New RIFERS blogs entries from Geert Bevin in category it

Flex to be open-sourced

Geert Bevin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:26:30 +0000

Adobe just announced that it will open source Flex under the MPL license.

I find this quite funny since when Flex was initially released you had to go through a stringent selection process before you were even granted a free developer license. At that time they judged that Bla-bla List didn't meet the requirements and my plans to create an alternative open-source version in Flex as a comparison couldn't go through.

When people have been asking me about Flex at conferences, I've been saying that to be successful it will have to be open-sourced. It seems they eventually realized that nowadays this is a requirement for any development platform. Kudos to Adobe for that.

Sadly, this will now make it even more difficult for OpenLaszlo to defend its case. I still think that it's a superior solution since the programming language is much closer to what people are used to in Javascript development. Also, the fact that OpenLaszlo now supports multiple runtime environments such as DHTML and soon JavaME, is a major bonus. However, going up against the huge Adobe marketing machine will now be any even more difficult task.

I'm joining Terracotta

Geert Bevin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:13:08 +0000

The open-sourcing of Terracotta DSO has been one of the most exciting recent events in the Java world for me. With the help of their engineers I looked into making Terracotta work seamlessly with RIFE and more specifically RIFE's native Java continuations and its dynamic template system. This integration will soon be widely available, so stay tuned!

As I looked closer at the approaches of Terracotta, I realized that they come very close to what I've been striving for with RIFE:

no serialization,
reliance on Java language keywords to drive the core functionality,
ease of configuration and
non-intrusiveness

... and a lot of this is achieved through byte-code rewriting. I also was very excited to see that Terracotta took the open-source model seriously and wasn't just dumping their product on the world without properly following up. Public documentation is collaboratively being written for open-source usage and support through IRC and email has been top-notch. You can feel that everyone involved is very passionate and genuinely motivated to improve their product through the feedback of a larger community.

Native Java continuations fail-over and clustering has been one of the trickiest parts for RIFE users to date and I want to be part of developing the de-facto solution for POJO-based clustering. That's why I'm joining Terracotta as of April 2nd 2007.

Of course I'm still continuing to work on RIFE, to maintain solutions for Uwyn customers, and to talk about various Java-related subjects at conferences ... including Open Terracotta!

Handy one-liner: get current IP address on Linux

Geert Bevin — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:11:15 +0000

This took me a little bit longer that I'd hoped, I tried with awk first but finally settled on perl. Maybe this could be handy for someone else if you need to have the current IP address of eth0 isolated for shell scripting:

ifconfig eth0 | perl -n -e 'if (m/inet addr:([\d\.]+)/g) { print $1 }'

Could result into:

216.182.233.220

At last, an excellent reason to ditch MySQL

Geert Bevin — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 16:21:02 +0000

For years I've been telling people to not use MySQL, but to go for better open-source databases instead, like PostgreSQL.

The reasons have been many, from them not being an actual relational database until version 5, pestering people with crappy JDBC drivers version upgrades, ridiculous float and double support, and insisting on JDBC connections being closed after x hours of inactivity, ...

Finally it seems that MySQL has dug its own grave since they stopped making recent releases available as binary or source archives. Apparently, version 5.0.27 will be the last one that their own download section will provide and you'll have to rely on commercial support, vendors or linux distributions to ship newer versions. If you want to compile from source, it seems that you can still download that if you happen to know the 'secret location' of the FTP archive.

Anyway, people please, leave MySQL behind and move on to something more serious both in terms of database quality as well as in terms of fair practices. Even Oracle 10g XE now starts to look alluring since you at least exactly know what the limitations are. Personally, I still swear by PostgreSQL.

I gave in, Macbook Pro has been ordered

Geert Bevin — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:30:36 +0000

I thought I could do it, I thought I could use an Acer laptop with Linux for a while until the next generation of the Macbook Pro comes out. I tried, I really tried, but ... it's not a Mac. It doesn't run MacOSX, it doesn't run iWork nor iLife, I can't use Exposé, I can't use Omnigraffle, I can't use any of the tools I got to love during the past three years. Besides that, the screen on this Acer Ferrari 4005 is disappointing. Sure, it's not bad, but next to my 30" Apple screen, or even my old Powerbook G4, it's clearly of inferior quality. Finally, this Acer laptop is too heavy and its fan never shuts down. This means that I have to live with the faint background noise all the time.

So I gave in, despite my resolve to be sensible this time. I signed up for an ADC Select Membership and ordered a 2.16Ghz Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive. I will be traveling a lot this year, and I don't want to be frustrated.

Now I'm regretting that I didn't do this a month ago because I will not have a Mac with me at TheServerSide Java Symposium. That will teach me, never try to be sensible about something that you know you'll give into anyway.

Now I just have to be patient for 5 weeks ... if anyone is interested in buying my Acer Ferrari 4005 with 2GB of RAM and warranty extension second hand, drop me a note.

EuroOSCON tomorrow

Geert Bevin — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:43:37 +0000

I made my way to Maarten who was very nice to let me stay at his place. The trip was very stressful since the locomotive of the first train broke down, and I had only five minutes to catch the next train and buy a ticket. I skipped the ticket acquisition and hoped I could buy it on the train. Luckily that is still possible in Belgium.

I have some mixed feelings about the EuroOSCON conference. Honestly, there aren't that many sessions that interest me. I'm giving my presentation on Tuesday, and after that, there isn't anything that I feel like attending besides Bob's Codehaus talk. I'm also curious about the audience since this is an open-source conference and not a Java developers conference. I hope people will be able to follow my presentation since it is quite technical.

I will thus go back home Tuesday evening since I've been away a lot lately and would like to get some work done again. I still have a lot of ideas from Java In Action that I want to investigate and I need to start working on our new CMS/Wiki product.

Anyway, I'll be going to the Presentation Aikido session tomorrow morning, hoping that it will be interesting. Sadly there's no abstract available, so it might not be what I expect from it. After that, I'll be going to Model-Driven Ajax, hoping that I will learn something that makes me reconsider my pessimistic view on the usefulness of Ajax as a general-purpose RIA development platform.

What is a feature?

Geert Bevin — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:17:12 +0000

Yesterday I watched a 40 minute video explaining Microsoft's new UI for Office 12. They demonstrate clearly the purpose of their new Command Tab (aka The Ribbon) approach. One of the main reasons to move away from the standard menu and toolbar paradigm is that Word went from their initial 100 features to 1500 features in the latest version. This doesn't comfortably fit in a menu structure anymore. Apple makes similar claims about Mac OS X Tiger, stating that it has over 200 new features.

That made me wonder: what is a feature?

How do you determine that a certain aspect of an application has the right to be called 'a feature'. What are the smallest parts you can split things up in? Is having a rich text editor a feature; or are bold, italics, underline, align, font selection, color selection, ... all features. This makes a big differences when saying "my application has googolplex features" (yeah, Google seems to be geek stuff inspired all the way up to its name).

To me this sounds like another marketing ploy where numbers are used to try to back up one's superiority but in reality don't have any meaning at all. Makes me think of Michael Ende's Momo (The Grey Gentlemen) chapter: the correct calculation that is wrong, where people are tricked into giving their precious time to evil men in gray.

'Enterprise' development requires balls

Geert Bevin — Sat, 21 May 2005 11:14:28 +0000

I post this as a reply to Koz's "Why ‘Enterprise’ Development is Hard” blog post.

A large part of our customers come to us because they don't want to go through their own IT service. Usually they need a solution quickly and doing it internally takes too long and is much too rigid.

Over the years we learned that after listening to the customer's stories, we almost never do exactly what they initially wanted. We work from the business requirements first and the mandatory back-end restrictions. What they already designed is taken with a big grain of salt and we investigate if the solution that they came up with is effectively the best approach. Very often we're able to propose a simpler approach that's easier to implement, easier to use and easier to integrate. It's part of our job to be able to gently say 'no' and use our experience to really solve the requirements properly without bloating the result. Many people in the internal IT teams don't really take the trouble, they are often aversive to any kind of change and execute what they've been told or architect it exactly in the same way as what has already applied before. Most of the time they don't have the luxury to take time to learn about new technologies and tools. There is nothing wrong with that, but we think it's our responsibility to do better.

People trust an architect to figure out the best approach to build their house. We noticed that many customers are ready to give you the same trust if you have some track-record and are sure of yourself. Indeed it's not always easy to counter the internal techies and come up for what you consider better.