Oct 15

Programmers, join the Stack Overflow!

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This is not supposed to be a flame war. It’s just an attempt to bring a little more diversity to the already interesting and very well implemented Stack Overflow.

I have been a member since the beginning of August and was lucky enough to join the private beta. Currently, the site is in public beta status and there have been a lot of interesting questions already.

In my opinion, questions concerning the Microsoft stack still dominate the site. Many have attributed this to the fact that Jeff’s and Joel’s readers are coming from this background. However, the goal of the site was to have resources for any kind of programming language/environment that may exist.

In order to support the achievement of that goal, this is a call to all programmers out there, no matter how weird the language they (must) use:

Join the Stack Overflow and share your rare knowledge!

Or just try to find some answers where Google can’t look (yet?): In the brains of some fellow programmers ;)

Jul 11

Eclipse JBoss server runtime library lost

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Today, I had a strange problem with Eclipse. I have an EJB project with JBoss v4.2 selected in targeted runtimes (project properties) and as such the JBoss v4.2 server runtime classpath variable. I have really no idea what happened, but the effect was that the JBoss classpath entry didn’t show up any longer. My first thought was that maybe the .classpath file got mixed up, but it still contained the required entry. The project properties also contained all the correct information. Just the package explorer didn’t show the entry and it definitely wasn’t there as the build for the project failed because the required classes could not be found.

The <workspace>/.metadata/.log file contained the following error message many times:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.jst.server.core 4 0 2008-07-11 16:24:46.251
!MESSAGE Error calling delegate RuntimeClasspathProviderWrapper[org.eclipse.jst.server.generic.runtimeTarget]: null

So this must have been a bug in resolving the server classpath. I couldn’t find an equivalent problem description, and after playing around with the project settings, adding and removing the library manually, which didn’t help any further, I tried updating the Java Standard Tools. There was indeed a patch available. My previous version of JST was org.eclipse.jst_2.0.2.v200802150100-7B-7_8dDTOvmuz0di_U5vgUfz0em and I installed the patch org.eclipse.jst.web_core.feature.patch_2.0.2.v200803241913-208i8s733I395D6BA7. My Eclipse SDK version used is 3.3.2, Build id M20080221-1800.

After the installation of the patch and a restart of Eclipse, the JBoss v4.2 entry showed up again and the error message didn’t occur any longer in the log file. As I said, I don’t really know what had happened, but the patch might have resolved the issue for me, so maybe this helps someone out there, who runs into the same problem.

Jul 10

Eclipse is a great IDE for developing any kind of Java code, e.g. Rich Client (RCP), Web or standalone applications. However, when a project is built using any IDE (yes, there are others – e.g. Netbeans or IntelliJ IDEA), there may be some dependencies towards the chosen tool when it comes to compiling and packaging the code. This doesn’t matter too much as long as there is no requirement to automate the build process. This will happen, as soon as you decide to set up Continuous Integration for your project.

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Apr 25

This just made my day:

When you’re in Eclipse (IDE), press Ctrl+3, then enter the name of a view, editor, preference, command, menu etc. or previously opened resource (e.g. a Java class), select the desired match from the list and voilà – Eclipse navigates you there. You can also enter the initials of the words you are looking for, e.g. “pe” for “Package Explorer”. That’s really a cool feature and available since Eclipse 3.3. It brings kind of a “spotlight feeling” to your development work ;)

Good bye, “Show View” and “Open Perspective” ;)

Apr 21

For some impressions of the JAX conference 2008, check out my Picasa Web Album JAX 2008.

Apr 20

We are going to leave Bayreuth in about two hours. Tomorrow will be the first day of this year’s JAX conference. While the main conference starts on Tuesday, there will already be several so-called “Special Days” on Monday. We are going to attend the Agile Day. Here a little overview of the topics:

  • Comparison of several agile methods (eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Crystal and Feature Driven Development)
  • A guide to becoming agile
  • Collaboration in Java Projects (IBM Rational’s Jazz)
  • Scrum roles and their meaning for agile teams
  • Field report of a Product Owner
  • Agile project management with contracts for services

I think it is a good start to see the different methods at the beginning of the day to have a better understanding for the following more specialized topics. I hope to get a very good insight into agile methods and agile project management as everybody is talking about it and there are often also very controversial interpretations of what agile really is. Of course, there are and must be always different opinions about such things. After all, it’s not about the name or definition of a method, it’s about the success that the applied strategy is supposed to deliver…

Apr 19

JAX 2008: The journey starts tomorrow

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Tomorrow, I will travel to Wiesbaden together with Andreas to visit the JAX 2008. Since we took advantage of the “very early bird offering”, we can join the Agile Day on Monday (April 21) for free. This is a bonus for booking the main conference that takes place from Tuesday to Thursday.

I’m looking forward to the atmosphere and knowledge that is present at “Europe’s No. 1 conference for Enterprise Technology and Strategy” in Wiesbaden’s Rhein-Main-Hallen. Last year, we didn’t follow the whole conference but joined in only on Wednesday for the second and third main days. Additionally, we attended the workshop for model-driven development with Eclipse and openArchitectureWare which was very interesting.

However, this year we decided against a workshop in favor of attending the whole main conference. What we didn’t change is the hotel where we will have dinner and sleep: Hotel Rheineck.

Stay tuned for more information about the conference: The hotel provides free internet access via Wireless LAN ;)

Apr 19

My FriendFeed is up and running

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Those of you who know FriendFeed can now follow me online. After being invited by Alex and reminded by Thomas, I decided to set up an account.

Currently, I’m sharing/using the following services:

So perhaps, see you on FriendFeed, too ;)

Apr 08

I really enjoy my MacBook and OS X, but I neither want to install nor use Safari on Vista (I don’t even use it on the Mac due to some vital Firefox Add-on ;)).

Always having to uncheck Safari when there are Quicktime updates is not very user-friendly…

Thanks Lifehacker for pointing out how to permanently stop safari on my PC

Feb 04

Tag vs. Location in Subversive tag dialog

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Have you ever wondered why you have to enter the full location for a tag (like http://svnserver/tags/v20080204) instead of simply entering the tag name (like v20080204) when you are about to create a new tag for a project via the context menu (Team -> Tag…)?

The solution is to enable structure detection for the Subversion repository:

  • Switch to the SVN Repository Exploring perspective in Eclipse
  • In the SVN Repositories view, right-click on the repository and select Location Properties…
  • Go to the Advanced tab and activate Enable Structure Detection

Of course, the Resource Names must correspond to the folders in the repository to make this work.

From now on, the tag dialog will ask you for the Tag instead of the full Location.

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