28 Feb, 2006
Cat + Kitten
Helen and I have just got a cat and kitten!
They are Parsnip
and Sprout
25 Feb, 2006
Eclipse and its plugins
Eclipse is coming along extremely well as an IDE - but a lot of people are not finding the plugins that make it even better.
So as I was reinstalling Eclipse I thought I would note what is worth getting.
For a start
- Get Eclipse 3.1.2 as a download from www.eclipse.org
Then the rest we can add via the update manager.
In Eclipse choose
Help
> Software Updates
> Find and Install...
> Search for new features to install
> Add Update Site...
In the Update Manager add the Web Tools Project update site http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/ . This once installed adds both BIRT (reporting), Visual Editor and TPTP (testing and profiling) to your update site list.
Add the new Web Tools features to get
- A nice XML editor
- A XML Schema view a bit like XML Spy's or OxygenXml's
- Web server start/stop plugins
- Database editor/viewer
Then once installed and restarted go back into the update manager and search for more featues. You can now install BIRT, TPPT and Visual Editor.
The TPPT (see http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-TPTP-Profiling-Tool/tptpProfilingArticle.html
for an tutorial). Allows you to
- Profile Code
BIRT is a reporting suite - I keep looking at it as an alternative to Jasper Reports. The report building GUI certainly seems better than anything Jasper Offer.
The Visual Editor is a Swing/SWT GUI builder - nice if you want a thick client application.
12 Feb, 2006
My del.icio.us tags
12 Feb, 2006
Web 2.0
There appears to be a lot of hype about web 2.0 flying about at the moment. As every much of it doesn't live up to expectations but some of it does.
I have taken to using http://del.icio.us/bgidley for my bookmarks and from there have found a range other web 2.0 sites.
The key things that web 2.0 appears to be is a slick GUI (usually using AJAX). This in itself seems like a good thing.
From a technology perspective I find the web 2.0 frames works all a bit worrying. Moving to the web from thick clients programmers lives got so much simpler - they didn't have to worry in the main about GUI events and instead just put the page back.
Web 2.0 is going to result in some really awful application bugs of the sort when you can fill in A then B then C but if you go back to A and edit it you will 'break' the page. This sort of thing was a common problem in the Visual Basic GUI's of a few years ago.
Hopefully component frameworks like Tapestry can keep all the Web2.0 coolness locked away and thus reduce the screw up likelyhood.
The other thing that worries me is the security aspect - unchecked input and cross site scripting are the most common sorts of security bugs and with Web 2.0 the opportunity for mistakes is going to be increased.
