Would you rather take the blue pill or the red pill?
Published by admin on
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - 01:00:03
- Filed under General, News, Development
Recently on Servoy’s forum someone linked to a blog where he started putting his impressions about FileMaker (described as ‘the comfort zone’) and Servoy (with its ‘learning curve’).
Nice subject, I thought, you can write tons of stuff about that’s for sure!
Somehow his dilemma kinda reminded me of that scene in The Matrix where Neo is offered a choice between the blue pill (a nice little dream) and the red pill (the shocking reality). When comparing FileMaker to Servoy in terms of software engineering, the choice is strikingly simlilar to the one offered there.
The blue pill:
- everyone can, without much effort, build enterprise software
- no need to learn about computer stuff… that’s for geeks only
- Object Oriented Programming? Come on, do we really need that?
- transactions, who the hell is using this anyway?
- programming languages are not necessary, you can do it all with wizards nowadays
- no need to know SQL to query a database intelligently, the program will do everything for you
- naming conventions? that’s so eighties!
- who needs a DB schema today? normalization? who cares, just put everything in a flat table, the program will sort everything out for you.
- etc. etc.
The red pill:
- building enterprise level software is a craft, and it takes long years of experience and learning to be able to write good software
- you will need to understand how things work to build things right
- if you want to build sustainable code, there’s no way out of OOP
- care about transactions in multi-users/multi-threads/multi-threads/multi-nodes is essential to your data safety
- no wizard of any sort will be capable of building an entire software of enterprise quality for you, you will have to do it yourself
- creating/querying database without a good understanding of SQL is going straight into a wall
- you need to organize your code/methods/forms/objets right from the very beginning, otherwise you will end up with an unmanageable mess, that you will have no time to rewrite later, and regret deeply
- undestanding database schema, entity-relationships, constrains is something you can’t do without if you are serious about software programming,
- etc. etc.
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What’s with this ServoyForge stuff now?
Published by admin on
Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - 03:07:00
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
You certainly heard about it, you’ve seen it announced on the forum, on ServoyCamp, it soon will be in the Servoy newsletter as well…
You went there, seen it, got the tee-shirt…
Right, but what the hell is this new site about?
Fear not, Servoy Stuff is here to explain all about it!
Let’s look at the blurb, what does it says?
“The mission of ServoyForge is to organize Servoy Open Source projects into a centralized community-owned platform.”
Yes, we have a mission: we want to organize all Servoy Open Source projects, - and yes we could have called it SOS but in the end decided against it, it sounded a little bit too desperate ;-)
What about community-owned platform? To me that’s the interesting part: We owe nothing to no one, aren’t guided by any merchant agenda, - in fact the only agenda we profess to have is that we want the Servoy platform to be the one we dream about!
Are you in?
I gather that if you are still reading this, you probably are…
So how do we propose to do that? Well, still according to the announcement, the site “will enable talented Servoy/Java developers to contribute more easily and will offer innovative Open Source components to the Servoy community at large.”
So is that what it is? Is that it?
Yes, sir: A mean to communicate with other Servoy/Java developers in the world and make things happening!
To that end, we evaluated a few of the best Open Source project management/development platforms available to find the one that would suit best our needs. In the end we chose to build the platform on top of the Redmine system (another community-owned system, BTW).
So what’s in it for you? When you open a project on SourceForge, you benefit from:
- svn repository, complete with members and anonymous access, and a web-based repository browser where external developers can easily browse your code (and you can point them to it with a simple URL too!),
- team management, with role based control on the whole interface for your contributors, reporters, project leaders and other simple users,
- module management, you can activate certain functionalities at will, - or choose not to,
- sophisticated issue-tracker, with status management, role-based attributes, control over categories, time management, workflow, versions roadmap, notifications, all of this accessible from your Eclipse/Servoy installation using Mylyn,
- all activity is logged and accessible (browsable and searchable),
- news management is here for your announcements,
- wiki for your documentation (with versioning enabled), and easy to use syntax
- forums management for your own projects, with email notifications,
- files management for the release you make, and any relevant files,
- document management for your documentation,
- an easy way to be found and be part of a large base of talented contributors and reporters all working together on different projects..
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How not to destroy your Open Source Community before it even exists.
Published by admin on
Monday, June 7, 2010 - 00:08:42
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
While being enthusiastic about Servoy’s announce that Servoy 5.2 will be Open Sourced (see my post on that subject), I really hope that they are going to do it right. What do I mean?
Most major Open Source software are backed up by companies who have interests in it (think of Eclipse and look at how IBM/Adobe and others are major contributors to the project), so it is not unusual for a commercial company to Open Source a product, or even pay part of its staff to maintain one. I will not list again the many benefits that this move can offer (just see what Jan Aleman said in the official press release), the problem is that there can also be very bad consequences if the company is not “open” enough.
About openness, you might remember the famous post about the failephant of the Ushahidi project. This is something to keep in mind.
Yes, in matters of Open Source, there is a flip side of the coin: benefits on one side, big dangers on the other. What will make a big difference when you draw is the company’s attitude towards openness in general.
Now since I like the platform very much, I would like Servoy to get all the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Josh Berkus, CEO of PostgreSQL Experts Inc (quoted “one of the foremost PostgreSQL consulting firms in the world” on Servoy blog), lately summarized how easy it was to destroy an Open Source community.
Interestingly enough, the Josh Berkus who did this presentation is the very same guy who will be doing next thursday’s webinar about Open Source Servoy and PostgreSQL…
Please read his very informative (yet funny) slides called “10 Ways to Destroy Your Community” - there is also an abridged version for the impatient (funny and informative as well), called “Destroy your Community in 5 easy steps“.
For those of you who also want some background comments about these slides, you can read the post Josh made about Sun and the Ten Ways.
If Sun and dozen others did it so badly, there is still hope that Servoy will do it right…
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10000 visits today!
Published by admin on
Monday, May 17, 2010 - 06:39:11
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans
Today, not even a year after its launch in May 2009, the Servoy Stuff site is celebrating 10000 visits!
It’s only been a month and a half since the site reached 5000 visits, so I can say that the last 2 months attracted a lot of attention, and I wanted to thank you all for your support!
Be sure that there will be more interesting stuff related to Servoy in the future, so keep coming.
To properly celebrate this, I’ve made publicly available the new VelocityReport plugin, that we’ve created together with Jeff Bader. Version 1.0 is now available for download from the Servoy Stuff site related page.
You’ve heard rumours about it: they say it is going to change forever the way you do reporting in Servoy. The truth is that now you will have yet another powerful option to build your reports.
We coined this one ‘Servoy reports, the easy way’, and you will see that it lives up to its name! :)
Seriously, this is yet another (French Canadian/American) Swiss knife tool for Servoy, you have to try it to believe it. Not only can you build powerful HTML reports and export them to PDF with it, but you can also use it as an internal templating tool or an extended charting tool (with as much options as Google charts) and a barcode tool.
There’s only one thing missing: the long awaited ‘make it work’ button (this one is a special request from Ian ‘Kahuna’ Cordingley ;-) - I’ll see what I can do, Ian!
To make the most of this new stuff, read all about it on the associated google code site.
Enjoy!
VelocityReport plugin history
Published by admin on
Monday, April 26, 2010 - 06:53:51
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
Jeff Bader contacted me a few months ago because he wanted to Open Source his nice XhtmlRenderer plugin. Basically he couldn’t find the time to support it anymore and he thought that it was kind of competing with the BrowserSuite, so he asked me if I would be interesting in porting it to Servoy 5 and see what could be made out of it.
At the time, I didn’t really know what to do, I knew about the plugin but had never tested it, and I had no real idea how to make it relevant after all the effort I already put into the Browser Suite.
Then, a few weeks later, my boss came to my office with one of her crazy ‘on-the-fly’ requirements for a future project… The project was not that difficult (it involved some kind of management tool to create surveys and to gather results in Servoy), but there was one part that was a bit frightening in it: she showed me the kind of reports she wanted to output from the data gathered. It was 8 to 10 pages long, with each pages having a different structure, one with a simple text, with paragraphs and styles, the second with a table of 8 column and another table of 4 columns (with one big column of text and little results column and background colors to show a kind of graph of the values), the next one with some charts and explanations underneath, etc.
All along I thought: god, it’s going to be a nightmare to create this kind of report dynamically with Servoy and Jasper Reports.
And then I remembered that the last time I had a seemingly impossible report to create in Jasper, I actually did it in HTML in no time! It was for a calendar tool that I have made (in Java, web-based, not in Servoy), with a monthly view of 7 columns x weeks and different ‘events’ with background colors and a certain number of lines of text inside each cell.
I did it in HTML and used the xhtmlrenderer library (aka the Flying Saucer project). What was nice about it was the CSS capabilities of that libary and the fact that it was dead easy to create PDF with CSS styling.
So remembering my usage of the xhtmlrenderer lib to output a report, and knowing that there was this plugin waiting for me to put my nose into it, putting all this together, I saw the light! (It happens to me too, sometimes :)
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Signed beans/plugins for Servoy Stuff
Published by admin on
Friday, April 23, 2010 - 03:34:30
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
Following the latest Java 6 update 19 fiasco, followed a few days later by another buggy release 20, which was forced on our throat thanks to Oracle total lack of care for us developers (without any beta like it was always the case when Sun was… Sun), you will find from now on that every plugins/beans available for download on the Servoy Stuff site will be signed by “Patrick Talbot Open Source Developer”.
This certificate has been provided thanks to the generous offer of Certum CA, a Certificate Authority recognized by Sun in the JVM (works on Mac OS X too, don’t worry!). They offer FREE one year (renewable) certificate for Open Source developers and I am the proof that it’s for real, and this is an initiative that must be applauded these days where companies like Oracle clearly don’t care a bit about us developers, except for our money, I mean.
So once they have installed this certificate (which will be the case when they accept the first time to run Servoy with one of the plugin/bean used in your solution), your clients will never hear about me again, which is fine because I’m shy, really ;-)
On another note, I have found this article on the JavaLobby DZone site which I’m sure you will enjoy as much as I have (the author you know already ;-)
I think we should all support the author who is expressing here some reasonable concern and offering reasonable solutions. The more we all make noise about it, the more Oracle might have its ears scratching and who knows… they might be listening.
I know another company who recently showed that they were ;-)
More than 5000 visits! Let’s celebrate with the new JSDoc Serclipse plugin
Published by admin on
Monday, March 1, 2010 - 00:39:07
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans
Yes. On friday the Servoy Stuff web site reached more than 5000 visits!
Started in june 2009, now 9 months later it seems to be popular enough :)
And it’s only since last July that I have started tracking downloads, which as of today are well over 3000!
So thank you all for your support and visits!
Now to celebrate this, I’ve had some fun writting a brand new plugin for you: this time it is a Serclipse plugin (it will add functionality to your Servoy developer environment), helping you generate JSDoc html documentation out of your Servoy solutions.
Check it out on the relevant page of the Servoy Stuff site.
Browser Suite v0.9 coming soon to a website near you!
Published by admin on
Monday, December 21, 2009 - 05:55:48
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
Hi there!
For those of you expecting the end of the story, I’m asking for a little bit of patience…
Right now, I’m hard at work on the Browser Suite (for a change ;-), currently writing an extended documentation with (hopefully useful!) explanations of all the properties and methods, tips and tricks and examples of usage. All this in a nice PDF with table of contents, screen captures, and all the bells and whistles…
And while I’m working on the doc, I made a few changes to method names and signatures, mainly harmonizing the names to better match Servoy’s conventions like calling the event methods with a name starting by “onXXXX”, adding a JSEvent first parameter to all the event callbacks, adding comments to the sample solution and generally fixing everything I can (while I can).
Which means that there will be a few changes here and there, and if you are already using the Browser Suite you will need to adapt your scripts (nothing major, though :).
I thought that since the suite is not yet production-ready, it was now or never to harmonize all this stuff. Once the suite reaches v1.0, I will make sure to keep backward compatibility from then on.
So, with an up to date documentation (that will be included, as an optional install package, in the installer), this will lead to a brand new 0.9 version, where every methods and properties names will be fixed for the future… And only bug fixes for the rest of the cycle until v1.0
You can expect this version between now and next year :)
In the meantime, let me send you my virtual wishes for a happy new decade!
Open list of bugs to vote for in the Eclipse bugzilla system
Published by admin on
Monday, December 7, 2009 - 05:25:43
- Filed under General, News, Development
There has not been too much activity on the Eclipse bugzilla system lately, related to the bugs we (Christopher Deckers and myself) uncovered with our port of the DJ-NativeSwing library in the Browser Suite for Servoy… so I’m putting here a list of direct links to the opened bugs asking you to vote for their resolutions if you intend to use the Browser Suite in the future, because you (or your client) will be affected by them.
These ones are all Mac OS X related (but surely you have Mac clients too?):
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=291326
[SWT/AWT] Freeze when making a sync SWT call in response to certain Swing events - WAITING
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=291705
SWT_AWT: new Browser SWT.MOZILLA gives NPE in MozillaDelegate - NOW FIXED!
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=291328
[SWT_AWT] NPE when accessing a browser custom context menu - WAITING
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=295795
[SWT_AWT] Popup menu in browser freezes app - WAITING
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=295794
[SWT_AWT] App freezes when tooltips are called in browser - NOW FIXED!
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=295792
[SWT] Browser issue: open a window from link or script doesn’t work - FIXED IN SWT- pending in DJNativeSwing
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=293276
[Browser] SWT_AWT: can’t type in MOZILLA Browser HTML fields - NOW FIXED!
These ones are Windows specific and might or might not affect you or your users:
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=221235
[Browser-IE] VisibilityWindowListener.show() is not called - WAITING - But in the Browser Suite, a workaround (opening modeless dialogs) is implemented
- https://bugs.eclipse … how_bug.cgi?id=90023
Browser 3D content border not consistent - WAITING - But minor issue (almost unnoticeable)
- https://bugs.eclipse … how_bug.cgi?id=84532
[browser] Browser widget does not send focus events - WAITING - But not used in the Browser Suite
On Linux there is this one that I know of:
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=225401
[SWT_AWT] Removing the AWT Canvas generates a Gtk-CRITICAL message - FIXED
For all platform, this one fix could also help:
- https://bugs.eclipse … ow_bug.cgi?id=292062
Provide a way to dynamically introspect an SWT port info - WAITING - In the meantime a workaround has been implement in DJNativeSwing
Voting for the resolution of these bugs is as easy as registering on the Eclipse bugzilla system (you won’t get any spam from them!), and clicking on the ‘vote’ link on the pages above, so I say it again: if you intend to use the browser suite in the near future, it is impotant that these bugs are fixed, otherwise you or your clients will suffer from them…
You can also comment if you like, stating that these bugs are actually delaying the need you have of an SWT port on Servoy, this will be true.
Thanks in advance!
Java Web (doesn’t) Start
Published by admin on
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - 06:10:56
- Filed under General, News, Development
That’s what you could call this wonderful technology that Sun created a while ago, to easily deploy rich clients on any(!) platform, providing that this platform have a proper JRE installed.
And true to its usual motto: ‘write once, debug everywhere!”, Java Web Start actually works great… most of the time. Because then again, you have the usual black sheep (Mac OS X, you’ve recognized it) that never really does thing like any other… One might say that it is a blessing, and sometimes that’s quite true, but when it comes to Java, I’m afraid it is rather a curse.
So, the first step was to make the DJ-NativeSwing demo app work from Java Web Start (JWS for those who love abbreviations) on all the target platform: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Armed with the latest SWT nightly build I thought it would be a piece of cake. True for Windows and Linux, although there was the occasionnal tweaking of a few flags, like the infamous -Dsun.awt.disableMixing=true (this one will really be used from Java 6u18 onwards, but I’ve tried it on early release, - to be on the safe side:).
On Mac OS X, I managed to make this work, on Leopard (10.5.8) using Java 5 32/64-bit and Java 6 64-bit only (because in its infinite wisdom, Apple decided not to release any Java 6 32-bit for Leopard, only for the new Snow Leopard - 10.6 - go figure!). So it was working fine on Leopard, and I decided that it would be nice to try it on Tiger (the previous beast: 10.4.x), because there is Java 5 available and I thought that it would be nice to be able to say to users that this stuff was compatible Tiger or more…
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