GNOME and The Cloud

Recently I've read some thoughts on GNOME and its (no) integration with the Internet. Let me throw my 2 cents here:

Please allow user to fill its accounts in 'About Me' dialog. Distros (like Ubuntu) can make a nice wizard. possibly the first time GNOME starts (is installed). It can even simplify the install process a lot. User would fill Name, Password (also default from gnome-keyring) and was allowed to add its on-line accounts (possibly with templates for well known, reccomended and new online services out there).

First time user can benefit in following ways:

• It is logical to edit this kind of information in one place. It will not have to be entered multiple times in various applications. User will be happy.
  

• Gnome can automatically start Piding, Empathy or other IM if user has pre-configured at least one IM account.

• Other applications can pull for this information (Ekiga, DropBox, Firefox Plugins?, Banshee-Last.Fm) and use it whenever appropriate.

• The first time application wants to know about specific account, confirmation dialog for access gnome-keyring data is raised.

I am not a GNOME hacker but is this feasible? I guess store it in the gnome-keyring and write a DBUS service Accounts?

the Computer Language

I'm diving. Yes thats is right, in my free time I'm now diving into Python. Finally it seems I found THE language. I grew up on Pascal and C and even it takes an effort to code something useful in it I like it (most parts of GNOME is written in C). Java is now mature but I never had enough time and will to follow up with it. But I have to say with things like J2EEv5 and above frameworks like JBoss Seam, web development in Java has bright future. Then there is Perl which I love, it is like extended bash with OOP in it. But I'm not skilled in any perl web framework and I'm unsure how to do Webservices in Perl and I'm even not sure I would like to do it Perl. So this leaves Perl to my Unix related skills where it works great for managing machines and automating small tasks. I've missed the Ruby On Rails hype.

And now Python. Something I heard about many times already. Something that has OOP built in from start, Interactive and is highly mutable (easily shape able) into anything you need. For some small project I'm developing I needed something simple and easy I looked into django. Because of great documentation and good people on IRC I've decided to stay with Django for some time. With Django you need python (well it is so simple you do not need it for tasks like CRUD) so here I am. So now I'm in the middle of diving into python eagerly reading how to do polymorphisms, SOAP and more in just few lines if you get to code right ;)

Google Tech talks about Django and several more videos from Alex Martelli aboyt python is definitely great way to start.

tests in Perl are easy and funny

and it used to be my nightmare. Many times I see my self scared of things that are actually easy. Probably problem in my head. I used to think that anything new is way above my limits. With this in mind actual learning takes a lot longer and in the end I many times scratch my head that it wasn't that hard. So let's change this attitude and move on to Perl tests.

I've touched Perl first time in my current job where something more powerful than bash scripting was needed to automate all we do. Firstly we had some easy perl scripts doing one task, spread around the boxes. Soon we've realized this is not going to be maintainable. Took some time and learned how to write Perl modules. There are many great articles on the web that tells you how, this one is sounds like nice summary to me.
Today I've decided and went one step further and write tests (I know they should be written in first place, but hey at least I'm writing documentation first).

So I went to perldoc Test::More and after some reading this line has stopped me:
"STOP! If you’re just getting started writing tests, have a look at Test::Simple first."
Ok, move on to perldoc Test::Simple :

"** If you are unfamiliar with testing read Test::Tutorial first! **"

And finally this seems like the one to start. First sentence there is:

" AHHHHHHH!!!! NOT TESTING! Anything but testing!
Beat me, whip me, send me to Detroit, but don’t make me write tests!
*sob*
Besides, I don’t know how to write the damned things.".

I feel like home now, anyway don't let that scare you, writing tests in Perl is actually easy in the end.

small Seam review

I've been trying to learn Seam for past couple of months with various results. After reading JSP and Servlets fundamentals few years ago, I realized Java server side programming was far away from what I expected/needed at that time and put my my efforts into operating systems and network related skills. Recently we've finished small business project coded in Perl, PHP and other open source technologies. As we (team in work, not me the first!) try to be ready for the future as much as possible (I guess this one of my characteristic) new revision of current product is carefully planned. And Java is likely the only one option (I know there are at least several other viable alternatives, but Java is most familiar to me) . Still with Java there are so many possible frameworks to build on it can cause headaches.

Anyway after reviewing possibilities, endless discussions with friends that Spring is the way to go I'm more and more looking into Jboss Seam. From Gavin King, father of Hibernate. Inter operable platform working in many containers (even those not adhering to J2EE v5.0 yet), delivering significant ease to developers work by implementing Bijection (objects are injected and outjected from components) and applying "configuration by exception" pattern as much as possible.

Seam also comes with a lot of predefined classes to simplify the development even more (although I'm still having problems to understand them, but that's my another nature). Developers will love the seam-gen tool which can generate complete project skelet, with possibility to generate Form+supporting component, Action component or generate complete frontend for tables stored in DB. Others will like fact that Seam includes implementation of JBoss rules or plays nicely with most of the IDEs out there. And it comes with great number of very well written and understandable examples too. And it supports AJAX! There is much more about Seam just check out some of reviews .

What I like about it is that it looks like all I have to do to finish my simple syslog front end is to wait.
With 1.1.0 I was struggling with implementing search functionality for EntityQuery component. 1.1.1 came with working implementation of how to do it. Ok that moved me forward and I finished simple application. But then I wanted to add Authentication so users could customize the application, and I've struggled with that as well (poor, bad coder!). 1.1.5 came with with JAAS and even working example implemented right in seam-gen! 1.1.6 is out now and brings bug fixes, email and PDF generation.

Well all I have to do now it to create some nice CSS style with that would replace the simple Orange theme included with seam-gen. Or maybe just wait :)

Sun Tech Days

At first, list of Christmas wishes sounded like a great idea for a first post, but then something that makes more sense came in.

What a nice surprise when on Monday I realized there is FREE Friday this week in Czech Republic. And what a surprise to find out on Tuesday, there is Sun Tech Days happening from 15th to 16th November at Prague's Congress Center. After I missed last Java Developers conference in Prague, this became must attend to event.

This year, more than 1100 mainly technical oriented people are attending various seminars and presentations. Event was spread into two days.

Day one
Jeff Jackson during his keynote talked about importance and growing usage of Java and SUN these days. He introduced project Glassfish which is a reference implementation of J2EE 5 where many companies contributes to this opensource stack. Ubuntu will be shipping Glassfish as their J2EE server. great. Then followed by courses about Java DB, simplified persistence in J2EE5 vie EJB v3.0 which eases a life of developer a lot. For example, one can use POJO's implementing business interface as an Session bean. No home or remote interface is necessary, this is being taken care by implementing container, all possible due to Annotations (new feature in JAVA5). Great and in-depth seminar about Web Services and Java and XML was held afternoon and after that we've enjoyed great buffet. Leaving about 8pm.

Day two
First session: Future of Java and open source communities in a vision of Sun. Monday 13th October, Sun after 10 years of development of Java has announced Java and even Duke are going open source. Sun's business model was introduced. There are 5 milion Java developers around the world. Today SUN is recognized as one of the most contributors to Open Source Community, by opening many of their products like OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, NetBeans and more. Sun's business is whole platform (HW+operating systems+environment where applications run) strongly depending on creating strong communities around their products thus leveraging running cost significantly. Sun likes sharing. Sirhar Redy had nice talk about importance of software freedom, open source momentum and license issues. Then attended a J2ME session and this reminded me time of sprites on C64 and ZX80. In the afternoon I got to in-depth session about building JSF and AJAX enable web pages held by Dr. Doris Chen. Really nice talk, full of hands on examples about jMaki, Dojotoolkit, Google Web Toolkit and more. After all these events, I realized that probably the biggest show stopper for new Java Developer is the CHOICE. There are so many great technologies, platforms and toolkits that it takes a time to get used to all of them and pick the right one for your project.

Summary: two t-shirts, one Duke, met many friends from University of West Bohemia. Great two days!

More info and slides at SUN Tech Days web page:

And oh yes my wish list:

• 7 iron golf club
• hand glow (golf of course)
• I'll come up with more

Some pictures:

SUN Tech Days