Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog: June 2005 Archive

Posted by kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

So, let's take a look at the list of 219 bugs fixed in the latest release candidate for 3.1 version. 159 (that's right, seventy two percent) have been fixed by IBM employees in four different countries. The list for EMF (open and closed bugs) contains 877 entries, all of them assigned to IBM mail addresses. The list for Hyades (open and closed) contains 3534 bugs, almost all of them for IBM addresses. They can babble all they want about gazillions of members on Eclipse board, but the fact still remains - it's open source (as much as Sun's projects on java.net), but it's powered exclusively by IBM.

And another, more alarming thing. It is true that Eclipse is now much faster than it was a few months ago (thanks to the competition with NetBeans). It is true that on small screens (15") it has much better layout than IntelliJ. But at what price it comes?

100MB for an IDE? More than twice than the latest Mustang JDK that receives much blame for the bloat? Twice the size of IntelliJ? Twice the size of NetBeans? I don't see twice the features (although there are some nice ones that are only now being developed in other IDEs, such as CamelCase, undo refactor etc).

And the last note - i guess the 3.1 version will make it just in time for the JavaOne presentations, but judging by the amount of bugs fixed (219 for RC3, 716 for RC2 and 805 for RC1) I would prefer focusing less on quantity and more on quality.

Working with JAXB 2.0 - JavaOne BoF

Posted by kirillcool on June 19, 2005 at 03:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Java Web Services Developer Pack community on java.net groups a number of inter-related Java projects in the Web Services and XML area at Java.Net that either implement the core Java WS and XML APIs or that take advantage of them to provide additional functionality to the developer community.

These projects will be presented by Eduardo, Kohsuke and me during the The Web Services Stack from Java.Net BOF (number 9646) that will take place in Moscone Center/Hall E 133 on Wednesday (June 29) at 19:30.

I will shortly present the JAXB Workshop project that has recently seen its Release 1.1. The notable tools in this project include:

XSD scrambler that strips all (possible commercially valuable) information from a set of input schemas at the same time preserving the structure. You can see the before and the after screenshots:

XML colorer that allows XML viewers and editors to retrieve exact location information on all XML artifacts. The granularity of the returned information is much finer than standard XML or StAX events. For example, the StartElement StAX event is translated into a series of locations : starting bracket, element name, attribute name / equal sign / quotation marks for each attribute, ending bracket.

Graphical front-end for XJC generator that allows viewing and editing the input schemas and viewing the generated Java classes from the JAXB 2.0 generator.

Pixel Precision the Almighty

Posted by kirillcool on June 08, 2005 at 03:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While the debates rage on with a lot of unsupported claims on both sides, while various projects aim to fix problems that are apparently known to developers only, while the developers themselves publish elaborate techniques to perfectly imitate behaviour that will be changed by OS vendor in the next version, where is the truth?

Many have praised this new Pixel Precision deity, many have claimed that this deity fails to account for successful UIs such as WinAmp or Media Player. I suspect that there are many followers of this new deity that wish to emulate native look and feel while at the same time thoroughly despising the OS vendor and all its products. All in the name of the end user experience.

Many have claimed that the default Metal LAF is obsolete and its replacement should have nothing to do with water. Many have demanded to incorporate open source LAFs into Mustang, hailing them as saviours long thought to be lost.

But what about that most sacred and decisive argument that serves both sides so well - the end user experience? Where is that mythical user that shatters his new LCD in frustration seeing awkward bluish rectangular buttons and at the same time screams in anguish seeing familiar look and feel in the completely different OS? That mythical user that is cited not once too many by both sides as the ultimate goal, the holy Grail of LAF, so to speak? Is he aware at all that such a problem exists? Has he been approached in a systematic manner? Has he been presented with some new application in assortment of LAFs? Did he have a chance to make his statement?

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