June 2009 – Page 4 – Kev's Development Toolbox

June 7, 2009

eWeek’s ’19 Reasons why Microsoft is huge with developers’ – Which developers?

Having worked in IT for 15 years now, 14 years as a developer, I read eWeek’s article ’19 Reasons why Microsoft is Huge with Developers’ wondering ‘what developers are they talking about?’ – obviously only developers that work with Microsoft products. Personally I know 1 developer who is a Microsoft developer, and one other colleague who is a big advocate for Microsoft products, which in 14 years of being a developer is not exactly many.

Admittedly, my view of the developer world is somewhat skewed, having spent 13 years working exclusively with Java. I know there are Microsoft developers out there, I just don’t know of any (other than the 2 I mentioned), so this article seems somewhat over-inflated. Huge? Yes, huge with Microsoft developers. I certainly have little interest in anything Microsoft, and have no desire to find out what that are doing with .NET or their VisualStudio tools. So, is Microsoft huge with developers? Possibly with existing Microsoft developers, but that seems like a limited world from my perspective.

June 5, 2009

Consolidation of online social networking services?

There’s too many social networking sites out there today. Everyone is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace etc, chatting on IM clients like Yahoo IM, AOL, Google Chat, posting snippets of their life and sharing photos etc on Flickr and elsewhere, plus I have a number of different email accounts for various reasons. All this information is spread too thin across too many places and to keep track of all this takes too much time and effort.

There are a few social networking consolidation tools popping up that look like they are taking us in the right direction, but I haven’t found (yet) a one tool does everything app or site. So far Digsby looks promising, but only a Windows app available so far. AlertThingy looks good as well – I’ll have to check this one out.

At some point I’m pretty at some point it will be possible to get all this information in one place, but it doesn’t look like it’s there yet.

June 4, 2009

Ubuntu 9 server cron jobs (cron.daily, cron.weekly etc)

I have some backup scripts that live in my home directory and are symlinked into the /etc/cron.daily and cron.weekly etc dirs. Apparently run-parts will not run scripts that have a ‘.’ in the filename, so the symlink to the .sh files has to be named minus the file extension.

Also, testing the scripts with ‘sudo runparts /etc/crond.daily’ gave errors like this:

<code>run-parts: failed to exec /etc/cron.daily/update_apache_logs: Exec format error</code>

To fix this, I added this to the top of each of the scripts:

<code>#!/bin/sh</code>

June 3, 2009

JavaOne day 1 summary

There always seems to be an common theme to each JavaOne conference, and this year although I only got to attend the CommunityOne day and then the first day of JavaOne, it appears there is a continued focus on the community and building social networking tools and sites, and a continued push for JavaFX.

It seems the last couple of years pushing specific technologies has taken a backseat instead to focus on what you can do with the technology. There was the mobile push for a while, then social networking, community building and open source, and for the last 2 years, JavaFX to build engaging client-side apps.

I admit this year JavaFX curiosity got the better of me. Two years ago (?) JavaFX was announced with lots of smoke and mirror demos. Last year it was released. This year they’re stil pushing it hard with plenty of sessions, so I decided to attend a few of the sessions to find out what it’s all about. I’m impressed with the goals and aims of the FXScript language. It got me really interested to see a domain specific language like this and how much of the plumbing and technical details can be abstracted away. My main interest coming away from the sessions was not how can I use JavaFX, but how and when will the main Java language evolve to provide domain specific abstractions so we think less about the technologies – JSP pages, Servlets, EJBs, data access etc, and think about build business systems declaratively – will this ever happen?