Juixe Techknow

It seems to me that there is a common theme, or meme, propagating in the background of developers’ mind as I keep reading how such and such technology is dead. Take for example the latest incarnation of this question asked by Zarar Siddiqi, Are JSPs Dead? I would suppose that JSPs are dead if Java was dead. But being pronounced dead by pundit engineers does not inflict Java alone. A few days ago Paul Graham made a uproar in technology circles by proclaiming that Microsoft is Dead and that Redmond rigor mortis was setting in on the software giant. Personally I think that Microsoft has soo much money in the bank that it won’t die that easy, they could just buy kidneys, patents and technology from whomever they want. But even with all that cash at hand someone asked on the Joel on Software forum if .NET was dead.

You can find premature obituaries not only for programming languages such as Python and Perl, but for the whole software industry.

Is “Free Software” Dead? No! Is commercial software dead? No! Is Enterprise Software Dead? No! No! No!

I feel that these questions are troll-level orange as they don’t help to answer any software questions or help in any design debate. These questions are not food for thought, but food for FUD. Just to answer your questions, Fortran is not dead, Perl still takes care of business, and Lisp is still alive and kicking.

JSP, and Microsoft, and all these technologies must be quoting Mark Twain right about now when he said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Now, can we all just get back to coding?

Technorati Tags: programming, cs, development, free software, open source, java, perl, python, lisp, fortran

I had to update our project wiki and detail our current software development environment. I found that we are lagging a bit behind the latest Java technologies and tools, but from a business perspective I think it is hard to up sell existing customers just so that developers can use the latest Java language features in their code. Large software clients usually invest a lot of time and money into the applications they use for their business processes and can’t upgrade based on the schedule of software tool vendors.

Thinking about the current state of tech tools, I wanted to jot down the tools of the trade that I use on a day to day basis.

Java Development/Work
Java 1.4.2
Maven 1.0
Eclipse 3.1.2 with Perforce plugin
TeamTrack

Java Development/Home
Java 1.5
Maven 2.0
Eclipse 3.2.1 with Subclipse, Groovy, JavaCC, and Aptana plugins
Subversion 1.3

Ruby on Rails
Ruby 1.8.4
Rails 1.2.2
RadRails 0.7.2

Database
SQL Server 2005 Express
Oracle 10g Express
Mysql 4.1.15

Firefox Plugins
Firebug 1.04
Web Developer 1.1.3
Selenium IDE 0.8.7

Miscellaneous Editors
SciTE 1.70
Komodo Edit 4.0
TextWrangler 2.2

Collaboration
Skype
Google Apps

Technorati Tags: software, tools, development, application, appdev, webdev, java, rails, ruby, firefox, maven, eclipse, komodo, firebug, sql, svn

I can best describe Yahoo!’s new service Pipes as a visual programming IDE for Web 2.0 mashups. Pipes allows you to gather, filter, truncate, analysis RSS feeds and other data sources to use that as input to other ‘modules’ all glued together with pipes. Pipes allows you to visually program web applications with prefab building blocks and connect them much as you would Lego blocks. There are other players in this space, Rapid Application Development for Web 2.0 applications, that allow you to define a custom web application such as Ning, DabbleDB, and Drapper.

I have some experience working with a drag and drop visual IDE framework. A visual IDE is usually limited to the functionality of the available building blocks. I wasn’t able to find an open API for Yahoo! Pipes that allows for the construction of new modules. I could see Yahoo! Pipes being more powerful still if there was an open API to construct additional modules.

I of course took Yahoo! Pipes for a little test drive. I cloned a simple pipe application and made it read the feed for this site. It was late when I was playing with pipes and I was tired, or I just lack imagination, but I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do with this thing. As of this writing some of the ‘hot pipes’ are the New York Times thru Flickr, which analysis New York Times content for use as keywords to find pictures in Flickr, and TechCrunch Citations that scours a bunch of search engines for TechCrunch.

These ‘hot’ pipes are definitely interesting but you or I were could already have done that with some PHP, so what is the big deal? I think the big deal is not necessary the applications you can develop but the entry skills and time required developing them. The Yahoo! Pipes IDE/framework is what’s hot, not the applications. In todays Web 2.0 landscape, its all about the framework.

Technorati Tags: rad, yahoo, pipes, yahoo pipes, flickr, rss, feeds, ide, visual, visual programming, framework, ning, dabbledb, drapper, web2.0, webservice

I have been using a PowerBook G4 for nearly two years and just today I figured out something that I wish I had known a long time ago.

Here is a scenario… When I have too many application windows opened and I need to see the desktop, I would normally minimize and shuffle around all the windows. As you can imagine, this is very annoying prone. So today not unlike Columbus, I discovered something that might have been known to a whole continent! If you hit F11 on OS X all your windows will fly to the edge of the screen leaving you with an undisturbed view of the desktop. Kewl!

If anyone else has any tips like this holla at me, that is drop me a line!

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, macosx, f11, columbus, powerbook, desktop

I was just in a meeting bored out of my mind… I was just listing the contents of a directory over and over with ls and a few different options until I thought I could use the options to spell words! I didn’t try to come up with an all inclusive list but here are the few I came up with.

ls -ls
ls -fun
ls -car
ls -pimp
ls -grim
ls -rump

Technorati Tags: options, command, command line, ls

My direct manager for the past two years has decided to leave his current position in the firm to look for other opportunities. Our CTO said that he “had served his time with the company.” To which I responded, “You make it sound as if it’s a jail sentence to work here.”

Over the last two days my manager was in the office, the whole development team spent that time with him in knowledge transfer sessions. Earlier this year I wrote about past knowledge transfer sessions with a former colleague. What follows are a few words of advice from my former manager which he gave us before his departure…

Use standard off the shelf components whenever possible, replace our custom ORM component with Hibernate, replace our client scaffolding code with NetBeans Platform. Use, reuse, and make use of open source software, don’t reinvent the wheel. In essence work smarter, not harder!
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