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Groovy and Grails

Rails has got a lot of buzz the last couple of years. I myself have investigated it, didn’t write any apps but it looked nice indeed. I wonder why grails doesn’t have this much attention yet. I have read the a couple books on groovy and grails and started my own small project. I have to say I like it, the thing I probably like the most is that you can package it as a standard war file and just deloy it. Another great thing is the fact that you can reuse all the big java libraries that have been released. So you create your reports in Jasper or Birt and just call them from your grails application.

I wonder how they solved this issue in rails. I can hardly imagine they rewrote entire libraries? (maybe they didn’t solve it yet).

Any grails users out there? Any good user groups in Belgium?

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ssh -X to the rescue

I’ve got a dedicated pc running some vmware images (trixbox,openbravo,oracle on linux,…) but after upgrading to ubuntu heron I couldn’t start my vmware console anymore. (Yes I know if I would be using Xen I didn’t have this issue.) But I like vmware better because you don’t have run a modified kernel. (maybe that info is outdated, not sure). In the end it just works. That is until the upgrade. I can’t start my vmware console to connect remote and my server is headless …

ssh -X to the rescue, you just gotta love linux 🙂

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Nice windows calendar

At some clients I have to work on a windowsm machine. One thing that’s just stupid is the calendar in the taskbar. It just tell’s the time and there is no way to see the date. You have to open it (and you just lose time)

I normally install this nice tool it makes your taskbar look a bit more like the one I use in gnome 🙂

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Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

I upgraded a while ago to Ubuntu 8.04. I wasn’t really impressed, I didn’t see much difference with the previous version. Now after a while I’m actually getting pissed off with it :s I had configured my system just like I wanted it. apt-get installed most of the things I wanted. And now it seems many of the upgrades weren’t like I had expected. (prolly it’s my own fault, I’m also using non standard repo’s)

I also have a lot of firefox plugins installed (google calendar,del.icio.us,firebug,…) most of them can’t be upgraded to firefox 3. Also my zoneminder got broken so I have to recheck why that is happening (and yes, prolly I had better done this on a real server, but who hooks up a webcam to a server 😉 )

In the end I wished I had waited a bit longer until all applications got upgraded as well. Reminder to be more patient next time around.

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Postgresql nice to know

I had built a small application using Postgresql as my database. I used the phpgpadmin to create my database schema (if I remember correctly). When I tried to issue SQL statement I always received errors that the tables didn’t exist, I figured out that if I used “TABLE”, then it worked.

Yesterday evening I had enough. I started googling why this was happening. After some time I found the answer and doing some testcases, it seems that this behaviour was pretty logical.

In short if you use Postgresql


create table TeSt(iD varchar(200));

Is not the same as

create table "TeSt"("iD" varchar(200));

If you do the first you can actually perform select id from test (or select Id from tEsT (reverse capitals). I get the feeling everything is converted to lowercase!

But if you issued the second statement the former selects won’t work. You really have to make it pinpoint accurate. So any people out there giving Postgresql a go. Take care how you generate your tables!!

The fix I did was pretty straightforward. Export my database to a sql file (using phppgadmin)(Also export data!). Then open with your favorite editor and replace all ” with nothing, save. Drop all your tables (but be sure you exported also the data 🙂 ). After you schema is empty, perform the SQL and you should be up and running without the case sensitive stuff.

NOTE
I do agree that TeSt is not the same as test. I’m pro linux filesystem file conventions, but for sql it really is a pain in the ass when you use generator tools and they fuck up.

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Flex update

I had a nice discussion with TimothyP I agreed on most of his points that Silverlight is indeed a nice framework (as is XAML as a language,standard,…). This evening I was doing some more Flex development and I noticed that I had forgotten to mention one thing. Maybe ActionScript is weakly typed, but the Flex Builder tool allows you to have code completion as if it was a strongly typed language.

You could compare it to VB.NET as there you also have code completion but are allowed to call functions that aren’t visible. (sometimes handy when you’re dealing with an ActiveX and don’t want to dependent on the version)

I’ll put some screenshots and code in the near future. Now I’m wrestling with a deadline 🙂

BTW Timothy sorry for the many spelling mistakes. I don’t want to lose time with writing stuff and normally correct it when I’ve published it, but seems there’s no way to edit a comment ?

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Lifesaver

If your monitoring tool get’s out of control this is your lifesaver!!

mailq | tail +2 | awk ‘BEGIN { RS = “” }
# $7=sender, $8=recipient1, $9=recipient2
{ if ($7 == “monitoring@pczone.be” && $9 == “”)
print $1 }
‘ | tr -d ‘*!’ | postsuper -d –

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Flex VS Silverlight

These days everybody in the web world is pushing RIA’s. We have the javascript frameworks like Scriptacilous,Dojo,GWT,… , we also have the browser plugin options like Silverlight,Flex,JavaFX. Probably I’m forgetting some here, but these are the ones I’m following.

As I worked with most of them (some more then others) my preference more and more leans to Flex for developing Web applications.

Why??

Well there are several reasons but probably one of the biggest reasons is the fact that Adobe has been releasing a lot of there core frameworks opensource. The Flex core is opensource, they recently released BlazeDS a Java framework for communicating in their own binary format with a Flash application.
For now the development platform (Flex Builder) still has to be bought, but if you want you can just use an Ant script to compile it.

Another big reason is the fact that Flash runs on Windows,Mac and Linux. Even the tool Flex Builder runs on those 3 OS’.

The fact that Flex can display a couple of thousand records in a Datagrid without crashing my browser is also nice. Try doing that with javascript (although I’ve seen a demo of a Dojo Datagrid displaying 100.000 records) but in most frameworks it just hangs your browser.

JavaFX is still in a early stage and IMHO is too little to late!

Microsoft offcourse is pushing their new Silverlight. I’ve seen some demo’s went to some workshops. And I have to admit it’s not bad but if you compare it to Flex, well hmm I’m not sure but they sure seem to be far behind. I just tried the tool Deep zoom (this was shown on mix 2008 as showcase for Silverlight 2) and I’m not really impressed. Compare it to this tool that was shown on Javapolis 2007 and you’ll see where I’m heading 🙂
On the other side Microsoft has the benefit that a Silverlight application can be written in the same language from Gui to backend. But I’m not sure if that’s really such a major advantage. If I look at friends and collegeaus they all seem to be doing some animation stuff with Flash for their customers. And most of them do it in Macromedia Flash MX. They also write code in there, the language is called ActionScript and is a real object oriented language. But these guys don’t know to much about building a large scale application. They do know however to write a nice Gui interface. So they can write components that can be used in Flex. So there Adobe also has a big advantage as they pretty much own the Graphics industry 🙂

One thing that most peeple however seem to overlook is the fact that with all these RIA applications the search engines will index much less of your page. If you for example have product catalog made with Flex,Silverlight or with one of the Javascript toolkits I’m not sure that they will be indexed by the spiders. But then again you can workaround this and always generate a Sitemap of your product catalog in plain Html. Hmm I wonder how many companies do that and how much money has been lost by companies who didn’t show up on top in a search engine because of this.
Another thing is that integration using links and parameters also gets a lot more complicated!

As I’m working with Flex at the moment you’ll here some more in the future.

PS I hope the upgrade of wordpress worked. Now I’m on 2.3.3 (currently latest stable release) If more SPAM should appear please notify me ASAP!!