Developer's Quarterdeck Log

I FINALLY received my Ferrari 5000. It was on back order since September and so far I have to say the wait was worth it. I only have three minor nits so far, one is that the keyboard will take some getting used to. The Enter key and ctrl key aren't where I would expect them but I am sure I'll get used to it. The second is the heat blasted from the side. If you use a mouse while the laptop is on a desk then your right hand gets warmed up. I am not sure if this is a feature or flaw! But the bottom isn't too hot for lap use like my older Powerbook. The third minor issue is that the scroll bottom does not work with Firefox/Thunderbird.

More to come...

Ben Rockwood made an interesting point on Joyent's latest podcast that Sun has two worlds: Java and Solaris. This came up during the discussion about Java becoming about sourced. He wasn't really happy about Java using GPL and made the point about different things are at Sun between the Java world at Sun and the Solaris world.

As someone who lives in both worlds as part of my job and my personal interests I have to agree. My feeling is that Sun could do more to "sell" Solaris to the Java world and vice versa. Yes vice versa, just try to advocate using Java for something on the OpenSolaris general list and you'll have flames in no time!

Here is what I am thinking about doing. I would like to write some articles for Java developers about why and how they would find Solaris productive as a development environment. After all, many Java developers like using Linux so Solaris is a natural alternative.

Also, I would like to write a book like this someday but about Solaris. Anyone think that anyone would read it?

So I have finally got connected to the outside web service using the JAX-WS tools in Netbeans. The big problem I had was the web service had some crazy ideas of how things should be done. The big trip up for me was how they used to mean put in an XML document here that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the WSDL but they told all about in the docs. Unfortunately JAX-WS can only read WSDL files and not docs meant for humans, at least not in this version, so I had so manual work to do.

All in all JAX-WS seems like a nice tool. My code to connect to the web service was just a handful of lines. The rest was all generated behind the scenes by Netbeans. It did take me reading through the generated code to figure out what was going on and to figure it out how it all works. I am not a big fan of lots of automated abstraction, but at least Netbeans makes it easy to get to the details if you need to and ignore it if you want to. Just like the Swing tools. The only gripe I have about Netbeans is that I could not use the my long running project I built from an existing ant script, I had to create a new project in order for Netbeans to allow me to consume web services with its tools.

# posted by Bill Rushmore @ 5:18 PM 0 comments

I have a URL from someone for a Web Service I want to send data to and I have Netbeans 5.5 that has tools for connected to Web Services. I have never done any coding with with Web Services but I have a full understanding of how it works. So I plug in the WSDL URL to Netbeans and then right click in my code and tell Netbeans to connect to the method that I want. That should easy right? Well it left me with a few lines of code with some TODO's for me to implement which I have no clue on what to do. All Netbeans did was create a whole mess of classes which it really doesn't what me to look at. Sigh, I have to use my brain and learn something.

So I want to know, it is 2006, where are my robot butlers, flying cars, and IDE's that think for me?

I finally moved to Pittsburgh and settled in. So soon I should be getting back into working OpenSolaris on a regular basis. But during the move I did get asked by someone writing an article about Netbeans about how I used it on the Chime project. I am looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out.

And speaking of Netbeans, I just switched to 5.5. One thing I just noticed, which I am not if it is new or has been there for awhile, is key bindings for Emacs! Since I bounced between the two all the time I really appreciate that feature.