Saturday, December 26, 2009

Review: Lenovo S12 Netbook

I recently purchased a Lenovo S12 Netbook mainly for the purpose of running Ubuntu to do Google Web Toolkit programming. Recently I've had some frustration with Java programming for GWT on my MacBook Pro.

My first impression of the S12 was not a good one. It came with a Windows 7 installation that seeming incredibly bogged down by bloat-ware. On the first startup I felt as if I was being barraged right and let by popups and offers and configuration options. Yikes. The first thing I did was to perform a clean install of Windows 7 from a USB flash drive. This went rather flawlessly and subsequently I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix which also was straightforward.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not run well at all until I was able to install the NVidia drivers from the unsupported drivers utility. Using the same utility I also installed the WiFi driver. So far, these are the only two drivers I've worked with. I would recommend having your netbook plugged into an ethernet port if possible when installing Ubuntu.

Moving on to setup of the development environment, nothing could be easier than letting the package manager do all of the work of downloading and installing everything I needed. I let the package manager install the basic Eclipse but then replaced it with the Java EE package from eclipse.org. One problem I have encountered with Eclipse is that there seems to be an issue possibly with the video driver causing the buttons in the GUI to be unresponsive to mouse clicks.

I have not yet tackled getting the onboard camera to function.

Overall I'm very happy with the machine and have no idea how anyone can function without a clean install of Windows 7 or another OS. It is too bad that Lenovo chooses to trash the experience.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

hbm2ddl and MySQL

Previously I had a post on using hbm2ddl with Maven and the hibernate3-maven-plugin for Maven. I recently needed to use this setup on MySQL so I have posted my persistence.xml below as a reference.


xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
version="1.0">


org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence











Monday, December 14, 2009

Building gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch on OS X Leopard

I had been having quite a bit of trouble building and running applications that use gwt-presenter, gwt-dispatch and Google GIN on Leopard 10.5.8 recently. The problem comes from the fact that there is no 32 bits JDK6 available. Upgrading to Snow Leopard would of course fix the issue but here are some steps I've taken to compile and run in GWT hosted mode successfully:

- download gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch locally
- set the active JDK to JDK6 64 bit
- set the build targets in the PM to JDK 1.5
- build jars and install into the local Maven2 repository
- switch the active JDK to JDK5
- build host project
- should run successfully in GWT hosted browser

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Running GWT 1.7.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit

I moved my GWT development environment over to Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit after encountering several problems on OS X. The first hurdle on Ubuntu was this one when running the hosted mode browser. The problem was with a missing .so. This posting helped me solve the issue:

http://hsmak.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/how-to-fix-libstdc5-dependency-problem-in-ubuntu-9-10/

Obtaining Spring 3 Artifacts with Maven

Obtaining Spring 3 Artifacts with Maven: "A recent commentor here ragged, "It's only half of the world that's using Maven", when pointing out it is not obvious how to obtain Spring 3 artifacts with Maven. In this entry, I'll show you how to do this and what the options are. This information will also be integrated into the reference [...]"

Hooray finally. I had so much trouble trying to locate RC2's repository during a recent build and had to give up.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

In the Binary Refinery | ChromeShell

In the Binary Refinery | ChromeShell

Very nice. Looks like a nice thing to install while waiting for ChromeOS.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

GWT 1.7.1 and Safari 4.0.4

Following the advice in http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=4220#c22 I also installed the latest WebKit build. Since I normally compile and run with Maven from the command line I simply added the following to my .bash_login:


export DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH="/Applications/WebKit.app/Contents/Frameworks/10.5

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

GWT and Safari(WebKit) woes

Apparently a recent upgrade to Safari on OS X has broken hosted mode for me. All I can find so far is:

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=4220#c22

I spent quite a bit of time messing with Firefox since I had recently installed 3.6 beta but it seems this is not the issue. I hope to resolve soon.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

New Features in the Latest Cloud Foundry

New Features in the Latest Cloud Foundry: "We recently updated CloudFoundry.com. With this update, we introduced several exciting new features that pave the way for future development. I want to take this opportunity to describe and explain these features, as well as provide some background in how they came about. We are excited for you to try them out [...]"

Need to take a look at this as an avenue for hosting FB apps. FB -> Grails -> CloudFoundry might be considerable better than FB -> Grails -> AppEngine.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

DuplicateMappingException: Duplicate class/entity mapping

It turns out the deceptive exception can be thrown from an improperly formed Many-to-Many relationship declaration. I'm not going to take the time to document a correct declaration here but I was getting this misleading error message and was searching for an obvious problem with imports when it turned out to be the @ManyToMany annotation usage.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Mockingbird

Mockingbird

Handy tool to remember especially from a Mac/Linux standpoint when one lacks Visio.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

It is about time someone did this. There's no reason to think the HTTP protocol is the optimal and only protocol to last through the ages.

Monday, November 9, 2009

SQLAlchemy - The Database Toolkit for Python

SQLAlchemy - The Database Toolkit for Python

I need to explore the world of ORM'ing in Python. Python might just be the best cloud option going these days.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Spring with gwt-dispatch

pgt » Use Spring with GWT dispatch

So inspired by this post and the discussion over in the gwt-dispatch group I have converted my application over from Guice to Spring. The only variance from the pgt blog post is that I am using net.customware.gwt.dispatch.server.spring.SpringStandardDispatchServlet in my web.xml. Other than that my action handlers are getting called as expected.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Raible Designs | Running Hosted Mode in GWT Libraries (when using Maven)

Raible Designs | Running Hosted Mode in GWT Libraries (when using Maven)

Linking to Matt Raible's notes on the GWT Maven plugin setup. I have basically the same findings.

I've added the maven-war-plugin for building a war for deployment. I've also had some problems since I'm not on Snow Leopard yet and there are JDK 1.6 issues with GWT and JDK 1.6 on Leopard.

Monday, November 2, 2009

pgt » Use Spring with GWT dispatch

pgt » Use Spring with GWT dispatch

Working on converting my servlet implementation for gwt-dispatch from Guice to Spring.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Thoughts on GWT, MVP and GWT-EXT

Thoughts on GWT, MVP and GWT-EXT

Putting some GWT-related posts over on my blog that primarily speaks to Java-related topics.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

test post

This is SQL:


SELECT *
FROM users
WHERE user_id = 1212;


This is Java:


package com.gwt.client.gin;

import net.customware.gwt.presenter.client.place.PlaceManager;

import com.google.gwt.inject.client.GinModules;
import com.google.gwt.inject.client.Ginjector;
import com.gwt.client.mvp.AppPresenter;

@GinModules({ ListClientModule.class })
public interface ListGinjector extends Ginjector {

AppPresenter getAppPresenter();

PlaceManager getPlaceManager();

}

Friday, October 2, 2009

Error in the download link

The link for the countries.dmg file on this page should be: http://developer.apple.com/webapps/articles/countries.dmg

in reference to:

"So that you can play along at home and test out the code samples in this article, we’ve created a simple web application, based on Ruby on Rails, that implements a RESTful web service. The first step is to download the web application named countries (.DMG, 600 KB). It is based on a simple, database of public domain data containing four fields: A country index, country name, gross domestic product, and two-character country abbreviation.
Our application will perform operations on this database, based on RESTful requests received from a client. Understanding how to implement those requests from your Cocoa and Cocoa Touch applications is our ultimate goal.
When you download the countries web application (.DMG, 600 KB), it can live anywhere on your hard drive. Once it is downloaded, double-click the file REST Article Test Server.zip to create a folder called countries. We won’t need to do anything else to that folder.
Next up, let’s make sure we’ve got Ruby and Rails properly installed."
- ADC—Creating RESTful Web Service Clients in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch (view on Google Sidewiki)

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

trouble with annotations and gwt-maven-plugin

I'm working on my first project to combine maven with Google Web Toolkit. In an attempt to use google-gin and its annotation, I ran into some compile time problems because the gwt:compile was running before javac had not compiled the annotations into .class files.

I don't have an elegant workaround just yet but running the process as a two step compile with maven after a clean works:

mvn clean compile -Dgoogle.webtoolkit.compileSkip=true

followed by:

mvn gwt:compile

Friday, September 25, 2009

Hive Development Limited: Google Web Toolkit (GWT) MVP Example

Hive Development Limited: Google Web Toolkit (GWT) MVP Example

I haven't found a wealth of content on the MVP approach and especially not event bus but this blog does a great job with transforming the greeting starter code.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Google Sidewiki

Google Sidewiki

So Google has just launched seemingly the world's largest message board. I have to wonder at what point it will take over as the largest BigTable application at Google. Maybe cached web page copies is larger?

Friday, September 18, 2009

noop - Project Hosting on Google Code

noop - Project Hosting on Google Code

Nice. A language about nothing? Hope to find some time to try this out. I can't imagine programming in Java without dependency ingection anymore even though it isn't baked into the laguage.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

chromedevtools - Project Hosting on Google Code

chromedevtools - Project Hosting on Google Code

Interested to try this out and see how it compares with Firebug. Even more interested to see Chrome running on a Mac.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Simple Flex Webapp

Simple Flex Webapp

I'll be returning to this topic shortly.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Iridient Digital - RAW Developer

Iridient Digital - RAW Developer

I'm giving this a test spin as I've read that its raw processing algorithm may be superior to Adobe Lightroom, especially for the Canon 5D MkII. We'll see.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Top 10 Tutorials for Web Designers

Top 10 Tutorials for Web Designers

Keeping track of this posting since it is a good compilation of useful and relevant tutorials.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Dan Walmsley » Blog Archive » Apache Wicket on Google App Engine for Java

Dan Walmsley » Blog Archive » Apache Wicket on Google App Engine for Java

I'm saving this one for later. Although I haven't taken the time to learn Wicket, I'd like to pick it up in the context of using GAE since to me Struts2 can be a heavy-handed way to approach a simple website.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Getting Started With Spring Batch 2.0 | Javalobby

Getting Started With Spring Batch 2.0 | Javalobby

This is a good article but still I'm yet to find much substance on how to get a skeleton project start and no Maven archetype exists that I can find.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

OS X instantclient and .tnsnames.ora

.tnsnames.ora - Doug's Oracle Blog

This blog entry was a huge help in geting the Oracle instant client to work for me on OS X. No matter what I tried I could not get my TNS_ADMIN variable to work with sqlplus. What a relief to discover that a personal tnsnames.ora can be created in one's home directory.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Official Google Notebook Blog: Stopping development on Google Notebook

Official Google Notebook Blog: Stopping development on Google Notebook

This is sad news to say the least. Google Notebook is an extremely useful tool for personal organization. It also feels disturbing that Google will discontinue its great services one by one.

One feature I have always wanted from Notebook is the ability to add items through GData. I guess this will never be added.