I have not posted much about linux for quite a while, however, I don’t want to loose this link. Red Hat posted an excellent tutorial called CVS is out, Subversion is in. The tutorial provides a quick introduction to Subversion, a new open source SCM app that is making big waves these days. The general feeling is if you are using CVS, give up and switch to Subversion.
How do you do UI design within an XP methodology when you only have one person who is trained in graphic design? Specifically, if you are creating a web app, is it possible to do the ui in an XP style, and by XP style, I am particularly refering to pair programming. What do companies do, hire two designers and force them to work together all the time? Is there an equivalent design philosophy in the graphic arts world that puts designers together to work on a design? Somehow I doubt it.
I fully understand how and why XP works for programming, but I have trouble seeing how it works for things like UI design or any area where art and graphics exist in computer applications. Computer programmers should not be the ones creating UIs. However, I just don’t know how well pair designing would work.
IBM’s Developer Works website has an excellent article titled Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse. The article runs through everything you need to know to get up and running with RDT and includes a ton of really nice screenshots to help out newbies. If you are looking for an IDE for Ruby, this just may be it.
This article introduces using the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse, which allows Eclipse to become a first-rate Ruby development environment. Ruby developers who want to learn how to use the rich infrastructure of the Eclipse community to support their language will benefit, as will Java™ developers who are interested in using Ruby.
Oh boy, it has been almost a week and a half without any new posts. I should loose my blogging license. The truth is that I have been extremely busy with school and I have also been extremely sick for the last 5 days. Apparently getting a virus is bad for humans as well. Look for new posts in the next few days. For now, I have to catch up on everything I have missed.
This is just a reminder to myself that I need to read this article sometime, it is on some of the myths surrounding Java.
Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited
The Java™ language is the target of a lot of abuse for performance. And while some of it may well be deserved, a tour of message board and newsgroup postings on the subject shows that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about how a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) actually works. In this month’s Java theory and practice, Brian Goetz pokes some holes in the oft-repeated performance myth of slow allocation in JVMs.
Javalobby has an article showing some benchmarks done by someone over the weekend that clearly show Java beating C in at least one benchmark which deals with memory allocation. The other benchmarks do show C ahead of Java, but not by all that much. These clearly show that anyone who says Java is slow doesn’t have a clue as to what they are talking about.
Gentleware has released version 3.2 of their UML modelling tool, Poseidon for UML. Probably the biggest highlight from this release is the vastly improved Sequence diagrams. This has been one of Poseidon’s weakest spot. No more. Gentleware has greatly improved the app’s support for creating sequence diagrams.
However, I can not recommend this product. I downloaded the Community Edition and on first glance, it is a much improved product. However, it seems they may have released it too early. Setting aside the frequent crashes, the app is extremely buggy. One of the biggest bugs that I have encountered is the class diagrams. In Poseidon, there is a quick enter button for adding attributes and methods to a class. I clicked on this button and instead of adding a default method that can then be edited, the program simply adds a blank line. When I go and try to edit the line, it is like the font colour is set to white. So I click on the background to end editing the class and the class name disappears. This can get very annoying after a bit.
A friend of mine was working with Poseidon and had everything disappear on him (his words, and since I was not there, I am not sure what “everything” actually refers to.)
Another problem that I have been having is if I try to directly edit the name of a class, or method in the properties box and then press Ctrl-S to save the project, the app freezes on me and I have to kill it manually.
In my experience, Poseidon has been a quirky UML modelling tool that, although it did somethings oddly–like sequence diagrams–was still a very good tool due to its simplicity and ease of user. However, now it is a frustrating tool that is just too buggy to use. Personally, I am probably going to go back to version 3.1 or find another tool until they work out some of these problems.
I highly recommend that if you are thinking of upgrading, don’t. At the very least, take this new version for a very long test drive before investing any money in it.
So people don’t think that the only IDE I use is NetBeans, here is a link to an article form the ONJava.com webiste about the Eclipse Web Tools Platform project which is an attempt by Eclipse, IBM and Lomboz to integrate J2EE capabilities into the Eclipse framework. This is something that is sorely missing from Eclipse.
One complaint that I have, and many others have as well, is the lack of support for J2EE and the need to run around and download a bunch of plug-ins in order to work with even a simple JSP page. This is suppose to solve that problem.
I have used WTP a little bit. I redid the Quickstart JSP/Servlet demo that I did in NetBeans using the new tools and it was fairly easy. Not as easy as NetBeans, but it was fairly easy. However, I have a lot more experience working with NetBeans and no experience working with WTP, so the difference in difficulty that I experienced may just come down to my lack of experience. (wow, how many times can you say ‘experience’ in one sentence. My english teacher is going to kill me 
)
One reason that I have stayed away from using WTP is that it is only at the 0.7 release. I had assumed that that meant it was not fully finished and still in an early development phase. Apparently this is not the case. From the article:
In order to support binary compatibility, the PMC decided that it would be in the best interests of the WTP, its contributors, and its community not to prematurely declare API. In response to Eclipse convention with respect to the amount and quality of API that is required of a 1.0 release, the PMC decided to change the release number from 1.0 to 0.7. This convention follows from the first Eclipse release way back in 2001, which was numbered 0.9 for the same reason.
Anyway, give it a try.