The life and times of zibbler.
{ Category Archives }
Lately, I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails a lot since I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do more java coding after work. I’ve run across a few interesting articles and sites that I thought you might find useful if you’re interested in RoR.
For anyone that doesn’t follow that sort of thing, the 3.2 release (Callisto) of Eclipse was released the end of last week. I just started playing around with it at home since I don’t want to destabilize my work setup, and it seems to work fine with all of the plugins that I use on a daily basis. Lately, I’ve found the following add ons to be really good.
There’s a lot of smaller plugins, but these are the main major ones that I always install. Recently, I started playing around with eclipse plugin development and I found the EclipseZone forums to be a really good place to find answers to detailed questions about anything related to eclipse. At some point, I’ll probably blog about the plugin that I play around with every once in a while for packaging and editing firefox extensions. When the source isn’t quite so hacked up, I’ll throw that up too.
It wasn’t until I started at Netflix that I had ever tried out any of the java 1.5 specific features. From a language syntax perspective, the main ones (at least the main ones that I can think of off the top of my head) are foreach, annotations, and generics. I’m not going write a long blog post about each of these features. The links on each are pretty good, and if you’d like more information, Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook is a pretty concise look at the changes if you’re already experienced with java. The interesting thing will all of the changes is that all the new syntactic modifications are designed to run within a pre 1.5 JVM. This isn’t incredibly exciting, but it is interesting when considering tradeoffs you have to make in order to keep that consistency. In the end, it means that almost all of the features are just to make life easier for the programmer by adding in some compile time checks and code generation.
When I was going through the listing of java 1.5 warnings that you can enable in Eclipse, I came across the feature @override. This construct’s entire purpose is to keep track of the fact that the method it is annotating is meant to override a superclass. If you change the signature of the method in the superclass so that this method is no longer overriding it, the compiler will generate an error. This is one of those features that I kind of scratch my head about. I want to believe that it is useful and will someday prevent me from refactoring issues when I change APIs or when somebody else changes some API that I am extending, but I can’t remember a time when having this feature would have saved me any time.
I was wandering the web before starting my real work this morning and I noticed that someone is working on a Wiki using Amazon S3. It seems like an interesting project with some interesting ideas inherent in it. The whole idea of doing remote content for an application is kind of crazy in some ways when it feels like we’ve all spent a lot of time at some point on caching mechanism and such to avoid taking a performance hit by going to the database which should be a lot more trivial than hitting S3. However, I think that it’s a kind of interesting proof of concept. In some ways, the whole idea of a mashup leverages the idea of using another web application to do something so that you don’t have to. Most of the applications of this that we’ve seen so far involve things like mapping that are overly complex to reinvent for every application on the web, but as everything gets faster and building applications becomes more about mixing and matching building blocks, it doesn’t seem crazy to swap out your own filesystem for a distributed one. Especially if there was a good interface layer.