If his name doesn't ring a bell, he's a Java guru who works for Sun and wrote the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Java Language Spec. A bunch of his papers are listed here.
It's a relief that JDK 1.6 won't include any language changes (as far as I know?). Updating various parsers and whatnot to work with all the JDK 1.5 language changes was a big job, although some of the new features certainly are quite handy.
...some of the recent changes in CVS have some Microsoft Project integration, too. GForge is pretty good at handling reasonably heavy loads. And you can even get commercial support.
I'm not affiliated with GForge Group, although I was a committer on GForge for a while.
This is in the section where he's talking about filling in event handlers for a VB form:
> This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a > program not as a complete coherent document, > but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects.
So true. You can't "read" the program, instead, you can only leap about from handler to handler. And another good point when talking about a XAML demo:
> It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks > of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML.
I'm not sure about this one - seems that one of the few times that duplicated code is OK is when it's in generated code; i.e., in a JavaCC-generated parser. For everything else, there's CPD, the Copy/Paste Detector.
The most recent issue of Linux Magazine had an editorial article on needing bigger, more powerful laptops. I agree completely - my HP zd7000 laptop sits on my desk at home until I take it to work where it then sits on my desk there. I need it to be powerful and portable, but not necessarily great for working on at an airport waiting lounge. As long as it runs FC4 on VMWare fine, I'm happy.
> The auto parts company Delphi is asking for their non-management staff to accept > 50-69% pay cuts, (these workers were described as being basically worthless in a > speech the CEO gave two weeks ago) while the managers that have presided over the > company sliding into bankruptcy are going to get massive raises.
In this case, unions extracted benefit promises from Delphi so that a worker making $25 per hour was promised $65 per hour in retirement benefits. Now Delphi is unable to meet those obligations and is filing for Chapter 11.
If only the unions had negotiated for 401(k) benefits vs pension plans! Nothing says "we care about our people" like cash up front. And Social Security is Delphi in the large.
From a scan of the Agitar forums it looks like they use JDK 1.5 annotations to do a sort of design by contract thing. Annotations are a great idea for this sort of thing; I've been working annotations into PMD to suppress warnings and it makes things a lot clearer.
Of course, those become less valuable when folks add RSS feeds that aren't specific to the topic, so that Java posts show up in the Ruby feeds and all that. That can be tricky too, though; does this post go under Jabber or PostgreSQL? Dunno.
Seems like Ruby on Rails is competing for web apps too - lots of comparisons are floating around out there. Some large sites are converting over, too, like Derek Siver's "CD Baby" - he blogged on the conversion here.
I've certainly found Rails to be a good fit with interfacing with a Jabber PostgreSQL backend. Good times!
...they've certainly helped me with the PMD JDeveloper extension a couple of times.
Most recently, I was trying to get the "update center" functionality working this past weekend and I got emails from several Oracle guys with fixes for various problems. It's pretty nice to get help right from the core guys...
> they could try and hire all the main developers or something
Right on, yup, that's about the only way they could do that - by hiring Tom Lane or some of the other gurus. But they can't "buy PostgreSQL". There have been some interesting discussions on this on the pgsql-advocacy list recently as well.
> And I'm glad of that as Postgres is my favorite rdbms.
Same here! 3.5 million records and cranking along; PostgreSQL is meeting RubyForge's needs very nicely.
...a Ruby plugin, that is; this one done by Rob McKinnon. It's a good piece of work, although of course all the "code completion is hard for dynamic languages" applies here as well.
Yup, and meanwhile PostgreSQL is prepping an 8.1 release with shared row locking, table partitioning, and better SMP support. Draft press release is here.
Anecdotally, RubyForge got 240K hits yesterday on a GForge site backed by a PostgreSQL 8 database with no problems; good times. PostgreSQL is good enough that our problem is bandwidth, not server load.
> In both the focus is always (in theory anyway:P) on progress > rather than the goods that follow
Hm... do you think that's true for programming? I mean... if someone declares that they are working on, say, a Java compiler, and they work on it faithfully for a year or so, releasing once a month, and then quit before being able to finish the "emit bytecode" part - wouldn't that be viewed as a bit of a failure as a Java compiler since the real product was never done?
Of course, it would be a great learning experience, and possibly a fine master's thesis topic... but would it be a success as an open source project?
The purpose of this course is to study the philosophical foundations and theories that have developed in the open source/free software field. Beginning with a historical view of the developments in theory and philosophy the course participants will continue their study of the phenomenon and also be given the opportunity to discuss the new issues these development philosophies have given rise to. Additionally the question of whether these same theories and philosophies can be applied in other fields of intellectual endeavour aside from programming.
Sounds like nifty stuff, although not much in the way of actually fiddling with open source code. I guess it depends on what aspect of OSS you're trying to focus on...
...it was a Java client that used Apache Axis and the GForge SOAP API to make a GUI client. I made a little jEdit plugin and a little JFreeChart app that showed user and project charts.
I wasn't really using the GUI client very much, though, so I ran out of interest. But if something like that was available that could talk to the SourceForge servers, I'd buy it...
Sun gets to use repackage PostgreSQL however they like, more people will be using PostgreSQL and finding bugs and adding features and writing utilities, more books will be sold, more consulting opportunities - everyone wins.
I've had people contribute code to PMD and say they were only contributing it because they felt the BSD license avoided any possible obligations on their part. And the products that are based on PMD? Just means more books sold. Good times!
...is simply to write a book about your open source project. The project users get better documentation for your project, the managers feel a bit better about using a product that has some paper documentation, and while you're writing the book you'll run across all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies in your code which you can fix and document.
Downsides are that it's a lot of work and that it doesn't make a ton of money; maybe just enough to keep one person going. But in my experience it's well worth the effort.
> The battle has been "won" in that "nanotechnology" has been repackaged > to refer to "really small stuff", rather than to Drexlerian nano-assemblers.
Well said. Same goes for AI; those who declare that "we now have have AI" mean "we now have good chess programs".
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If his name doesn't ring a bell, he's a Java guru who works for Sun and wrote the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Java Language Spec. A bunch of his papers are listed here.
It's a relief that JDK 1.6 won't include any language changes (as far as I know?). Updating various parsers and whatnot to work with all the JDK 1.5 language changes was a big job, although some of the new features certainly are quite handy.
...some of the recent changes in CVS have some Microsoft Project integration, too. GForge is pretty good at handling reasonably heavy loads. And you can even get commercial support.
I'm not affiliated with GForge Group, although I was a committer on GForge for a while.
This is in the section where he's talking about filling in event handlers for a VB form:
> This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a
> program not as a complete coherent document,
> but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects.
So true. You can't "read" the program, instead, you can only leap about from handler to handler. And another good point when talking about a XAML demo:
> It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks
> of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML.
I'm not sure about this one - seems that one of the few times that duplicated code is OK is when it's in generated code; i.e., in a JavaCC-generated parser. For everything else, there's CPD, the Copy/Paste Detector.
The most recent issue of Linux Magazine had an editorial article on needing bigger, more powerful laptops. I agree completely - my HP zd7000 laptop sits on my desk at home until I take it to work where it then sits on my desk there. I need it to be powerful and portable, but not necessarily great for working on at an airport waiting lounge. As long as it runs FC4 on VMWare fine, I'm happy.
> The auto parts company Delphi is asking for their non-management staff to accept
> 50-69% pay cuts, (these workers were described as being basically worthless in a
> speech the CEO gave two weeks ago) while the managers that have presided over the
> company sliding into bankruptcy are going to get massive raises.
In this case, unions extracted benefit promises from Delphi so that a worker making $25 per hour was promised $65 per hour in retirement benefits. Now Delphi is unable to meet those obligations and is filing for Chapter 11.
If only the unions had negotiated for 401(k) benefits vs pension plans! Nothing says "we care about our people" like cash up front. And Social Security is Delphi in the large.
From a scan of the Agitar forums it looks like they use JDK 1.5 annotations to do a sort of design by contract thing. Annotations are a great idea for this sort of thing; I've been working annotations into PMD to suppress warnings and it makes things a lot clearer.
i.e., Artima's Ruby Buzz and Java Buzz, Planet PostgreSQL and so forth.
Of course, those become less valuable when folks add RSS feeds that aren't specific to the topic, so that Java posts show up in the Ruby feeds and all that. That can be tricky too, though; does this post go under Jabber or PostgreSQL? Dunno.
Seems like Ruby on Rails is competing for web apps too - lots of comparisons are floating around out there. Some large sites are converting over, too, like Derek Siver's "CD Baby" - he blogged on the conversion here.
I've certainly found Rails to be a good fit with interfacing with a Jabber PostgreSQL backend. Good times!
Are here. Not many folks still using IE 6.0! Of course, RubyForge is a pretty niche web site...
I would have posted the stats here, but the lameness filter stymied me. Ah well.
...they've certainly helped me with the PMD JDeveloper extension a couple of times.
Most recently, I was trying to get the "update center" functionality working this past weekend and I got emails from several Oracle guys with fixes for various problems. It's pretty nice to get help right from the core guys...
> they could try and hire all the main developers or something
Right on, yup, that's about the only way they could do that - by hiring Tom Lane or some of the other gurus. But they can't "buy PostgreSQL". There have been some interesting discussions on this on the pgsql-advocacy list recently as well.
> And I'm glad of that as Postgres is my favorite rdbms.
Same here! 3.5 million records and cranking along; PostgreSQL is meeting RubyForge's needs very nicely.
...a Ruby plugin, that is; this one done by Rob McKinnon. It's a good piece of work, although of course all the "code completion is hard for dynamic languages" applies here as well.
For what it's worth, enscript works fine for doing Ruby syntax highlighting if that's all you need.
I've been using xdb_sql to log user registrations and roster changes and whatnot to PostgreSQL; notes on that are here.
The more Jabber developers and users the better... it'll just keep getting faster and more stable!
Sorry for the delay in replying, here's a description of the hardware.
I should really do an analysis of how many queries the DB processes per day/hour/whatever; that would be more useful.
Yup, and meanwhile PostgreSQL is prepping an 8.1 release with shared row locking, table partitioning, and better SMP support. Draft press release is here.
Anecdotally, RubyForge got 240K hits yesterday on a GForge site backed by a PostgreSQL 8 database with no problems; good times. PostgreSQL is good enough that our problem is bandwidth, not server load.
> In both the focus is always (in theory anyway :P) on progress
> rather than the goods that follow
Hm... do you think that's true for programming? I mean... if someone declares that they are working on, say, a Java compiler, and they work on it faithfully for a year or so, releasing once a month, and then quit before being able to finish the "emit bytecode" part - wouldn't that be viewed as a bit of a failure as a Java compiler since the real product was never done?
Of course, it would be a great learning experience, and possibly a fine master's thesis topic... but would it be a success as an open source project?
I've been using PostgreSQL on a low-end site - RubyForge, 3.3M records - and it's comfortably handling 200K hits per day.
Maybe I can turn on logging for a day to count the queries; that would provide another data point.
...apparently posts on StringBuffer.toString() and XPath engine timing aren't wildly popular. Odd, that...
...it was a Java client that used Apache Axis and the GForge SOAP API to make a GUI client. I made a little jEdit plugin and a little JFreeChart app that showed user and project charts.
I wasn't really using the GUI client very much, though, so I ran out of interest. But if something like that was available that could talk to the SourceForge servers, I'd buy it...
Sun gets to use repackage PostgreSQL however they like, more people will be using PostgreSQL and finding bugs and adding features and writing utilities, more books will be sold, more consulting opportunities - everyone wins.
I've had people contribute code to PMD and say they were only contributing it because they felt the BSD license avoided any possible obligations on their part. And the products that are based on PMD? Just means more books sold. Good times!
...is simply to write a book about your open source project. The project users get better documentation for your project, the managers feel a bit better about using a product that has some paper documentation, and while you're writing the book you'll run across all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies in your code which you can fix and document.
Downsides are that it's a lot of work and that it doesn't make a ton of money; maybe just enough to keep one person going. But in my experience it's well worth the effort.
> The battle has been "won" in that "nanotechnology" has been repackaged
> to refer to "really small stuff", rather than to Drexlerian nano-assemblers.
Well said. Same goes for AI; those who declare that "we now have have AI" mean "we now have good chess programs".