TimeGT Task and Note Manager launched!
The most secure and accessible task and note manager is now released!
See TimeGT latest blog post for details. It is not a web-based tool (not yet, at least) but you can access your information anywhere with a pc and keep working even without internet connection!
Check it out and let me know what do you think!
IntelliJ IDEA goes Open-Source!
Yesterday (October 15th, 2009) IntelliJ announced open-sourcing most of its IDEA editor under Apache 2.0 license.
Inevitable for growth
At some perspective this has been an inevitable move — code editors have turned into big platforms. They are used for much more than developing pure text-based artifacts. To remain competitive you need to allow the maximum level of integration, openness and visibility. Which becomes impossible without open-sourcing all the core components. Controversially, using a permissive license (ASL, BSD, EPL, LGPL, not GPL) can turn your business into a charity organization.
Commercial offering
IDEA Platform plus Java, Groovy and Scala support are all open-sourced. It looks like IntelliJ is retaining some of the revenue stream by keeping Java EE stack closed-source, calling it IDEA Ultimate and offering it as a commercial product.
The Importance of Java Enterprise (JEE) Tooling
I think IntelliJ decision about keeping EE as a separate commercial product is a very important indicator for the whole IDE marketplace and particularly for Eclipse. Much to my surprise, at the last Eclipse members meeting Q3 call there were some very interesting download stats reported. Eclipse Galileo IDE for JEE gets 41% of the downloads! While Classic and Java combined were 34%! (Off-topic but rcp/plugin edition was 2%).
This 41% of JEE downloads does not include 3rd party distribution providers, many application server vendors have their own bundles with a pre-configured settings (for example GlassFish Tools Eclipse Bundle).
Indication for a better future
IntelliJ move and Eclipse Galileo JEE download clearly demonstrate how important is a good tooling support for Java Enterprise development.
IntelliJ move can also be a sign for Eclipse that there is now a friendly competitor who has put their bet on outperforming current Eclipse JEE feature-set with a commercial offering.
I have no experience with the IntelliJ JEE offering, is it better than the JEE tooling from Netbeans and Eclipse?
Changing GIMP, XChat and other GTK apps to English language
This can be a real headache unless you know the trick: create new system environment variable “lang” with value “c” (lang=c).
Eclipse Datatools (DTP) gets Amazon AWS SimpleDB Support!
Great news for Eclipse community and SimpleDB fans — Amazon AWS team released Amazon SimpleDB Management tool that is built on top of Eclipse Datatools!
SimpleDB Management in Eclipse lets you access SimpleDB to create, edit and view domains, items and attributes without writing a single line of code. Additionally you can use SQL Scrapbook to write SQL select queries with the help of auto-completion.
See aws.amazon.com/eclipse for more information and download instructions!
Screencast about the Eclipse Datatools SimpleDB features:
AWS Toolkit including SimpleDB DTP integration is licensed under Apache License 2.0 so it is free to download.
Total Eclipse of the Heart
99.99% times I do not like to re-post youtube video links but this time I just have to spread some genius rework of a music video. And what’s more — song title is “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. So let’s use the video to find some out-of-the-box inspiration for our Eclipse platform future!
Thanks for watching! Do you see a message related to the Eclipse Platform?
Changing number scale for Oracle NUMBER columns
Whenever you try to change your NUMBER column to more specific scale like NUMBER(10,2) you end up with an error message:
SQL Error: ORA-01440: column to be modified must be empty to decrease precision or scale
There is a way out of this but it is a bit hacky. Let me know if there is a more elegant solution!
Following example also takes care of the situation when your column is not nullable.
[sql]
alter table MYTABLE add AMOUNT_TEMP NUMBER;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT_TEMP = AMOUNT;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NULL;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=null;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT number(10,2);
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=AMOUNT_TEMP;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NOT NULL;
alter table MYTABLE drop column AMOUNT_TEMP;
[/sql]
Take care!
Quick hint: Ignore bin, target, build etc dirs in Eclipse CVS and SVN Synchronize View
Directory ignore feature for svn and cvs in Eclipse Synchronize View is located in a straightforward place but still from time to time we tend to forget. I keep looking at SVN settings and synchronize View Menu but it is not there.
Here it comes:
Window->Preferences->Team->Ignored Resources
Faster is to simply type “ignored” into preferences quick search!
Here you can add patterns like “bin”, “build”, “target” etc so these will be ignored.
Please be aware that this kind of ignore patterns are not conceptually correct — ignored resources should be configured at the svn repository meta-info level!
No, Cancel, Yes?
New Eclipse 3.5M7 provides an interesting approach for confirmation dialogs. Previous “Yes, No, Cancel” has been replaced with “No, Cancel, Yes” options.
I wonder what is the reasoning behind it.. Read more (including screenshots) at Ivar blog.
MySQL and Oracle — founders take
Nice reading about MySQL future at Oracle is available at Michael Widenius blog. He is the founder of MySQL, was involved in successfully transferring MySQL business to Sun and left the company in the beginning of 2009.
Using Glassfish Eclipse Bundle for JavaDB, JPA and JSP
Have you ever wondered how quickly one could get from installing a J2EE server to running a JSP page that fetches data from DB using modern persistency technology like JPA?
To find out we (me and Ivar) did a little test-drive using recently announced Glassfish Eclipse Bundle that contains Eclipse IDE with bundled Glassfish J2EE server, optionally JDK and a lot of integrated plugins to get you started quickly.
After cutting out all the downloading, startup etc delays we ended up with a surprisingly short 10min demonstration! It was interesting that we barely wrote any code or XML — see for yourself! Tricky part was initial setup to get all the jars and configurations right — must be followed pretty much the same sequence as in the video!
Ok, here it comes, have fun Probably adding a few annotations and audio would help?
Any feedback is more than welcome!