Pito’s Blog

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I’m getting a little fascinated with Ruby and Rails so I’ve been getting acquainted with it. Just want to share a handy link with detailed instructions on how to build and configure all that stuff on a Mac. Handy if you are in the .01% of the world who cares

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Heard a lot about Ruby? Ruby on Rails? Wonder what the heck it is? Here’s a good intro.

“This is not yet another “Ruby is better than Java” article. Nor is it intended to bash Java or Java programmers. Rather, it is an attempt to aid Java programmers who are investigating Ruby by helping them quickly get over the “Writing Java in Ruby” syndrome and to discover the Ruby Way.” (from “10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know about Ruby”)

Technorati Tags: ruby

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Ever notice in restaurant menus how the dish descriptions are made to sound fancier and fancier by adding adjective?

“green beans” are not as good as “fresh green-beans”, which are not as good as “native fresh green-beans”, which are not as good as: “hand-picked native fresh green-beans”, which are of course the best!

Is this a similar phenomenon in geek-world?  It seems like you can tack “X driven development” or “agile Y” or “object oriented Z” to make anything sound cooler and more a-go-go. Why has no-one written the papers on “agile idea driven development” or “agile concept-driven object-oriented debugging” yet?

Or have they?

Technorati Tags: funny, Geeky

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One of the hairier and most interesting parts of Swing (Java’s GUI layer) are the so-called pluggable look and feels (or is it looks and feel?.) Truth is that you can live a very happy Swing life without knowing how it works, but if you are curious or need to know for some reason… 

This document is a good summary, even though a little dated, if you are interested in really understanding it. Like many things it’s not so complex once you understand it.

Technorati Tags: java, swing

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I’ve subscribed to this list from OCI (”Object Computing Inc.”)  for a while now. They always have interesting readable articles on one thing or another related to Java. 

If you are interested in Java, I recommend it!

Technorati Tags: java

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“IBM has announced that it will be joining the Harmony open source Java project. Although right now, IBM’s role is limited to providing thoughts and suggestions, it is likely that IBM will be contributing code to the project in the future according to Rod Smith, Vice President of Advanced Technology at IBM.”, from JavaLobby.

While Java is great as a language and as a platform, there has been reasonable concern about Sun’s stewardship of it, both short and long term. The fact that IBM seems to be throwing their hat into the ring of making an alternative, open source, Java platform, can either be good by itself or because it gives Sun a kick in the pants. Either way, I think it could be good!

Technorati Tags: interesting, java, IBM, puppy

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What a difference this conference is from the ones I usually go to. Ten thousand or so fairly hard-core Java programmers, more or less around the clock, learning about Java in all it’s mysterious variety.

• We get to learn how Sun thinks about its stewardship of Java
• We get to see the latest new features, concepts, directions of all the multitude of parts of the java universe
• We get to dive deep, really, really deep, into many nooks and crannies of the technology platform

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Another neat link I was shown:

“Ever since I was a wee programmer, I’ve been reminded that good code has a lot of comments. After all, code will be read many more times than it will be written. ” (from “Write Sweet-smelling Comments“)

Technorati Tags: programming

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Maybe you’ve read or heard my rants about what has become known as the “Scary Dialog Box” that users see when the run a Java application without a valid certificate.

And if you have used BlogBridge, you will have seen it and many of you have asked what the heck it means, and I am sure many more have chosen not to run BlogBridge because of it.

Sun has heard this complaint from many many people and is now trying to fix the problem, by introducing this new alternative dialog box to report the same thing. There’s a post and a thread about this here. Here’s what you see if your application is signed with a verified certificate:

Is this an improvement? Yes.

Is it good enough? No!

IMHO the whole idea of using certificates to sign applications is fatally flawed. It provides illusory security.

As a small developer, all I have to do to make it go away is to spend some number of hundreds of dollars to get a certificate from Verisign or one of the many other CAs. When I do this, the message then becomes this:

How is the user any more secure?

Any malware developer could do the same thing. Of course they are smart enough so their company name wouldn’t show up as “Malware Developer” and the application wouldn’t be called “Big Bad Virus.”

How is the user to know?

So my problem with this whole signed application certificate thing is that it gives the user a very false sense of security.

Technorati Tags: java, security, webstart

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There’s another flame-up on the WebStart commentary on the web, this time under the title “Webstart, now I see why people don’t use it.”

Even though I’ve spoken out about this once or twice, I couldn’t resist weighing in.

Here’s what I wrote:

I have written so much about this in Blogs, newsgroups, etc that I won’t rehash it here; however I will put some links below for those who are interested.

My Bottom lines:

• WebStart is a very promising (I would call it tantalizingly close) approach. The problem is that when you are trying to get people to use your application, the one place where you need to be super robust is in the install and setup and initial user experience, which is exactly where WebStart falls down.
• The BlogBridge project is a major cross platform application that uses Java Web Start. Today there have been thousands of installation. Of the people that have any kind of installation or startup problem, 9 out of 10 are Webstart related. Try BlogBridge’s Web Start experience for yourself.
• Java Web Start is not a solid solution for a cross platform java application that you intend to deploy widely (on the internet not just internally where you can handhold each user)
• BlogBridge will be abandoning WebStart in the next release with Great Regret.
• IMHO Sun is acting contrary to their strategic goals (as stated) by not paying sufficient attention to a major hurdle to succeeding on the desktop and their progress on this front is so slow it’s absurd.
• Sun has heard lots of highly specific technical explanations of where the problems are and what the impact is and they say they understand but don’t act on it.

Here are some links where I wrote about this in the past. I am but one voice in dozens. Click to read:

• From ClientJava.com
• Also from there
• From my blog
• Also from my blog
• And also from my blog

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