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.

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 {

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.

The company I work for, IT-eye, is part of Redwood. This week Redwood announced that it has an OEM agreement with SAP. This basically means that the Cronacle batch scheduling system will be part of every SAP Netweaver installation. This is good news for Redwood, but also for all SAP customers, as Cronacle is one of the better batch schedulers available.

Shay Shmeltzer wants to know how you do deploy your j2ee applications.

Multiple ways:

Ant – We want to be able to do a full build without jdeveloper installed. Our continuous integration build runs on a linux server using cruisecontrol. We’ve put all libraries used (including bc4j and adf) into cvs, and using cruisecontrol we tag all sources in cvs, build all ear files and deploy every build. This way we know exactly which version is installed on every application server and what we’re testing, and which version needs to be checked out from cvs when we want to patch a bug.

10g Web console – Cruisecontrol installs the ear files on a test server and copies the ear files to an ftp directory. If we want to deploy an application on another server (say beta, or production) you can download the generated ear through a link on our project wiki. These ear files we install through the web consoles of the servers.

jDeveloper – When developing and testing an application on my development machine, i’ll build the ear file using ant. Then i’ll deploy it to an oc4j instance running on my machine using jdeveloper. (right click on the ear file, deploy to). But i don’t deploy locally build ear files to a general purpose test server, as i want to know exactly which files from cvs the users are testing.

Just read this news on the Amis weblog: The JHeadstart team has started a weblog, and in their first post they have anounced a new version of JHeadstart, using jDeveloper ADF.