Developer's Quarterdeck Log

I have FINALLY put a Java 1.5 app into production this week. It was a Swing app so I made the decsion on the JDK, not the app server vendor. Generics are great but my favorite addition is the for/in, it works just like the foreach command I would use in my shell scripts. No more creating Iterators and casting stuff, yeah!

It has been about 5 years since I wrote a Java GUI app and I forgot how much like to write Swing apps. Netbeans 5.0 is the first Java GUI builder that I actually like too. (My hats off to the NetBeans team there). But I do realize why it is so unpopular with some people. You have to do a lot of the low level stuff yourself, namely I am talking about implementing threading for thing to behave properly. But since I had AWT horrors in my past of making a BWT progress bar update correctly Swing seemed real easy. But someone new to this whole thing, especially a server side person who is spoiled by not having to do threading, would have found it difficult. Using SwingWorker tool really helps too.

Along with this app I also used Java Web Start. What an amazing technology!

So just on a whim I tried to connect my digital camera and Sony Clie to my Sun Blade 100 running Solaris Express using the tools in JDS. I was completely amazed that it just worked with just a few mouse clicks! I had everything from the Clie in Evolution in no time. And transferring pictures from the camera coundn't be easier. This may seem strange to be excited about but coming from old time Linux and using Solaris as my primary desktop for a couple of years now these things never came easy. I didn't have to download and compile anything or get real intimate with the hardware.

The thing is these things have probably been in JDS for awhile now, I just never thought that it could be this easy. Solaris (and desktop Linux which helped out here) has come a long way in a short time.

I had a long openSolaris todo list that i wanted to accomplish over the weekend and the first was to upgrade to build 33 on my Sun Blade 100. I did an upgade install and I had plenty of problems which took up much of the weekend. The first problem was with the cdrom on the SB100. For some reason it didn't like the second CDRW I burned. I put in a drive from the spare pile and tried again. This time it made it through but on the reboot I saw a few errors from smf but I ignored them. But when I couldn't log in then I knew I had big problems. After some digging I found that some really important files were missing. So I reran the install and did a custom upgrade and found the problem, several important packages were not selected. My particular problem was with the /usr package of volume services which had a cascading effect. After the third install all was well.

JDS on build 33 does look different and a little better with new fonts and colors. I also tried out the infamous new Real Player. It didn't really perform well on the SB100. Just one more reason why I need a new machine. But I could view all the content that the old one couldn't handle, which is good.

I didn't loose my work after all, it was just "misplaced". It seems like it when a page gets renamed in Creator everything doesn't get the message about the name change and it required some clicks on my part to fix. I am still ticked about the crash though.

OK, so i edit the name of portlet and try to redeploy. Then the thing becames a big unresponsive gray box. So I kill and try to restart, the splash screen hangs. It takes a few kill -9's to clean up some rogue process left over. Then when I open my project a bunch of work I did is gone!

I still don't have a good feel of this tool so I'll give it another chance, but its on notice...

Normally I work in Emacs. Mostly because I am a "pragmatic developer" who doesn't want to code by coincidence. Today I need to do some protyping so I decided to give Sun Studio Creator a try. I saw some neat things with it at JavaOne and I here about almost every week on the Java Posse podcast.

First of all, it is marketed to novice developers, which made me feel a little dumb because it took me some time to figure things out, like to use "Run" instead of "Build" to see my changes. But I was very impressed with how fast I built a simple and nice looking portlet. It was really cool how all I had to do was drag a table on to a drop down and it just worked. I'll keep working with to see if it is a tool worh keeping. So far it seems like it might be a good prototyper, lets see if I can do something real with it.

The minor suprise was how much of a pig this thing is. My Sun Blade 1000 dual processor with 2 gigs of ram can barely handle it.

OK, not much of a trade I admit but I would love to have VMware Workstation running on top of Solaris, not just Solaris on top something else. I use Solaris on my primary desktop but I need Windows once in awhile. Right now my solution is a Sparc workstation with a SUNpci card. Don't get me wrong, this is a great solution, just expensive which forces me to used hardware.

If VMware releases workstation for Solaris I'll buy it along with a shiny new Ultra 20.