+shift+o for any file, period) with recognition for acronyms/camel case abbreviations
- Excellent integration wtih JUnit
- SVN revision highlighting with mouse-over diff and undo/revert (change by change)
- Incredible diff and conflict resolution interface
- WYSIWYG JSF editor
- JSF tag auto-complete (even with Seam and other third-party taglibs)
- A full-featured profiler with the ability to take snapshots the entire runtime
- JavaDoc validation and auto-complete
- Project groups so you don't have to close and re-open your IDE to switch "workspaces"
- Language support for Ruby, C++, PHP, and scripting languages (JavaScript, Groovy)
I can appreciate that there is a group of developers that prefer to use lightweight editors and command-line tools, and that's fine. But if you like big honkin' IDEs then NetBeans is a worthy platform, and I've found it to be a huge time saver.
It wasn't until very recently (first with JSF, and then with Glassfish) that Sun got into the business of providing any kind of reasonable implementations. Apache has been the defacto RI producer for as long as I can remember:
Servlet/JSP: Tomcat
JSF: MyFaces
JAX-RPX/JAXWS: Axis
JAXB: JaxMe
EJB: Geronimo/OpenEJB
JPA: OpenJPA
JCR: JackRabbit
Java Logging: commons-logging, Log4j, SLF4j
(Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head). Apache was also a leader in developing most of these technologies with projects like Struts, Turbine, Velocity, Log4j/commons-logging, etc.
The JCP and open-source RI combination benefited Sun immensely. First, most developers had access to most tools and platforms for free, so there was no barrier to entry. The result? One of the largest developer bases for any platform. Second, developers had access to the RI source code, which means they can trace through the framework code, find/fix bugs, and offer their own improvements. The result? One of the largest support bases for any platform (BugZilla, Jira, forums, blogs, etc.). Finally, both of these offer tremendous incentives for commercial third parties to create their own offerings, which has lead to incredibly diversity: RedHad/JBoss, IBM/WebLogic, BEA/WebSphere, Oracle/OracleAS, Apache/Geronimo, Sun/Glassfish, and tons other.
And all of this creates a positive feedback loop that builds on itself.
So where did Sun benefit financially?
1. They receive licensing fees from the commercial third parties and in handheld devices (JavaME)
2. Certification fees
3. Hardware/software/support in their integrated platform offerings (admittedly this has suffered due to the popularity of commodity OSs like Linux)
4. (Indirectly) Not having to pay development staff to produce and support implementations
Oracle is attempting to dam the river so they can sell water to people downstream. If they are not careful, people are just going to find another water source.
I don't see this as the "end of Java", but I do see it as the end of the cohesive, constructive community built around Java. I expect to see fewer JSRs being ratified, more independent third-party libraries being used, and a lot of fragmentation in the community like we saw with web UI frameworks before JSF was introduced. I think it will be up to the container providers to try to hold it together and provide a consistent experience for developers.
Why? I've been using JBoss for years and it seems to be a very robust, agile, and well-managed project, particularly after being acquired by RedHat.
Besides, I wouldn't expect "JBoss" itself to mess with the JVM. I would expect RedHat and SuSE to put effort behind maintaining/optimizing the free JVM, especially given their respective stances on free software.
Why would you have to memorize anything? In the video they have a very cool animation where the letters are magnified as the finger moves. Presumably the same kind of interface could be (or has been) developed to aid in memorizing the gestures. I absolutely cannot stand virtual touch keyboards on mobile devices--this on the other hand would actually make me consider a touch-screen device. (I currently have a e71x with a tiny little physical qwerty keyboard that I can almost tolerate.)
Oracle is not in the mobile market, except in the sense that they now own Java and want to collect royalties for the use of Java in handheld devices. Sun has always required royalties for J2ME (Micro edition) in handheld devices. The issue here is that Google tried to weasel out of royalties by making a Java-compatible VM based on J2SE (Standard Edition) which is GPL and open. The problem is that this move violates the *spirit* of the original Java licensing agreement, which as to open Java for desktop/server use and charge royalties for Java on handheld devices.
I listened to Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at Java One in 2005 and he made the claim that handhelds were the future and where Sun's focus would be. One of his statements was about how there were virtually no desktop computers or land lines in rural areas / developing nations (India, China, Africa) but cell phones were ubiquitous. J2ME (at the time) was on 1 billion handhelds (now over 2 billion I believe). Whatever the royalties are, it is a significant source of revenue.
The success of Oracle's lawsuit will depend whether the wording of the licenses is such that a derivative of J2SE on a handheld device can be considered to be essentially J2ME. I.e. does any flavor of, or derivative of, Java on a handheld require licensing and royalty payments? And it may come down to whether certain APIs or implementations are shared between J2SE and J2ME, which is almost certainly the case.
Google tried to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted the ability to leverage a massive preexisting class library and huge developer population without paying the royalties to Sun/Oracle. So they made a byte code translator to allow developers to build and compile using Java, and execute on the Dalvik VM.
Harmony is in the clear, because the Apache Foundation is not trying to sell handheld devices with Harmony embedded. (Same with OpenJDK, GCJ, etc.)
I think Sun could have successfully sued Google over this, but chose not to, probably because it would be messy and because the goodwill with Google was more valuable. For Oracle it's a potential revenue stream. The intent isn't to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but to get a chunk of each egg that comes out.
Break down your tasks into actionable items and ask management for a priority. When "Do X" becomes "Do I work on A, B, or C first?", and it is apparent that A, B, and C require nontrivial investments of resources, then it becomes more real to management. Further, in doing pieces A and B you can demonstrate progress toward completing X as a whole, whereas the nebulous "X" is either done or it is not.
This is an old technique for software project management. Take each requirement, break it into use cases, and put a level of effort next to each use case. A high-level requirement like "Add security to the app" becomes hundreds of "Restrict action A on target B to roles X,Y, and Z" use cases. Each one may take an hour. So whereas a manager might reject a blanket 100 hour estimate for "Add security to the app", showing him or her that there are hundreds of source objects to update, each of which requires checkout, modification, testing, and check-in, then the 100 hour estimate seem more reasonable. (This also shows that you put thought into the estimate and its not an off-the-cuff figure.) And if you get 8 use cases done per day, well that's measurable.
Also, if you can demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in your estimates then you will be taken more seriously. The smaller the unit of work, the more accurate the estimate. If you do 6 use cases in 6 hours (at 1 hour apiece), and then have 2 hours worth of meetings, you're still 100% accurate. Whereas if you estimate 100 hours for X and three weeks later it isn't done, then your credibility is shot. Meetings don't (usually) show up in the issue tracking system, so they aren't measurable. (The 50% or 75% devoted argument is not very effective in my experience.)
I used to say that I didn't have time to do the administrative part of development. But the reality is that I don't have time *not* to do it. Break it down and make it measurable, and then the demands (or at least the expectations) will become more realistic.
I writer server software as well, but I get irritated to the point of distraction by the laggy performance of my IDE (NetBeans in my case).
Probably a troll, but I'll bite.
My point was that NetBeans and Eclipse are written in Swing and SWT (respectively). These, as well as SQuirreL, JXplorer, and a number of other Java client applications perform as well as native applications on Windows and Linux. Not so with OS X. And to make matters worse, the look/feel of the Cocoa bindings hasn't changed since the early 10.1/10.2 days, and the bubbly aqua stuff is really out of place with the rest of the OS.
I'm primarily a web-based applications developer, but I've done a few things with Swing. It has an impressive API and NetBeans/Eclipse are proof that applications written with these technologies can be made to perform well.
I can't think of a single reason to drop Apple _hardware_. Their hardware is fantastic. I have a 3-year old MacBook that has survived to major drink spills, being dropped many times on a tile floor from the arm of a couch, and being routinely trampled by a 1- and 4-year old. I love their hardware.
But if you are a serious Java developer, there are plenty of reasons to drop OS X, though, foremost being the performance of Swing/SWT and the version lag. I've always felt that Apple's support for Java was grudging and second-rate.
Java on OS X has always been a second-class citizen. Swing and SWT apps (read: NetBeans and Eclipse) have always been ridiculously slow and ugly on OS X compared to Windows or Linux on similar hardware and the OS X JVM /JDK is always months (or years!) behind the official version.
So as much as I like Macs and OS X, I ended up switching to Linux a long time ago. Cheaper, faster, better tools.
This is some of what Java has going for it:
1. Massive standard class library covering everything from smartphones to distributed application servers
2. Huge amounts of third-party support. If you can think of it, someone somewhere has written a library for it, and chances are it's open source
3. The best IDEs in existence. NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc. all come with built in support for unit testing, dependency management, source control (mercurial, SVN, git, you name it), profiling, local and remote debugging, etc.
4. Agent support for instrumentation and runtime redeployment. Using tools like JRebel I can edit code in my IDE and see the results instantly in the application server, and *still* take advantage of strong typing, etc.
5. Object-Relation-Management (ORM). Tools like TopLink and Hibernate mean that you can reverse engineer a class model from a DB, or generate a DB from a class model, and use the ORM API to effortlessly add optimistic locking, transaction management, and object based queries to your app
6. Application servers support distributed transaction management (XA) and messaging (JMS) on top of a generalize connection management framework (JCA) in which any vendor can provide a standard connector (resource adapter) to their systems and participate in global two-phase transactions
7. Open driver support for virtually every data store; lots of choices for embedded in-memory SQL/RDBMS databases
8. Container-based pooling, caching, and transaction management
9. Dependency management and build systems like Ant, Maven, Hudson, and Sonar that enable you to very easily configure scheduled builds with static code analysis, automated unit tests, and concise reports of errors with references to changesets included in the build
10. Perhaps the largest collection of forums, blogs, and online documentation for any platform
11. Strong typing, API contracts, and runtime introspection identify issues at compile/deploy time, rather than runtime
12. Strong industry support from multiple vendors (Google, Oracle, IBM, RedHat, etc.)
So, if you're writing a little GTK widget for managing your MP3 collection, maybe Java isn't for you. But if you are a medium-to-large business chances are you either develop or administer an enterprise-scale Java application.
Another thing to consider is that the vast majority of Java tools and libraries are open source, and many of the specifications are formed once an open source toolset reaches a certain level of maturity/popularity. For example, Hibernate did most of the legwork for JPA; JSF was initiated largely due to the success of Struts; and WebBeans is a formal spec defining the basics what Seam provides. So all Oracle really has to do is keep the JCP going and publish the standards while RedHat (JBoss), IBM, the Glassfish development team, and everyone else provides the implementations. Oracle stays competitive with IBM and RedHat by offering a development stack (based on Oracle DB, Oracle AS, Oracle JDeveloper, etc. all of which use Java) *and* continues to collect licensing fees from the other players. Plus they have a little more say in the JCP process, which gives them a slight advantage when ratifying new APIs.
Not to mention that Java is installed in over 2.6 billion handheld devices, each of which pays a royalty fee to Oracle.
What surprises me is that Oracle is partnering with IBM on this venture. I wonder what IBM has on Oracle?
Not trying to be facetious, but this is the #1 reason I'm using Ubuntu instead of FC or OpenSUSE. (Not just Java specifically, but Java, restricted codecs, Flash, etc.) It also updates all of the relevant alternatives for me, as part of the package install, which is also very nice.
Write to your state legislature and request preferential voting ballots. The plurality system we have today causes people to vote for one of two candidates that is most likely to win and offends them the least. With preferential voting you can truly vote your conscience without "robbing" your second- or third-ranked candidate of a vote. Some states already have this; see:
http://instantrunoff.com/
http://www.fairvote.org/
Not sure what is meant by this, but at my local store they reintroduced late fees and they were harsh. Even for older releases you had 3 days to return the movie or it was automatically rented again ($5) and the cycle repeated until you paid the retail equivalent in rental fees at which point you owned the scratched, dented, smudged rental CD. The day the policy changed I started a Netflix account and never looked back.
I was using a self-checkout at a grocery store and was somewhat bemused when I was asked to put a helium-filled mylar ballon in the bag. Thankfully there was an employee nearby to override the machine's demands. I wonder what weight was associated with that UPC? Was it negative? :)
But it is in the best interest of merchants (faster flowing queues, less money spent on ink and paper), so perhaps we can appeal to their greed. This is basically most useful on a debit card; generally banks like it when you keep a positive balance and get really ugly when you overdraft.
However, even credit card companies wouldn't be hit that hard. Ever notice how your balances from them always shows how much *more* you have to spend and how payments are the parenthetical/red items on your statements? Same thing applies here. If you're apt to go into debt then *how much* you are in debt doesn't really matter until you're close to your limit, in which case credit card companies are more than happy to shut you down.
I'd love it if my credit card stored a history of my transactions and I was able to bring it home and upload them to my accounting software. That way I could easily compare the transactions my bank thinks I made vs. the ones I know I made without having to use paper receipts. And all those coupons you get from the grocery store could be uploaded directly to the card and automatically applied on the next purchase (provided they haven't expired). The cost savings on printer ribbon would be huge and the time savings at the checkout queue could possibly lead to a reduction in manual labor (and an increase in overall customer satisfaction). Survey codes could be embedded into the receipt as well, and could open automatically in your browser when clicked on.
If I'm not using cash I don't see the need to deal with any paper at all, especially not a meter-long strip of paper folded fifty times.
I'm a huge KDE fan and after getting fed up with Kubuntu I tried OpenSUSE. I really wanted to like OpenSUSE, and I did at first. I was very impressed with the LVM support in the installer and the ability to import my existing fstab settings. I have various data drives and Samba shares I like to have permanently mounted, and it was a pain to have to update these every time I do an install.
But after several days of frustration an automated kernel update botched and left me with an unbootable system, and rather than repair the OpenSUSE install I decided to go back to Ubuntu. After the magic of the initial install I got fed up trying to make it do the simplest things. For example, it wouldn't play MP3s out of the box (ridiculous!) so I went to the OpenSUSE site and found a very lengthy and poorly formatted forum-style wiki on setting up non-free decoders. I tried several of the different options and none worked. So after hours of hunting I came across a blog walking me through adding the gstreamer back end for Phonon and all of the restricted codecs, which were in a separate Packman repo with a dubious cert. After about 8 hours and a couple reboots I was finally able to listen to MP3s.
I also really dislike having to add all kinds of third party repos in order to install the simplest things. Yes it's flexible and free, but who do I trust? Will the packages and dependencies work together? Do these guys know what they're doing? Am I better of building from source? I don't want to have to go to some web site and search for an RPM, only to find several variations from various repos. How to I choose? And every time I opened the YaST package manager (which was frequently due to the spartan install) it would spend 2 minutes refreshing all of the packages. Installing Sun JDK 6 and updating the alternatives was a pain. Installing VirtualBox was a pain (it didn't add my user to the vboxuser group and failed with an vague error message.) Basically, it took me 3 whole days to get a system set up whereas in Ubuntu it's 3 clicks. Ubuntu even prompts you with a dialog if you try to do something but need a package that isn't installed (codecs, Samba, non-free drivers, you name it).
There's lots of other little irritating things too. Wireless didn't work, so I had to change to the other broadcom driver, which involved blacklisting kernel modules. I never got that working 100%... after every reboot I'd have to rmmod ssb bcwl wl and then modprobe bcwl before things would work. Also, KWrite was the default text editor and Kate wasn't even installed, so I hat to install Kate and update every single text MIME type to use Kate instead of KWrite. The menus are arranged so you have to navigate 4 levels deep to find anything, and the categorization is not intuitive. I also had to play around with ALSA to configure DMix so that sound would work. And for some reason you have to explicitly tell it you want 3D support and hunt down and install a bunch of non-default packages for that.
Other than the botched kernel update, these are the same issues I have with virtual every Linux distro. (Getting rid of noveau in favor of the proprietary Nvidia drivers on FC12 was a *bear*. No one should have to edit grub configurations and kernel module blacklists.) I've been using Linux for almost a decade, and it's still a pain to set it up. Ubuntu has its problems (pulseaudio stutters and has a wonky volume range; Ubuntu One music store is incredibly flaky) but its default configuration is much more friendly than the other distros, and the Wikis, forums, and bug tracking tools (and community) are outstanding. I much prefer KDE to Gnome, but I'd rather use the stable/clean Gnome on Ubuntu then KDE on another other distro. (I don't consider Kubuntu to be "stable".)
So kudos for Ubuntu ... it's not perfect, but at least they make the simple things simple and have sane defaults.
Not for those of us using free software.
You always have three choices:
1. Accept the terms under which the product is licensed
2. Purchase or lease a different product with better licensing terms
3. Write your own
Someone puts forth capital and offers a product under certain conditions. You agree to those conditions and then expect to be able to break them without consequence. This is breach of contract. I fail to see the issue. If you didn't like the terms, why did you enter the contract?
(And, as an aside, you can't have it both ways. Either software is a product you purchase and can re-sell, in which case patents are appropriate and piracy is theft; or it is "information" to which you enter into a contract to obtain the right to use under certain terms [GPL etc. included], in which case copyrights are appropriate and piracy is "infringement".)
And yes, if you were prompted with a EULA and you clicked "I agree" then you willingly entered into the contract. (The ability to reject the EULA and receive a refund is another issue and one in which I support consumer rights.)
Try opening Xine and going to Preferences -> Audio and changing "ALSA" to "Pulseaudio". That should make the Xine backend for Phonon pipe through PA now. The PulseAudio device shows up in the Multimedia configuration (provided you add "pulseaudio -D" to your ~/.kde/env directory to run before KDE starts), but I guess even if you output to that device it still tries to go through Xine, which could be hitting OSS or ALSA. (And I suspect that since the PA server is using the ALSA device already there is no sound unless you happen to have hardware mixing. That's all just speculation, but it seems reasonable.)
Of course, Xine+PA broke for some reason with the 4.5 update on Lucid. Supposedly it's fixed in Maverick, but won't be backported to Lucid. I spent a day trying to get DMix set up and reverting everything (Xine, VirtualBox, etc.) back to ALSA. Very irritating.
While I don't disagree with your sentiment vis a vis the meaning of life, it's far more likely that our ancestors cut down more trees than they ever planted. Perhaps this is cynical, but I tend to think that thousands of generations of people simply couldn't manage to consume what we have now. Every new generation just inherits the leftovers.
I'm personally of the opinion that if we can't get it right on Earth we have no hope (or business) in space. Plant trees, reduce consumption, live sustainably, and then we just might (eventually) develop the discipline required to cope with the scarcity we will be confronted with in space or extrasolar colonies.
No worries. It still doesn't work.
Seconded. I've used them all, and keep coming back to KDE. SC 4.3 and previous were incredibly buggy, but 4.4.5 is a lot better and I expect 4.5 to be pretty solid. I can't live without Kate, and I much prefer Dolphin+kdesvn to Nautilus. Kontact/kdepim are not yet fully mature, but I still much prefer them to Evolution. Amarok, krfb, k3b, digiKam, ark, klipper, kopete, etc. are all as good or better than the Gnome equivalents. And this is in spite of the fact that there is very little support for KDE from the majority of distros and the development resources they have.
Yes, Akonadi, Nepomuk and Strigi are useless and aggravating at the moment, but philosophically both centralized PIM services and contextual searching are steps in the right direction (although the implementations leave a lot to be desired).
For everyone complaining about the emphasis on eye candy, have you even checked the release feature lists? Sure there are eye candy improvements, but those are very much in the minority. They just happen to be the most visible because when you show screenshots, that's all that really shows up. For every plasma improvement there are scores of tactical improvements that put KDE in a better position in the long term.
And keep in mind, a lot of the improvements are contributions from the community. If there is an active volunteer developer with a pet project (such as kdegames or whatnot) then its no surprise that these sorts of improvements make it into each release.
When I look at KDE I see a well designed framework of integrated and pluggable services, applications, and subsystems. When I look at Gnome I see a collection of do-one-thing-and-do-it-well applications scattered about. Purely a matter of preference, but if I had to place bets on the long-term viability of each DE, I'd put my money on QT/KDE, especially given QTs foothold in the mobile market.
Different things work for different people. I find that I organize files on my computer the same way I organize files on my desk -- in piles. If it's in a pile, it's important, and if it's on top it's *really* important. Every day or so I go through the piles and one of three things happens to each thing in the pile: 1) I deal with it (pay bill, file statement, etc.); 2) Decide it's no longer important and throw it away; 3) Leave it in the pile to go through later.
On my computer, everything first goes in the Desktop folder. Why? Couple of reasons:
1. It's staring me in the face until I file it away, delete it, or otherwise handle it
2. It's easy to find. Desktop search tools are slow and useless. grep "foo" in a single folder takes a lot less time than find . -exec grep {} \;
3. Most of my documents fall into several categories, and I don't remember where I put things. Did my SQL script go under doc/sql, lib/sql, examples/sql, snippets/sql, hotfixes/sql or what? Did my HR document go under company/doc, doc/company, etc.? I don't have time to obsessively categories and maintain consistent directory structures and cross-references.
Something like meta tags would be very useful. Something that says "oh, a .sql extension ... let me automatically assign the tags 'script', 'sql', and 'txt'" and then let the user add, modify, and search that list.