Villane

Blog Moved to Wordpress

2008-04-14T22:56:00.002+03:00

I moved my blog to Wordpress some time ago already, but I discovered that I sometimes accidentally posted a link to this old one so I'm adding a link to my new blog here: villane.wordpress.com

Eclipse's code style options are a bit messy

2007-07-21T18:14:00.000+03:00

At work we have had an agreed upon coding style for a couple of years, but it hasn't been enforced so not everybody have followed it. When the style was established, everyone was using IntelliJ IDEA so the style was based on IDEA settings. Now it's a split between IDEA and Eclipse, so recently I was trying to create matching style settings in IDEA, Eclipse and CheckStyle -- the first two for automatic formatting and the latter for checking.

Both IDEA and Eclipse have some problems. For example Eclipse puts more whitespace in JavaDocs and I could not configure the JavaDoc formattings to be compatible so I just turned it off in IDEA. Eclipse tends to not respect the maximum line width setting for code very well -- occasionally a few characters will go beyond the limit. IDEA has the same problem for JavaDocs. Eclipse also has some problems with optimizing imports (note to self: should report /comment on bugs about those, maybe even contribute patches) that make it incompatible with IDEA.

But the biggest problem is that Eclipse doesn't have a very good user story for configuring all of this. The code formatter options (Java -> Code Style -> Formatter) are the oldest and they are pretty good -- easy to manage profiles and everything can be exported/imported. The same can be said about code clean up (Java -> Code Style -> Clean Up), but I would argue that these two separate concepts should be merged.
There is also a problem of redundancy: Java -> Editor -> Save Actions use the existing Formatter and Organize Imports settings, but they do not use the Code Clean Up settings, instead here you have to configure those again, in a non-shareable way.
However, Code Templates, Organize Imports and the general settings are worse -- they don't support different profiles, and Organize Imports does not export/import all settings (such as the number of static imports needed for .*). All of this makes it quite hard to share these settings between a team.

I think a good solution would be to replace the profiles and import/export in the different pages (formatter, clean up) with more general Code Style profiles and import/export that would cover every setting under Java -> Code Style. Then again, maybe more granular profiles are better for some reason that I fail to see, but I'm sure they could be retained somehow while solving the problem I just described.

And another idea: as Eclipse is becoming an IDE for more and more languages, and many of these language tools could possibly offer code formatters, compiler options etc., why not think of a generic code style settings UI that would be extensible by plug-ins for specific languages.

Rhythm in open source

2007-07-06T00:56:00.000+03:00

Mark Shuttleworth (what an awesome last name, BTW) thinks that KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice.org would benefit from a common release schedule, preferably six months like Ubuntu. I'm wondering if Eclipse's annual release trains also influenced his opinion and whether these kind of coordinated/rhythmic releases have been done elsewhere in the open source world or are Eclipse and Ubuntu the only ones? I think it would be great for the open source community if the rhythm spread and releases became more predictable.

Eclipse 4.0 should be about usability and integration

2007-07-04T11:06:00.002+03:00

Eclipse 4.0 Io is probably 2 years off now (or 3, if Io will in fact be 3.5?) , considering the very precise yearly release cycle that just brought us Europa and will bring Ganymede next year. And if there are going to be some more fundamental changes in 4.0 than the releases since 3.0 have had, I think it's time to start talking about this now. Really big changes can't happen during one release cycle.

So that it's understandable where I'm coming from: I've been following the Eclipse community for the past two and a half years, as an occasional hacker, but mostly a user and a somewhat objective observer. Or at least that's what I like to think -- I'm actually a pretty big fan of Eclipse so there definitely is some bias. I heard there was some discussion on Eclipse 4.0 already during EclipseCon 2007. Sadly, I couldn't attend EclipseCon myself. Note: I'm also linking to some old related discussions in this post -- I think some of them are still valid.

Even though Eclipse is growing very fast, I think there is still a lot of untapped potential in the projects hosted by The Eclipse Foundation. That potential lies in the integration of the various tools so that they can be composed into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts -- creating synergy. To some extent this is already happening, but at the moment there are still a lot of areas where it feels like the tools should work better together, but they don't. There are endless possibilities for small improvements that span projects, but actually filling that potential may be somewhat hard to do.

The Callisto and Europa release trains have definitely been a big step in the right direction, but they have not set integration as a top priority and it would probably be too much to expect much greater strides towards this from Ganymede. But as a user, I'd like to see this become a priority for Eclipse 4.0 (or soon after). If Eclipse just keeps extending wider and wider into new, though definitely cool areas (which it must do, of course), while not paying much attention to keeping the expanding core cohesive, I fear it may eventually start losing focus.

In the past there has been some talk about "extensible frameworks and exemplary tools" and that the focus of Eclipse is sometimes a bit more on providing a platform rather than a great end-user tool. This focus may vary from project to project. But parts of Eclipse do make a great end-user tool (perhaps most notably JDT and PDE, but there are others too), and other parts less so. Of course this undoubtedly has to do with the maturity and age of the projects as it takes time to become an awesome tool.

But perhaps there should be more effort made in the area of usability and making a set of "core" projects better integrated and of a more uniform quality, whatever exactly the "core" would compose of -- probably platform + the more popular language tools + PDE + Mylyn + ECF + data + modeling + reporting + testing and some other projects as well. More focus should be put on the areas where these "core" projects touch. This would in turn probably put a lot of pressure on the platform itself, which may need to become even more flexible, even though it already is probably the most flexible and in my opinion the best application platform in the known universe.

Some examples of what I mean, but these may be somewhat superficial and don't really go deep into details:
* Mylyn bridges for more projects -- perhaps even all of the release train projects
* Taking advantage of potential communication/collaboration features offered by ECF and other projects (Corona comes to mind)
* More BIRT reports in other projects
* Make the static analysis from TPTP more prominent. IDEA has had this for years. How many users know that they can get static analysis and a profiler for Java by installing TPTP?
* Make Eclipse a competitive database design & administration tool
* Make Eclipse a competitive UML modeling tool
* ETC.

I hope not all of this will be left for vendors to do in their Eclipse based products -- that could make Eclipse itself lag behind.

Oh, and by the way, great work everyone who made Europa happen! You all deserve a vacation now, but don't go resting on your laurels! :)

Equinox & ECF serving interactive fiction

2007-06-22T15:07:00.000+03:00

After a couple of years of being lazy and procrastinating, I finally got Ziggy to the point where we now have it running live [Beta] :) at Idle Thumbs (thanks Spaff, Jake and others from Idle Thumbs for your help with this) . Ziggy is a server side application based on Equinox and ECF, it enables people to play interactive fiction games on web forums, acting as a bridge between the forum and an IF virtual machine.

At first it was just plain Java, a very simple app hacked together in only a few days, but has suffered many a rewrite since then and is now fully OSGified. I separated it into four main components: server, Interactive Fiction API & implementation, Bulletin Board API & implementation, management client -- all of these are now packaged as OSGi bundles and the client is an RCP application. The Bulletin Board API is open source and is also incubating at ECF (still needs some work before becoming part of a release). The Interactive Fiction API may also become open source at some point, and there are other interesting uses for it. For example another plug-in I developed allows playing these games inside an Eclipse console, which I hope to make available soon.

Thanks to taking advantage of ECF's communications container abstractions, Ziggy's potential is not actually limited to bulletin boards -- it was easy to add just a bit of code to make it work over instant messaging and IRC, but this aspect of it is not public yet.

Padclipse Text Editor

2007-06-18T03:50:00.000+03:00

Padclipse is a new very light weight distribution of Eclipse that only contains the Text Editor and a few other plugins. The first pre-alpha release based on Eclipse 3.3RC4 just came out, but is not well tested, so caveat emptor! You can download it for Windows, Mac or Linux.

The first release of the "Lite" edition contains RCP, Text Editor, Compare and Search and not much else from the Eclipse SDK. Also included for convenience are EclipseColorer editor with syntax highlighting for many programming languages and HTTP File System.

The download is only 20MB and I've seen start up times from 2 to 5 seconds.

Future editions might include "Team" (CVS, SVN, Mylyn, ...), "Full" (Team + WST XML) and perhaps "Micro" (taking out everything that can possibly be taken out while leaving the text editor).

Padclipse also brings some new functionality that makes Eclipse easier to use as a simple editor:

Files (URI-s) can be opened via command line parameters, and consequent launches will open editors in a single instance of Padclipse (per user).
Files will be automatically linked to the workspace to make local history and other features be available to all files. This will be improved in future versions.
Future versions will improve OS integration and general usability.

Also, note that since I am no artist, the current splash screen is really ugly and the icon is taken from a PDE template. Padclipse needs a splash screen, an image for the about page, and an icon. So I'd like to kick off another logo contest, which will be tracked in this bug at SourceForge.net. Unfortunately, since SourceForge doesn't seem to allow everyone to attach files to bugs, files can be sent to villane at gmail dot com.

Open Software

2007-05-22T20:26:00.000+03:00

The terms Free Software and Open Source Software are cumbersome to use, especially when speaking with laity.

Free Software seems to often need an extra qualifier "free as in freedom" (as opposed to "free as in beer"). Without that qualifier, it can have a negative connotation, as people confuse it with Freeware, which is (was?) often thought of as something gratis, but of lesser function or quality than commercial offerings.

Open Source Software has the word "source" in the middle that needs extra explanation for many people. It would be much simpler to explain Open Software, without all the source (or sores, as Hani Suleiman would say). With the emergence of Open Source Hardware, where source can have a somewhat different meaning, I think Open Hardware would also be a better fit.

Simply open is good. And it can more easily include other qualities we've come to associate with, but what the words "open source" don't actually cover: open development, open processes, open attitude. It can include both Free Software and Open Source Software, and hopefully better associations with "open software" would form in people's heads, like: it's transparent, you can take it apart, modify it, distribute it and be part of it.

So, if you agree with me, lets start using the term open software from now on. :)

PS. Lets not even speak of alternatives like Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (but don't forget to FLOSS!)

Using OpenGL in SWT with Java 5

2006-11-22T22:16:00.000+02:00

Following my last idea about an OSGi based game engine, I thought I'd start experimenting with various game engine stuff. So far, I've managed to get a bundle that has OpenGL binding working quite nicely. I used LWJGL, and created two bundles for it:
1) org.lwjgl -- the Java classes and source code is in this bundle.
2) org.lwjgl.win32 -- platform specific fragment for the above bundle, which has the Windows DLL-s and OSGi knows how to load them because I specified the Bundle-NativeCode header for them in the manifest.

I used the SWT OpenGL support to test this and after experimenting with some snippets, and copying some code from the famous NeHe OpenGL tutorials, I thought that since I was using Java 5, I could do the following:

import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.*;

to import the static methods and lo and behold -- now I can paste the C code from NeHe tutorials into Java files without making any changes! :)

Now I'm getting the urge to start learning OpenGL again. I've already done some of the NeHe tutorials in C++, but I never really liked to write code in C or C++ that much.

Idea: OSGi based game engine

2006-10-07T01:05:00.000+03:00

There has been a little talk in the Eclipse related blogs about Eclipse's relationship with games. Which currently seems to be minimal. Here's an interesting idea for a new Eclipse Technology project: an OSGi-based game engine. It could be named EDGE for Eclipse Dynamic Game Engine. Another (sub-)project would add developement tools.

A project like this should define API/interfaces for sub-systems that are required by most game engines and create exemplary open source based implementations. There are some fine open source engines out there (there are others, but these are the ones I know about):

OGRE graphics engine. Someone else develops a Java wrapper for it
ODE physics engine. There seems to be a plethora physics engines out there lately, but I'm not sure how many are open source. I remember that ODE is one of them. It has a Java wrapper too
OpenAL 3D audio library. I think there are Java wrappers for this too, but you'll have to find the links yourself.

Maybe there are even pure Java solutions out there that are better to use in Java? I looked into game engines before I became a Java fan, so I'm not very aware how good the Java ones are.

Other things needed:

entity/actor system
a scripting language
the glue to hold it all together
2D graphics engine (start simple)?
extensions for specific genres

There are efforts like this out there, like Yake (although I'm not very familiar with them), but we all know there is no other component platform like OSGi (+ Equinox) :)

Switching to Linux

2005-12-19T17:50:00.000+02:00

Zerobot developement is slowing down for a few days while I'm switching my main desktop environment from Windows to Linux. Ubuntu is great IMHO, no matter what Linus Torvalds says about Gnome. I even got the ATI driver working on my AMD64 PC finally (that's mostly what kept me on windows so far). The switch isn't that hard if you've used to multi-platform applications anyway (Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, OpenOffice). Importing all my thunderbird settings and emails meant copying a directory from a windows drive to the linux file system. For eclipse, I din't use the packages provided by Ubuntu, but downloaded the Sun Java VM and Eclipse from the official sites. The GJC version was incredibly slower and ate lots of more memory.

So I already have three linux systems: coyote running on a Pentium 200 with no hard disk, booted from a floppy, shares the ADSL connection to my local network. Ubuntu 5.10 32-bit running on my old computer. And my new computer is dual boot -- WinXP and Ubuntu 5.10 64-bit. I think it will stay that way for I will still need Windows for playing games.

There's one thing I'd like to do before going full throttle with Zerobot developement: set up a server that not only shares the internet connection, but also acts as Apache, MySQL, file & print server + Bugzilla + CVS / SVN + phpBB2. Otherwise I have to keep synchronizing multiple desktop systems to provide up-to-date versions these services. I have a 450MHz Celeron that I could use for this, but I think I'll probably need to get a new hard drive for it. I'm planning on installing OpenSuSE 10.0 on it.

Mavenising

2005-08-31T00:00:00.000+03:00

I just realised again how great Maven is. I wanted to get back to working on JSimpleton, the bot that allows forum users to play old text adventure games cooperatively. I haven't touched the project for months and since I last did have gotten a new computer and didn't have any of the numerous Jakarta and other open source libraries any more, and have switched Eclipse versions from 3.0.1 to 3.1. Thankfully I had used Maven as my build tool and Eclipse as my IDE. After importing the old project directories into Eclipse, installing and configuring Maven and the Eclipse Mevenide (Maven IDE -- why Mevenide?) plugin from the update site, I only had to run the POM synchronization and build the project with Maven once to have all my classpath dependencies in the IDE resolved and the project built properly. Ok, so there were more issues than that, but they were my fault entirely.

Sometimes I don't think Maven is that great though -- I've wasted many an hour trying to make it build complex J2EE projects exactly how I want. Maybe I'm just not used to it.

Faces, Eclipsed

2005-05-20T00:01:00.000+03:00

After developing a JSF application for a few weeks, I have now been in contact with some negative aspects of MyFaces (and/or the JSF spec) as well. I knew that would happen, but some of it really surprised me. For example, there is no easy way to temporarily turn off form validation and not break the entire lifecycle without rewriting many parts of the JSF implementation. In the end I had to implement custom validation methods for forms, that get executed only when needed. Thankfully our project doesn't require lots of form validation.

***

During the last couple of weeks, I've started using Eclipse Web Tools in a small project. It's currently very buggy, but it seems on the path to total awesomeness and I think the time is not far when almost everyone and their neighbours dog will be using Eclipse or a derived product for Java web application developement. There's simply no point in using a commercial IDE, when a free one can do all the same things, if not more. I use IDEA at work, and while it looks and feels better, it seems like Eclipse is catching up fast with features, and its Refactoring functionality is arguably already better than IDEA's.
I also learned about some cool Eclipse productivity features that I hadn't noticed so far, thanks to the Planet Eclipse site. Should read the help more.

Waxy

2005-05-19T23:37:00.000+03:00

I've become addicted to waxy.org/links. It's a daily updated mini-blog containing lots of great links with one-line comments.

Go get your daily dose.

My Java Faces

2005-04-26T22:23:00.000+03:00

At work we use a lot of Java libraries from The Apache Software Foundation. Last week we took a look at MyFaces, which is an implementation of the Java Server Faces specification with some added components that make life easier. While the inner workings of it are still not entirely clear to me, the current impression is that it's like Swing over HTTP. We've started using it in a new project, and it allows us to do some things very quickly, which is good because we're on a tight schedule.

I really like the MyFaces extensions to JSF -- with their help, some complex user interfaces components can be built very easily. I was able to wrap our own generic Data Transfer Object in a very simple DataModel subclass and use it in a MyFaces component that can render sortable tables easily. That required another custom class to implement the sorting, which delegated it to a Data Access Object, and the actual sorting was done in SQL.

Bots and pipe dreams

2005-04-17T22:15:00.000+03:00

I actually suspected this blog would turn out to be something that I will rarely update. Perhaps I should let people know about it, which might very well motivate me to continue. Anyway, on with the post that has been gathering dust as a draft, for weeks I think.

When the Playstation 2 I borrowed broke down, I had to find something else to do with my free hours. That something should have been learning to use the Source SDK but alas, I have spent very little time with that.

I don't remember what exactly gave me the idea, but I started writing the foundations of a Java program that could communicate with various web sites and other internet resources, such as forums, search sites, e-mail, dictionaries, blogs etc. I had, or perhaps still have, vague ideas of creating an AI bot that could pass as a human internet user and be useful to real people in some way. My current plans have scaled down a bit...

I started with a vBulletin forum interface, but then got stuck. I had no idea what exact functions the bot would have. As a quick distraction, I wrote a very simple console application for browsing vBulletin forums. I tried it out on a couple of forum sites, but it only seemed interesting for a little while.

Then I revealed my coder's block at Idle Thumbs and asked for suggestions on what the bot should do. Jake Rodkin came up with the idea of people playing interactive fiction (otherwise known as text adventure games) cooperatively on the forums. I liked the idea and soon had a somewhat functioning Zork I running on the Idle Thumbs forums. The "bot" communicated with a DOS version of Zork, which I found quite lacking both in performance and security. Being a layman when it comes to IF, I only found out that there were lots of interpreters for the Infocom games after a short discussion with Jake about how he would like to put the bot to use. I found some open source Java Z-Machines, like Zax, Zplet and Zinc.

Zinc seemed the most recent (possibly even alive) and flexible, and I decided to go with that. After hours of reading the Zinc source code, I finally realized that I was looking in all the wrong places -- an unused import threw me off, until I decided to let Eclipse organize the imports. I was then able to extract just the Z virtual machine and modify it's wrapper to suit my own needs. After some more hours of input/output hassles, I finally saw my error in thinking and got it working well enough for what I needed, if not the most efficiently. I have still a lot to learn about multithreaded programming.

Since then, I think the bot has evolved quite well, and is more and more starting to resemble something that could be called a bot instead of a set of small, disposable applications. It now supports TADS 2 games as well as the Z-code games, handles exceptions better and can be run as a service/daemon on many platforms (tested on Windows XP and Mandrake Linux). At the moment I'm busy with getting the code as stable as I can, and release the initial version to the Idle Thumbs staff, who will put it to use on their forums.

On sit-coms

2005-02-11T12:34:00.000+02:00

In his blog entry ("The Secret of Success", 10.02.2005) about American sit-coms, Yahtzee says the reason they suck is breaking a set of rules that British ones follow precisely. I might agree with half of what he said, but the other half is bullshit. I suspect it's due to him having a very particular taste and being quite British.

Firstly, Friends != Horrible Shit. Sure, it has kind of turned into a soap opera, but almost every fucking episode IS funny. Compliance with an arbitrary set of rules does not define the funniness of something. Something is simply funny or not, although that can be quite subjective. The quality of the humour in Friends is way above that of the standard American sit-com. To see that, there's no need to analyse it's success or break it down into a set of rules -- it should be obvious to anyone who has watched even a few episodes.

Secondly, Seinfeld is way above Not Too Shabby. You can simply tell that from the various contexts it is often referenced in. The jokes are often quite unique, compared to other sit-coms. Or even if they aren't, they sure fooled me. For example, google for "Costanza principle" and download the powerpoint file "Strangling Legacy Code", then search for "Costanza" in the file again. It shows how a joke from one the episodes can apply to solving a real-life software engineering problem.

The others that Yahtzee mentioned I pretty much agree with. But my point is that there are more kinds of comedy than the British variety, and it can be equally good. Usually I prefer British humour as well, though.

The one thing about sit-coms (American or not) that bothers me is the laugh track. What the fuck is that good for? I don't need to be told if something is funny or not, I can figure it out by myself. The only sensible reason for the laugh track I can think of would follow this logic. They say laughter is both healthy and contaiguous, therefore more laughter should mean a healthier population (which would be good, if the Earth wasn't overpopulated).

Welcome and goodnight

2005-02-03T14:25:00.000+02:00

Welcome! For some reason I don't completely comprehend, I decided to open a blog. The blogging business has been fairly unfamiliar to me; I don't even know how it's customary to begin them, I'll just keep it short and say whatever pops into my head. My main reason for starting this is that I want to have a place where I can vent or write down my thoughts about something I'm obsessing about that would be too long for a forum post. The topics I'm going to cover here will probably mostly relate to software developement, video games and ETC.

Goodnight for now,
Villane