I can't imagine my mom wanting to bother trying to set up wireless in ANY Linux distro
I haven't set wireless up at all, but with a wired network I found Windows was a pain in the ass; I had a 98 box and an XP laptop and had a hell of a time getting them to talk to each other. I put Mandrake (this was over five years ago) on both of them, and the Linux partitions were a piece of cake to network; it pretty much did it attomatically on installation.
Windows' vaunted "ease of use" is a myth, as is Linux's complexity. Windows' only claim to superiority to Linux is that it's prettier.
True. I can use iwconfig with the best of them, but NetworkManager is nice, clean, and incredibly simple. Been using it with Ubuntu since it debuted, and haven't wanted to go back to anything else.
Is 5.2 any better? I don't have a day to kill to try it...
We use CentOS where I work, and did find one interesting glitch in the upgrade to 5.2. We were using Xen hosts bridged onto the network, and found that the CentOS 5.2 upgrade *insists* on installing libvirt and starting up its own DHCP server, thereby breaking DHCP on the Xen hosts. Not that it wasn't trivial to fix, just annoying that a yum upgrade of a bunch of Xen Dom0 servers ended up temporarily taking down a bunch of VMs. Other than that, the upgrade was relatively painless.
From a bad experience or two, I have found that distribution upgrades on Ubuntu work, but only if you upgrade from one release to another. It usually breaks horribly and inexplicably if you upgrade before the official release or skip a release (upgrading 7.04 directly to 8.04, etc).
Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.
If this story (and the MS one before) doesn't alert you to the sad fact that you don't own any DRMd music you've bought, nothing will.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't buy any DRM'd music, preferring to deal as directly with the artist as possible, through places like CD Baby, which eschew DRM in favor of straight MP3 downloads once you have purchased an album.
Spiff, but the first two examples, from what I can tell don't solve the RPC issues. The 3rd is questionable, it may.
What Qt and Wt both offer in the RPC arena is SIMPLICITY. GWT does not offer this out of the box.
How so? GWT Designer, at least, creates one from the other, such that stubs for functions are created in the appropriate places, and it does check that the RPC calls are in the proper format, etc.
Also, do any of these allow me write a single app which splits the functionality of the server and browser for my without me having to do the work?
You mean determining which parts run on the client and which on the server? Create a class implementing RemoteService, populate it with methods, and they're all available to use via the *Async methods provided to you, almost as simple as calling them natively, with the exception of having to load the actual Async class in a particular way). This is done particularly well in GWT, and the UI design frontends for it hide much of the complexity.
I know GWT out of the box does not. Write your java code for the Browser, compile to javascript, Write your code for the server, put it on there using Tomcat or whatever. Hope you have your RPC calls handled proper...
How is this the case? If you're using native GWT-RPC this is handled for you. JSON RPC calls, you're on your own, but that's pretty much the way it is with all of the toolkits.
Last time I checked, GWT Designer (and even GWT "out of the box") supports an embedded tomcat container which allows full testing of an application without deploying it.
The point of GWT isn't that you can create pretty applications, but rather that you can create large web apps with all of the benefits you get from writing your code in Java. The OO and code reusability stuff makes it much less painful, and GWT does more or less remove you from the business of troubleshooting browser incompatibilities.
I find it interesting that you say YUI is an "actual javascript library" without using that term as a pejorative. An optimizing compiler/translator beats a js library in speed and efficiency hands down, since most of the kruft is removed during the compile stage.
What I really want to do it write an application like a gui where I write in a single language (c++/Java/whatever) and it deals with the browser and the server and I don't have to think about it, when a button is clicked this function is called, if it's on the server, great, if it's on the browser fine. Wt is very close. What it is missing is the graphical designer that Qt has. Add that and it will be quite the tool!
There's a saying that "It's hard to teach the old dogs some new tricks" (or sth like that) and this also might apply here. But the major reason why the GWT isn't widely seen in use is I think the lack (for now at least) of a strong need for it. I mean, most web apps I see still don't rely heavily (not to mention entirely) on JavaScript where using GWT as an alternative might be a big win (in some cases). There are some exceptions of course: apps which involve some serious browser coding (like Gmail or Google Maps though none of them done with GWT) but they're still in minority.
I beg to differ. I think that GWT is more directed at "traditional" UI designers who are trying to make the move to web based applications, but want to do so without sacrificing code quality and maintainability. We're seeing an increasing number of apps move away from traditional server-side page rendering, since more users appear to be asking for desktop-like response from their web apps. (hence "web 2.0" or whatever awful name is being used for it now)
This sounds kind of like ASP.NET development, minus the integrated IDE. Also, it's not particularly clear how to roll this out to my favorite hosted environment.
After screwing around with a lot of the well known JavaScript libraries (notably: Prototype+script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo and YUI) as well as a GWT, i settled for Prototype+script.aculo.us - simple, and easy were the main reasons behind this. In the end GWT didn't even come into the decision due to the restriction on server side language.
Could you explain this? GWT doesn't necessarily have to be run in a servlet container, it can be precompiled and left on the server to interface with things like PHP or Python, or just use the JSONRequest support in GWT. So, there's no actual advantage to using something like YUI or Dojo, since GWT can call back to whatever your server-side component is in the same way that YUI, Dojo, script.aculo.us, etc could.
Dojo was *horrible* to build an interface in, especially when the Dojo team kept breaking their API with every release, usually in subtle ways that weren't necessarily apparent.
GWT isn't a traditional Javascript framework. It doesn't have if...else clauses meant to give browser compatibility, but rather optimized chunks of heavily optimized Javascript which are selected based on locale and browser on initial load.
It's not fair to say that GWT has the same disadvantages as toolkits like Dojo, Ext, Prototype, etc, since it's really not the same thing.
Also, it's one of the few open "Web 2.0" frameworks to have a really nice visual designer available.
It's actually a pretty elegant solution. But then again, it's not really a "toolkit", which is usually a huge clot of Javascript, called in places in your code. It's a fantastic optimizing compiler. And though this is mentioned alsewhere, it's more for keeping yourself from having to maintain horrific hacks and large, unweildy Javascript codebases. Java is far easier to manage in a large project.
Firefox usage is mandated in some places for security reasons, preinstalled on a lot of machines, and also anecdotally preferred by a fair number of users for the neat plugins and extensible pieces.
I don't think that between 18.43 to 29.03% of web users are all considered "technical" users, either.
Don't worry, when the Watchmen movie finally comes out, we'll get a huge pantload of depressing bunk about the "scientific" aspects of all of it. And faintly in the background, you'll hear Alan Moore grinding his teeth.
Also, when you say "Batman is a wanker", do you mean the character, or a specific interpretation of it? I mean, I think we can all agree that the Schumacher turd-like adaptation was pretty awful, but the newer ones are much better. And Adam West's is a little too campy for most people...
I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.
I remember reading something like this in Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, where he postulated that if we didn't limit growth of humans on Earth, either famine, disease or war would limit our population for us. Great read.
The wording of the argument sounds a lot like the "No true scotsman" logical fallacy.
Face it, both muslims and christians have done horrible, unspeakable things. This in no way says that your average muslim or christian is about to cut someone's head off or burn someone at the stake. Also, those awful things that muslims in very conservative societies are doing are very similar to what certain parts of christianity are doing. Anyone who cherry-picks their literal interpretations of a book written centuries ago is going to get *something* wrong.
I liked the last pope better than this guy. As I recall, the last pope was the one to pardon Galileo and admit that science may have some merit...
If I could have gotten my Thinkpad without Vista, I would have. I just ended up putting Ubuntu on it, anyways. It just kinda sucks to know I've been bolstering their numbers as to how 37337 Vista is.
I agree that applications shouldn't use OS specific libraries... but developing apps with monodevelop 0.17 has been pretty easy, and has yielded pretty portable apps. (Stetic is a wonderful tool, especially after they integrated it into monodevelop)
Due to C# and mono, I was able to develop NSClient++ plugins which were able to be easily compatible across Windows server versions, yet were able to be tested on a Linux machine (I prefer ubuntu, and haven't actually owned a Windows machine in going on 8 or 9 years...). It's a useful technology, although dealing with both Windows.Forms and OS-dependent DLLs will be a bit of a pain in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't mention the war!
Obligatory video.
Or maybe Mr Burns.
Yeah, it's off-topic, but at least it's entertaining.
I can't imagine my mom wanting to bother trying to set up wireless in ANY Linux distro
I haven't set wireless up at all, but with a wired network I found Windows was a pain in the ass; I had a 98 box and an XP laptop and had a hell of a time getting them to talk to each other. I put Mandrake (this was over five years ago) on both of them, and the Linux partitions were a piece of cake to network; it pretty much did it attomatically on installation.
Windows' vaunted "ease of use" is a myth, as is Linux's complexity. Windows' only claim to superiority to Linux is that it's prettier.
True. I can use iwconfig with the best of them, but NetworkManager is nice, clean, and incredibly simple. Been using it with Ubuntu since it debuted, and haven't wanted to go back to anything else.
And here I was thinking it was a place where Hobbits got stoned.
Again, almost spit milk out my nose. Nice. Kinda like pointing out that Gran Paradiso sounds like an old hooker.
Is 5.2 any better? I don't have a day to kill to try it...
We use CentOS where I work, and did find one interesting glitch in the upgrade to 5.2. We were using Xen hosts bridged onto the network, and found that the CentOS 5.2 upgrade *insists* on installing libvirt and starting up its own DHCP server, thereby breaking DHCP on the Xen hosts. Not that it wasn't trivial to fix, just annoying that a yum upgrade of a bunch of Xen Dom0 servers ended up temporarily taking down a bunch of VMs. Other than that, the upgrade was relatively painless.
From a bad experience or two, I have found that distribution upgrades on Ubuntu work, but only if you upgrade from one release to another. It usually breaks horribly and inexplicably if you upgrade before the official release or skip a release (upgrading 7.04 directly to 8.04, etc).
Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.
If this story (and the MS one before) doesn't alert you to the sad fact that you don't own any DRMd music you've bought, nothing will.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't buy any DRM'd music, preferring to deal as directly with the artist as possible, through places like CD Baby, which eschew DRM in favor of straight MP3 downloads once you have purchased an album.
Spiff, but the first two examples, from what I can tell don't solve the RPC issues. The 3rd is questionable, it may.
What Qt and Wt both offer in the RPC arena is SIMPLICITY. GWT does not offer this out of the box.
How so? GWT Designer, at least, creates one from the other, such that stubs for functions are created in the appropriate places, and it does check that the RPC calls are in the proper format, etc.
Also, do any of these allow me write a single app which splits the functionality of the server and browser for my without me having to do the work?
You mean determining which parts run on the client and which on the server? Create a class implementing RemoteService, populate it with methods, and they're all available to use via the *Async methods provided to you, almost as simple as calling them natively, with the exception of having to load the actual Async class in a particular way). This is done particularly well in GWT, and the UI design frontends for it hide much of the complexity.
I know GWT out of the box does not. Write your java code for the Browser, compile to javascript, Write your code for the server, put it on there using Tomcat or whatever. Hope you have your RPC calls handled proper...
How is this the case? If you're using native GWT-RPC this is handled for you. JSON RPC calls, you're on your own, but that's pretty much the way it is with all of the toolkits.
Last time I checked, GWT Designer (and even GWT "out of the box") supports an embedded tomcat container which allows full testing of an application without deploying it.
Next problem with GWT, please.
You could always just GWT with toolkits like that ...
The point of GWT isn't that you can create pretty applications, but rather that you can create large web apps with all of the benefits you get from writing your code in Java. The OO and code reusability stuff makes it much less painful, and GWT does more or less remove you from the business of troubleshooting browser incompatibilities.
I find it interesting that you say YUI is an "actual javascript library" without using that term as a pejorative. An optimizing compiler/translator beats a js library in speed and efficiency hands down, since most of the kruft is removed during the compile stage.
Yeah, it would be great if there were just some UI designer tools available ....
I beg to differ. I think that GWT is more directed at "traditional" UI designers who are trying to make the move to web based applications, but want to do so without sacrificing code quality and maintainability. We're seeing an increasing number of apps move away from traditional server-side page rendering, since more users appear to be asking for desktop-like response from their web apps. (hence "web 2.0" or whatever awful name is being used for it now)
It just begs the question, Who is the Drizzle?
Yeah, no integrated IDE available.
Could you explain this? GWT doesn't necessarily have to be run in a servlet container, it can be precompiled and left on the server to interface with things like PHP or Python, or just use the JSONRequest support in GWT. So, there's no actual advantage to using something like YUI or Dojo, since GWT can call back to whatever your server-side component is in the same way that YUI, Dojo, script.aculo.us, etc could.
Dojo was *horrible* to build an interface in, especially when the Dojo team kept breaking their API with every release, usually in subtle ways that weren't necessarily apparent.
You might want to take a look at Google Gadget support, which does a lot of #1, and does it with the same advantages you'd get writing a pure GWT app.
GWT isn't a traditional Javascript framework. It doesn't have if...else clauses meant to give browser compatibility, but rather optimized chunks of heavily optimized Javascript which are selected based on locale and browser on initial load.
It's not fair to say that GWT has the same disadvantages as toolkits like Dojo, Ext, Prototype, etc, since it's really not the same thing.
Also, it's one of the few open "Web 2.0" frameworks to have a really nice visual designer available.
GWT *does* do this, as detailed on their code FAQ: http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60559&topic=10211
It's actually a pretty elegant solution. But then again, it's not really a "toolkit", which is usually a huge clot of Javascript, called in places in your code. It's a fantastic optimizing compiler. And though this is mentioned alsewhere, it's more for keeping yourself from having to maintain horrific hacks and large, unweildy Javascript codebases. Java is far easier to manage in a large project.
Just go catch it at Apple's trailer site, where it has been since the day before Dark Knight debuted.
It looks like someone has already started the process for Firefox, at least.
I'll feed the troll a bit.
Firefox usage is mandated in some places for security reasons, preinstalled on a lot of machines, and also anecdotally preferred by a fair number of users for the neat plugins and extensible pieces.
I don't think that between 18.43 to 29.03% of web users are all considered "technical" users, either.
It isn't *included*, but it's definitely *supported*. Just go here with Firefox to install their root cert.
Don't worry, when the Watchmen movie finally comes out, we'll get a huge pantload of depressing bunk about the "scientific" aspects of all of it. And faintly in the background, you'll hear Alan Moore grinding his teeth.
Also, when you say "Batman is a wanker", do you mean the character, or a specific interpretation of it? I mean, I think we can all agree that the Schumacher turd-like adaptation was pretty awful, but the newer ones are much better. And Adam West's is a little too campy for most people ...
I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.
StupidI remember reading something like this in Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, where he postulated that if we didn't limit growth of humans on Earth, either famine, disease or war would limit our population for us. Great read.
The wording of the argument sounds a lot like the "No true scotsman" logical fallacy.
Face it, both muslims and christians have done horrible, unspeakable things. This in no way says that your average muslim or christian is about to cut someone's head off or burn someone at the stake. Also, those awful things that muslims in very conservative societies are doing are very similar to what certain parts of christianity are doing. Anyone who cherry-picks their literal interpretations of a book written centuries ago is going to get *something* wrong.
I liked the last pope better than this guy. As I recall, the last pope was the one to pardon Galileo and admit that science may have some merit...
If I could have gotten my Thinkpad without Vista, I would have. I just ended up putting Ubuntu on it, anyways. It just kinda sucks to know I've been bolstering their numbers as to how 37337 Vista is.
I agree that applications shouldn't use OS specific libraries... but developing apps with monodevelop 0.17 has been pretty easy, and has yielded pretty portable apps. (Stetic is a wonderful tool, especially after they integrated it into monodevelop)
Due to C# and mono, I was able to develop NSClient++ plugins which were able to be easily compatible across Windows server versions, yet were able to be tested on a Linux machine (I prefer ubuntu, and haven't actually owned a Windows machine in going on 8 or 9 years ...). It's a useful technology, although dealing with both Windows.Forms and OS-dependent DLLs will be a bit of a pain in the future.