Friday 29 August 2008

Ganymede around the world contest shirt received!





This summer ended great!
When I returned yesterday from Greece, where I was on summer vacation , I found a package on my desk.




I received  my Ganymede around the world contest shirt!
I thought it’s going to be the white one, but this one is much better!
It’s great!
Here are some pictures:


 

 



Monday 18 August 2008

Visual Web JavaServer Faces issue in NetBeans 6.1 and 6.5

In my personal opinion, NetBeans is the best IDE there is… Not only for Java, but generally the best IDE.
It’s really stable, professional and the best of all: It’s absolutely free!
I use NB version 6.0 and recently replaced my 6.0 with 6.1 and hope to see 6.5 final release very soon…
There is one thing I noticed while working with 6.1: Visual web JavaServer faces has some kind of an issue…
Let’s start from the beginning.
I have two NB IDEs started , 6.0 on my PC, and 6.1 on my laptop.
Let’s create some web application, and let’s use Visual Web JavaServer Faces framework while building it.
The easiest thing to do is to follow steps in this tutorial:
It’s quite easy… Just follow the steps …
So, I created two new projects on my PC and laptop , called HelloWeb just as it says in the tutorial.
I selected Visual Web JavaServer Faces framework, I designed the page , I added all the components to it .
NetBeans 6.0 behavior:
If we look at the Navigator (Window -> Navigation -> Navigator , or Ctrl + F7) in Java view we can see that it shows these new components as private members.



I double-clicked the helloButton and added code provided in this tutorial:



And it went really good too…
Finally, I started my new application:





Now, let’s see how 6.1 is doing:
NetBeans 6.1 behavior:
If we look at the Navigator (Window -> Navigation -> Navigator , or Ctrl + F7) in Java view, we ( I ) can not see any of the added components!??



And if you try to add a code provided in this tutorial, you’ll get this:





NetBeans acts like there aren’t any nameField or helloText, and offers to create them for you…!!!???
If you select that, it will create class/Object with that name , but , off course, it won’t solve any of your problems…
So, NetBeans 6.0 creates all as it should, but 6.1 and 6.5 does not!?
I don’t know if I am missing something here, or this is a bug ( a HUGE BUG ) , but I guess something is not as it should be…
I reported this to SUN and asked them why does this happens in NB 6.1 and 6.5, but didn’t get any answer from them…
Does anybody know why did this happen? If yes, please share it with us… I guess and hope that I forgot to do some small and trivial thing here…





Tuesday 12 August 2008

CodeGear sold to Embarcadero technologies

What was announced about two years ago , finally* happened in May, this year.
At first, when Borland software corporation announced that it plans to sell it's famous products, I could not believe it.
I kept asking myself "why? Is this possible?".

Many people started programming using Borland's tools. I am one of them.
This is the company which developed my favourite IDEs, and it's really hard for me to see it all breaking apart...

One of the strangest things for me was the fact that not many people ( as it should ) was using it's products, and ,at the other hand, many were using , for example, Microsoft Visual studio 6 instead!? ( I still don't know why it has this "Visual" in it's name??? )...
Or look at it this way: It is quite funny that people were surprised and impressed when they saw visual studio.NET for the first time , because it was RAD tool and everything was much easier to build , but on the other hand they had Delphi and Borland C++ Builder for a long time before, with everything that it had to offer ( and it was much more than C# had)...
Let's make this irony even bigger and say that the man behind C# and entire .NET was the chief architect for the team which produced Delphi : Anders Hejlsberg.

I thought thing were getting much better when Borland created CodeGear. I thought they would stop selling IDEs and start all over...
Borland C++ Builder 2007 was released in a short time, JBuilder and Blackfish SQL too...And everything else was going just fine... JBuilder even won "the best Java IDE in 2007" title...
And then this...
So, in May Embarcadero technologies bought CodeGear for almost 30 million dollars. No Borland and it's tools anymore??? Sad...

In my personal opinion: YES there ARE better IDEs on the market, but there are no better RAD tools then Borland C++ Builder and Delphi and it's VCL.
I have yet to find another environment that made good looking apps that fast as these two IDEs.

I wish all the luck to Embarcadero, and hope to see only improvement on tools it bought...

* - unfortunatelly