For quite a while I've been frustrated with Oracle's lack of doing limit and offset in an easy single query. This always made it tedious to display paged results from a database query in a web page. Today, after looking on the web for the xth time, I stumbled into a query that seems to solve this.

So without further ado, here it is for those that have been searching for it also:

SELECT * FROM (
    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY column1) LINENUM, column1, column2
    FROM MyTable
    ORDER BY column1
)
WHERE LINENUM BETWEEN 100 AND 200;

Omnicore released another update to their awesome IDE. More information about it here. The changelog is available here.

My favourite IDE made a new beta release of it's upcoming new version. More information can be found here. For me, the most important new features are: facility to switch the inspected thread while debugging; "Logpoints" that are similiar to breakpoints but instead of suspending, the VM logs a user expression to the console; advanced breakpoints with expression evaluation, expression watches, hit-count watches; it runs with 1.5 alpha on linux.

Yesterday, a new open-source web application framework has been announced on The Server Side and it has been literally been blown to pieces by the remarks. When I first read the announcement and went to the project's site to get some more information, I was struck by the amount of marketing crap that I read and quite quickly dismissed digging deeper into the project. After following the discussion on TSS I posted a comment too, indicating that after the author's statements and bold comparisons against existing project, he should have expected such a reaction.

When I woke up this morning, I couldn't help asking myself the question if these reactions are really all that justified. It seems clear to me that the author is quite passionate about his work, maybe too passionate. Probably, while trying to achieve the best possible results, his gaze got stuck on the neat things that he created and he lost perspective a little bit. So what? A few polite remarks and corrections from offended people should have sufficed, but I really don't think there's a need for personal attacks like this. Sheesh, this software is given away for free and the author simply believes that what he does is better the rest out there. Maybe it's true and he fails to explain it correctly or to defend himself appropriately, or maybe it isn't as good as he says. So what, there's no need to give people blows like that. I'm sure many reactions hurt him a lot.

I have released quite a number of open-source projects in the past and regrettably I have had to go through similar experiences. I remember vividly that when I announced RelativeLayers on Freshmeat a few years ago, the source code was torn apart on IRC and a bunch of IE-lovers had the time of their life making fun of some bad javascript habits I had back then. The project was eventually put in the channel's topic with some pointers to code locations as the laughing stock of the day. Now that really hurt!

If open-source is about community, shouldn't the established gurus politely help newcomers instead of ripping their heads off? Remember when you had that first project that gave you the rush, how passionate you were about it and how much time and energy you spent on it. Maybe you got somewhere now and you are part of a successful project, but that simply should make you more tolerant, not vindicative!

For a while I've been using the XMLmind xml editor to write documentation for the RIFE project in docbook. I've been very impressed with how easy it is to work on the users guide after having done documentation before in raw docbook with XEmacs.

Today I started to get really annoyed while editing javadoc comments with in-lined example code. Since CodeGuide only has minimal support for javadoc, I searched the web for an additional tool that would allow me to visually do the documentation authoring. I stumbled onto this plugin for XMLmind and I must say that it's one of the coolest tools I've used in a long time. It fully preserves your java code formatting and you're even able to use spellchecking inside the javadoc comments!

Here's the obligatory screenshot: