Programming in Scala

Got the Programming in Scala eBook. I hope to get time and build an experimental Eclipse Plugin with it.

The Java Explorer

I’m happy to announce that Eyal Schneider, the collegue of mine, has been finally convinced to open a blog to share his knowledge and experience.

Eclipse Galileo RC1 Update Manager RT Equinox P2 is still not good enough for me yet

I’ve just failed to install JDT over clean Eclipse Platform RC1 (and this time a bug has been opened):

An error occurred while installing the items
session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.ant.ui 3.4.0.v20090504, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).
Error while loading manipulator.
Error while loading manipulator.

Retrying causes the message immediately. Reverting to the previous installation stage does not help. Restarting does not help either.

It’s very sad that what they call Release Candidate is still rare. Waiting for the release…

PHP Frameworks popularity estimation

About 2.5 years passed since I posted the development activity comparison of major PHP frameworks. Since then I’ve got about 4.5k hits from search engines, which IMHO is not such a bad sample to summarize people’s interest in each of them.

Again, no conclusions – just pure numbers

http://tr.im/lnXq:

Query	Hits	Zend	CakePHP	Symfony	CodeIgniter	Prado	Seagull	eZ
zend framework vs cakephp	573	573	573	0	0	0	0	0
zend vs cakephp	319	319	319	0	0	0	0	0
cakephp symfony	258	0	258	258	0	0	0	0
zend vs symfony	254	254	0	254	0	0	0	0
cakephp vs zend framework	217	217	217	0	0	0	0	0
symfony vs zend	210	210	0	210	0	0	0	0
zend framework vs symfony	187	187	0	187	0	0	0	0
symfony vs cakephp	185	0	185	185	0	0	0	0
zend framework vs	176	176	0	0	0	0	0	0
codeigniter vs zend framework	143	143	0	0	143	0	0	0
prado framework	139	0	0	0	0	139	0	0
cakephp vs zend	139	139	139	0	0	0	0	0
symfony vs zend framework	138	138	0	138	0	0	0	0
zend framework cakephp	131	131	131	0	0	0	0	0
prado vs zend	103	103	0	0	0	103	0	0
zend framework vs codeigniter	84	84	0	0	84	0	0	0
cakephp vs symfony	82	0	82	82	0	0	0	0
prado vs cakephp	81	0	81	0	0	81	0	0
prado vs symfony	80	0	0	80	0	80	0	0
zend vs codeigniter	76	76	0	0	76	0	0	0
zend or cakephp	69	69	69	0	0	0	0	0
codeigniter vs cakephp	68	0	68	0	68	0	0	0
codeigniter vs zend	62	62	0	0	62	0	0	0
zend vs code igniter	60	60	0	0	60	0	0	0
cakephp zend framework	59	59	59	0	0	0	0	0
codeigniter vs symfony	55	0	0	55	55	0	0	0
cakephp symfony zend	52	52	52	52	0	0	0	0
cakephp vs prado	50	0	50	0	0	50	0	0
symfony zend framework	48	48	0	48	0	0	0	0
cakephp vs codeigniter	48	0	48	0	48	0	0	0
zend framework vs code igniter	46	46	0	0	46	0	0	0
zend framework vs. cakephp	46	46	46	0	0	0	0	0
symfony vs codeigniter	45	0	0	45	45	0	0	0
symfony vs prado	39	0	0	39	0	39	0	0
zend vs prado	37	37	0	0	0	37	0	0
zend cakephp	37	37	37	0	0	0	0	0
zend framework symfony	36	36	0	36	0	0	0	0
zend framework or cakephp	35	35	35	0	0	0	0	0
prado symfony	35	0	0	35	0	35	0	0
seagull vs cakephp	34	0	34	0	0	0	34	0
zend framework versus cakephp	32	32	32	0	0	0	0	0
Total	4568	3369	2515	1704	687	564	34	0
Interest Ratio		73.75%	55.06%	37.30%	15.04%	12.35%	0.74%	0.00%

Windows XP x64, Cisco VPN Client, VirtualBox and Windows 7

As you can easily guess from the subject, I had compatibility issue with installing Cisco VPN Client over my Windows XP x64 installation – the bastards refuse to release 64-bit version drivers. That was not a big deal for me, since I used to connect to the office from my ThinkPad T42 anyway.

But just these days Windows 7 has been pre-released, so to play with it a bit I installed the x86 version of it over VirtualBox.

Hence, in this very moment I’m tunneled through 6 network interfaces:

1. Some neighbor’s wireless router
2. Wireless adapter
3. VirtualBox’s adapter
4. Cisco’s virtual adapter
5. Cisco’s VPN server
6. Office workstation’s adapter

Speaking at …

Reading blog rolls for years, I rather often meet posts of different “socially recognized” ones, which proudly inform us, that they are going to speak at some conference. And what’s very common is that the subject of their messages are literally that they are “speaking”.

What does that mean? That the main fact they provide us is that “they are speaking”, and not that “some important subject will be explained in their speeches”. Otherwise they would say that first.

What can I conclude? That most of them are just egoistic monkeys that in fact using the corresponding issues to promote themselves and collect more bananas, rather than they are really interested in sharing their information, which is (according to my understanding) the purpose of the conferences.

Other monkeys use the chance to participate in such sessions to promote themselves by asking “interesting” questions in these sessions…

It’s funny that some people thought that socializing the network may boost building selfless society. As I see it, it’s just a way for offline losers to find the bunch of other losers of the same kind and to gain respect among them to feed their ill and hungry ego with fast junk.

Well, personally I don’t mind. What I’m truly happy about is that people I respect for real are trying to spread the good by deed, rather by dissimulating word.

Eclipse Maven Integration

Honestly, I was pretty unsure regarding Maven at all. “Why should I port my projects from Ant, where everything is plain, simple and predictable? Single point integration jars are connected to their dependent projects, shared ones are extracted to a Libraries project. Deployment is as easy as checkout and build…” – I convinced myself.

But soon I’ve realized that if our team’s Product is no more than a chain in the string of Products and Components which are unified into the Solution, than why the hell should our code base not to be like that? It’s so nice that lots of Environments has their packaging systems which make installation simple and aesthetic… So if you work in Java and harmony and beauty are not just senseless terms for you, believe me, you should use Maven.

The main Maven’s advantage over Ant is that each dependency, called artifact can be (and commonly is) an independent project with its own history of versions and dependencies. So, if you want your project to be dependent of any library, you can just find it in one of major Maven repositories, add its id to your pom and – voila! it works.

Then, when time comes to deploy your stuff, you pack it and do the same – upload your stuff to another maven repository. Here the cycle closes and the universal happiness has been achieved.

Now, regarding the subject. There are 2 Maven Eclipse plug-ins in the market – m2eclipse and q4eclipse. Both of them recently were accepted as Eclipse native incubation projects as M2E and IAM. I tried them both starting from the second, but as it always happens, the first was the better one. M2E is very stable, comfortable and easy to understand w/o any documentation, while IAM is pretty buggy and unclear.

So I chose M2E to work with and it took just about 3 hours to convert all my projects to poms, configuring all their dependencies and then converting the projects into Maven managed ones. With the last action, all the Eclipse dependencies convert into Maven dependencies, the build is replaced with Maven build and it guarantees that there will be no surprises in production builds. And then you can proceed with LB/Continuum/CC with no time spent to understand why nothing doesn’t get built correctly.

Now what’s remaining is to reintegrate the changes from the sandbox branch and help the team to not be too scared of the changes

Last Singleton

Hooray!

Today I’ve eliminated the last misused occurance of singleton pattern in the monsterous project I’m currently involved in.

LinkedIn WordPress integration

I’ve just discovered (with a passive help of comrade Cal Evans) that LinkedIn added an application to embed WordPress blog entries into the profile.

There are two options for that – one is to share all the entries in there, and the second – to just share what was labeled as LinkedIn.

Not sure why exactly does it, but it seems kind of groovy to me

Aptana “steals” PDT code

Long time ago I set up Google alerts to receive new search results related to myself. And today I’ve discovered that Aptana steals “prepares derivative work of“ PDT code.

The only visible “derivation” there is they changed package names, though.