amor

Inline bytecode

amor — 2003-10-01T11:23:07+00:00

Now, after having played around with C# and .Net for awhile I have to say that standard support for emiting bytecode is great. I'm aware of thirdparty tools that can do this in Java such as ASM and BCel however I would really like to have a standardized way in Java for including inline "assembly". Having coded assembly quite a bit in my younger years I would like to have access to the power it gives me for certain code optimizations. Case in point is the sorting of primitive arrays or optimization of loops (for an example in C# see the Programming C# book).

JavaZone in Oslo

amor — 2003-09-18T12:34:59+00:00

What can one say. This years JavaZone here in Oslo looks like a much better event contentwise than last year. I just came from a John Crupi presentation where he talked about his last revision of the J2EE Core Patterns. They have added some new patterns that reflect some of the work done by Martin Fowler in his last book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. He reflected on the fact that the Pattern community is talking together to avoid cofusion about pattern naming. All in all a nice presentation but nothing new for anyone that follows the pattern discussions or keep updated by reading the server side. One litte point of interest though. He mentioned that one should remember the difference between a basic pattern and an alternative pattern. As an example he mentioned someboy who did a XMLDelegate pattern which in essecense was a variation on the BusinessDelegate pattern.

The second presentation I have gone to was the Richard Oberg where he presented AOP from a introductionary point of view. He spiced up the presentation with some examples from the CMS product his company is building (SiteVision I think) that uses AOP extensively throughout. All in all a quite nice presentation about the fundemental sides of AOP. However since Richard is using a selfdeveloped framework which is not available (as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong) it was a bit different from what I'm used to using AspectJ and AspectWerkz. He is having another presentation about Advanced AOP, which I'm looking forward to as I guess more of my questions will be answered there.

With the lineup including Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter and Kent Beck it looks like this JavaZone is going to be great for all of us that had poor companies that cannot pay conferances all over the world :)

Working with .Net on the Mac

amor — 2003-08-10T20:48:50+00:00

I have to put it to Connectix, their Virtual PC 6.0 software makes it easy for me to work on my .Net projects without having to boot up a PC. I just hope that the fact that Microsoft bought them will mean that it will be discontinued at some later date.

Now if they could just get a proper Mono release out the door for Mac OS X :)

Learning C# is interesting by the way. One can clearly see the influence from Java, yet I sometimes feel that it really has more in common with C++ than with Java. A lot of the concepts seem geared towards C++ developers more than Java developers. Luckly Java will be catching up with release Tiger.

Now a little slap on the wrist for C#. If everyone keeps telling that overloading of operators is a bad idea because it obfuscates the code and does not make sense in most circumstances why the h*** did they include it in the C# language (My guess is beacuse of C++).

Dealing with JAR hell ?

amor — 2003-07-29T12:13:06+00:00

I'm constantly reminded about the horrible reality of working with jar libraries. I have a project that generates several deployables, including a server and client jar file. However being dependent on external jars makes it messy to do quick releases. I would love to have a way of bundling jars together in a master jars just like war files or ear files. This would allow me to release a packaged jar with the right libraries included in the jar file.

I'm aware of the ability to link libraries using classpath references in the manifest file however I want something nice and easy. Does anyone know of a way to archieve this ? If not, is there an interest for such a tool.

Basically a jar in jar file with a custom classloader that loads all classes and passes control to the real main method ?

Strange behaviour using Idea Build 873 on Mac OSX

amor — 2003-07-26T17:07:54+00:00

Well here is a mystifying experience. I booted up IDEA and it looked just like the PC version. After working for a couple of hours It crashed and when I restarted IDEA it came up looking like a OSX native application instead of having the platform agnostic view. Not only did I get a new view, but its also snappier and boots up faster. Very strange indeed. Have anyone experienced anything similar before ?

JOnAS is a great friend

amor — 2003-07-22T10:53:48+00:00

I have to say that the whole discussion and controversy around JBoss bores me. Because of all the politics I decided to have a look at one of the less known opensource J2EE servers around, namly JOnAS. Now in version 3.2 it is starting to deliver on its promises. It supports CMP 2.0 and all you need for a proper J2EE application server. It has some good tools for administrating the server and all the documentation is available on the net

http://jonas.objectweb.org/

What can you say. Its built more traditionally than JBoss but hey it works and thats all I need.

So check it out and be supprised at how well it actually performs. Now, if they could just get it J2EE certified it would finish off the whole JBoss vs everyone discussion, which could only be a good thing in the long run.

I think I'm falling for Tapestry

amor — 2003-07-20T20:34:15+00:00

I have been playing around with tapestry http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry and I'm falling for the concept of reusable web components. After playing with the .Net web framework and struggeling with JSP and struts, webworks etc ending up hating development of clientside code, I find the component driven world of Tapestry a breath of fresh air.

Just being able to work with the actual application logic and leave the presentation to the components and templates makes me want to shout of glee. I'm feed up wasting my time on HTML (Its below me :) , and I'm not particularly good at design either).

RAVE (A new development enviornment) from sun, that they claim will compete with the .Net web framework sound interesting. However looking at their past failure in the development tool market I'm wondering if it will have much of an impact. And what JSR's is it based on ?