Kev's Development Toolbox

May 8, 2006

Sony set to unveil PS3 at pre-E3 press conference this evening

This week is E3 week in LA – new game releases a plenty, however the big and much awaited news is going to be Sony’s unveiling of a working, playable PS3 console. Sony are hosting a pre-conference press conference this evening, to supposedly unveil a working PS3.

Yes, we’ve seen the specs, pictures, the prerendered movies, but this week the big news is going to be a playable console on the floor that people can actually play.

May 6, 2006

Selecting a Java Code Generator – update 2

Last week I wrote a short article about selecting a Java code generator.

So far I have not had much luck:

I’m still disappointed with the Netbeans 5.5 daily builds (last I tried was NetBeans IDE 5.5 daily build 200605050500). This has the most promise, but is still full of bugs and I haven;t been able to get the ‘JSF pages from Entities’ generator to work or deploy successfully to JBoss4.04RC1. The annoying thing so far is when you create a new ENterprise app, if you create Entities in the EJB project, the web project cannot see the Entities and you get no-where with the wizard. If you create the Entities in your Web project then the wizard works, but the JSF pages generated are still not compatible with JBoss 4.0.4 (despite having created defects on the Netbeans site and have them supposedly resolved).
The JAG generator gave NullPointerExceptions importing my XMI exported UML model from Poseidon CE1.6.1 UML designer, so no luch there either.

Next is to go back to Eclipse with with JBoss IDE plugin, and use the Hibernate Tools option to generate a CRUD app skeleton for their JSF/Seam Framework… I haven’t been able to work this out yet without digging into the docs, so time to install the latest versions, browse through the docs and give it another go… by the way, here’s a link for a complete walk-through using the Hibernate Tools: http://www.jboss.com/products/seam/SeamHBTools.html

May 6, 2006

Creating matching color schemes

I admit I’m not very artistically inclined, and so tend to stick with simple designs for any of my UIs. I just came across a link to this usful app, Color Schemer, which when you select a base colur, produces ranges of matching colors that go well with your selected color.

I’m sure there’s a science behind how this works, but it seems to produce pleasing combinations, so I’ll definitely be checking this out soon.

May 5, 2006

Ethan Nicholas: ‘Understanding Weak References’

Ethan Nicholas has an interesting article in his blog this week about ‘Understanding Weak References’.

I have known of weak, soft and phantom references for some time, but have never had a reason to use them. Nicholas gives a couple of good examples of how they can be used.