Andrej Koelewijn

Thought i might try another one, while i’m testing blogging clients. This time i’m using blogdesk. Ok, here we go with the images:

No copy, paste, but you can insert an image from the clipboard through a menu. Not as fast, but will work. And the first time i tried it, it didn’t work. The image is opened in an image editor where you can resize it. This again, isn’t without flaws. I opted to resize the image to 400px, so i entered 400, and tabbed out of the field. Nothing happened. So i started looking for a resize button. Nothing. Put my cursor in the size field again, entered 400, and pressed return. That works! You have to press enter. Very intuitive…

To upload to wordpress i had to configure ftp again. Seems like wordpress doesn’t support image upload.

So far i like live writer better.

I’ve looked at using a desktop blog editor before, but couldn’t find one which i liked. My main reason for using a blog client would be to avoid having to upload images. I just want to write a text, drag some images into the text and save it to my blog. I tried some clients but they all required me to upload images through some ftp window. Too much work. I want something which works like MS-Word. Paste an image into you text, resize and crop it in your document, and save it. No more external image programs required.

So far, Live Writer seems to be better already. I’ve just pasted a screenshot into this text and resized it. Cropping isn’t supported as far as i can tell. You can apply some effects to your image, like black and white and watermarking, but no cropping. Hope it ends up in the production release.

What about uploading? Let’s test…

Update: image upload is not seemless with wordpress. I had to enter ftp configuration details, like where to save the image. Also, i would think that a good image program would generate smaller images.

Conclusion: not bad, not great, but better than an html interface when adding a lot of images with a post.

When I read the summary of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Search Engine as Leeches on the Web, my first reaction was what? You gotta be kidding me. His summary is as follows:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

This seems so wrong. Without google many sites would not exist. Many sites depend on google to deliver visitors, and they depend on google for income, through adsense. So how is google leeching on these sites?

But Jakob Nielsen isn’t talking about these sites. He’s talking about webstores that get customers through adwords. And his conclusion is that most of the profit of these webstores is going straight to google to pay for the adwords. He’s probably right about this.

His solution, improve customer loyalty, is correct, but misses in my opinion the most important ideas. He suggest to improve customer loyalty by using email newletters, request marketing, affiliate programs, news feeds. These are all good ideas, but i don’t think these will turn me in a loyal customer. The most important ideas are quality, customer satifaction and trust. If i’m happy after the first sale, i’ll probably come back for another. Why would i gamble with a new webstore if i’ve had a good experience with an earlier webstore?

Some of the posts i’ve written on the IT-eye weblog this last week: Finding jar library dependencies using JarJar, Productivity, choice and ADF metadata and Jwebunit, untrusted certificates, https and proxies.

I’ve just written my first entry for the new IT-eye weblog: Viewing changesets in CVS.

Infoworld is reporting that JDeveloper will be gratis: Oracle to offer JDeveloper tool for free.

Out of the box, JDeveloper has a lot more functionality than Eclipse in many areas. Visual JSP editing, visual support for JSF, support for some of the UML diagrams, wizard support for it’s ORM frameworks ADF Business components and Toplink. It’s a good IDE, so if you haven’t tried it yet, you should.

It’s good to see all the effort Oracle is putting into Java these days: EJB 3.0 support in OC4j since last year, BPEL plugin for JDeveloper, BPEL engine, a really good set of JSF components, a Toplink plugin for Spring, support for xdoclet in JDeveloper.

There’s a very interesting post on Veerle’s blog: A response from an accessibility consultant from BlindSurfer. It seems like web standards, xhtml and css are not improving accessability for blind people, yet. Apparently, screenreader manufactures are as slow implementing support for web standards as some other big software companies. Worth a read.

This blog may look weird for a while, i’m upgrading it to wordpress 1.5.

Wilfred’s story about Jules de Ruijter’s presentation on their migration from Designer to Developer made it to OTN’s frontpage! I have to agree with Wilfred, the presenation, Oracle Designer versus Oracle JDeveloper, was really interesting, Jules is a good speaker who likes to provoke his audience.

Javaddicts and the Amis blog are reporting about executing pl/sql statements from Ant: Executing Oracle PL/SQL from Ant, Executing PL/SQL from ANT – how to keep the format straight.

I’ve also written an Ant target for my current project where we execute pl/sql. The pl/sql queries domain values from some tables and outputs an xml document containing these domains. The problem with Ant’s sql task is that it doesn’t display the output created using dbms_output. So i’ve extended the SQLExec class, to copy all the output created using dbms_output to standard out. This is done in the printDbmsOutputResults method:

Interesting read about some new features in j2se 1.5: Five Favorite Features from 5.0. Good timing, as i started using jdk 1.5 this week: i’ve been trying Hibernate 3.0 with annotations. I’ve used Hibernate in the past in combination with xdoclet, switching to annotations is pretty straight forward.

Something you might run into when starting with annotations is the following error message:

Error(8):  cannot find symbol

It’s not a very helpfull error message, but you can solve it by importing the class for the annotation you are using:

import javax.persistence.*;
@Entity
@Table(name="EMP")
public class Emp {

There’s a discussion on the serverside: what if java had native support for SQL? It discusses a proposal by microsoft about embedding sql in C#. Somehow most people seem to be missing the point on what microsoft is doing. Most of the postings are comparing microsoft’s solution to sqlj or one of the many available ORM solutions.

The thing is, these solutions offer solutions of interfacing with a database. If you look at some of the examples on msdn, you’ll see that microsoft is proposing something more radical: completely replacing the database. You can actually use sql statements to query data from structs and arrays in your application. This means that your application will handle the parsing and executing of your sql.

This might actually make a nice solution for stand alone applications, where no central database is being used.

Update: This could be very usefull if you’re creating Occasionally Connected clients, where you want coarse grained communication with the server. For example, you could have a web service which returns all lookup/domain data (used by dropdown components, etc). This info you keep in memory in an array, but when you need it for a component in your gui, you can query the data using sql.

The serverside is reporting on a Forrester report: The Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms Q1 2005. Basically Forrester is saying that both MS and Oracle offer the most complete solution with their application servers. Not many people seems to agree with this on the Serverside, most people think either Oracle or Microsoft payed for this report.

That may or may not be true, but fact is that Oracle is working hard on offering a good and complete application server. Some examples: BPEL support in the application server, and Oracle is already offering a developer preview of EJB 3.0. They’re also working pretty hard on their IDE: see for example the JSF support in JDeveloper.

Read the CNET article: Oracle warms to Eclipse with open-source project.

While i was searching for mobile weatherstations i found this site: Bwired.nl. Someone has put everything, i mean literally everything, about his house online: energy, water, gas, all incoming and outgoing phone calls, the status off every device in his house (Sunscreen, bathroom amplifier, lights, washdryer, etc), and ofcourse his weatherstation. Just wait untill he gets a virus…

O’reilly has started a repository for java components: O’reilly CodeZoo.

I never considered the possibility, but it’s so obvious: The Mozilla foundation is raising funds using Firefox’s integrated search. Helping your favorite browser has never been easier: just use the integrated search.

Some strange contradiction happened this week. Joshua Marinacci is asking in his blog why people aren’t shipping Swing applications. His post has generated a lot of reactions, and many people are saying that Swing isn’t fast enough, and that’s why they prefer SWT. Infoworld published an article comparing the four major Java IDE’s: Four Java IDEs duke it out. The article compares Borland JBuilder, IBM Rational Software Architect, Oracle JDeveloper, and Sun Java Studio Enterprise 7. IBM Rational Software Architect is based on Eclipse, so it uses SWT. According to the article the IBM IDE is the slowest of the four, and Oracle Jdeveloper is the fastest. Oracle’s JDeveloper is based on Swing. So it seems like using SWT for performance isn’t really that important, performance probably has to do with a lot of other issues as well.

This is in response to a thread on OTN forums:

We’re working with 3 developers on a project, and yes jdeveloper 10.1.2 does have cvs problems, but you can learn to live with it.

Some tips:
1. Devide your work into different projects: Our workspace contains about 9 projects, and mostly we’re working in different projects.
2. Use a code formatter. We run jindent as part of our ant build script. Running the build is mandatory before checking code into cvs, and recommended before doing an cvs update.
3. Update often. I start my day by updating my code from cvs. And i do this at least 4 or 5 times per day.
4. These are the steps i take when commiting: cvs update, build, commit.
5. Commit often. Break up your code changes into pieces of work which can be implemented in one day. Commit when you’ve implemented a change. Don’t collect a weeks worth of changes before commiting.
6. Clean update .jpr/.jpx files containing conflicts. Usually it’s easiest to just take the last revision from cvs and reapply your changes to the project file.
7. Run a continous integration tool. We use cruisecontrol. Whenever someone commits changes to cvs, cruisecontrol will rebuild your complete project. If someone has commited a change which breaks the build he will be emailed, and requested to fix the code in cvs. This will improve the confidence your developers have in quality of the code in cvs, meaning that they’ll probably update more often, and have to deal will smaller updates and less conflicts.

Brian Duff posts about code folding in Jdeveloper. I think i’m in same camp as Brian on code folding: nice, but probably not for me.

Some weeks ago a colleague mentioned that he liked the code folding in visual studio very much, and that he would like to see the same thing in Jdeveloper. My reaction then was: why? What use is code folding. To see the contents of a class without all the coding details? I use the structure view for that. Want to edit a specific method? Just select it in the structure view. My feeling is that once you start using code folding, you needlessly spend a lot of time opening and closing code blocks.