May 29th, 2009
There is quite some anti-mavenism going around, about plugins suddenly not working, etc. And often this is true, case in point: maven-eclipse-plugin version 2.6 botched all projects working with Wicket by being very anal about what should live in the src/main/java directory tree (only Java files! God forbid you’d like to put web resources such as .properties (i18n for your web components), .js, .css, .html, etc next to your Java files. This version not only broke Wicket projects, but AspectJ as well.
Fortunately, the Maven community (more specifically Barrie Treloar and Arnaud Heritier) were helpful in finding the root cause of our pain: a conflict in merging the resources paths during the classpath generation.
With the latest snapshot of maven-eclipse-plugin 2.7 we now have our old build stability back, and can enjoy the new features of the maven-eclipse-plugin, such as searching your workspace for projects that are snapshot dependencies, and adding a project link instead of a jar dependency.
Yes, maven can sometimes be a pain, but ultimately with a great supporting and responsive community it will deliver. Many thanks to Barrie and Arnaud for being patient with us.
Tags: eclipse, maven
Posted in maven, wicket | 3 Comments »
May 20th, 2009
From Slashdot:
‘This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers,’ —
And the Java critics said total platform independence was impossible!
(yes I know that this is only affecting OS X Java, the quote was just too good to waste).
Tags: java, slashdot
Posted in java | No Comments »
May 19th, 2009
I have my share of complaints like everybody else about Apache Maven and one of them is that upon installation (or upgrading to a new plugin version) it starts downloading half of the available internet. Maven is constructed in a highly modular fashion, requiring lots of different, small, focused Java libraries. I’d like the distribution to contain those libraries, but I digress. Tonight I saw that not only Maven is structured this way. It is something *all* open source projects got.
For example, the much touted Ruby on Rails project with their disdain for everything Java would probably cringe at Maven (it uses XML after all). But installing Ruby on Rails and for example Radiant CMS with some plugins is a futile attempt in finding the right invocations of: script/*, rake, gem, port and other commandline tools you’ll want to get familiar with. All these tools start downloading stuff from the internet from different repositories (SVN, ruby forge, etc).
Maven: you’re not alone anymore in downloading the internet for your builds…
Tags: maven, os x, Ruby
Posted in maven, os x, technology | 11 Comments »
May 5th, 2009
Eclipse is a great IDE, but the state of subversion support is appalling. Both subclipse and subversive are buggy as hell, and I’d rather not touch either of them with a 10 feet pole.
Installing subversive is a futile exercise in “find all the update sites and correct plugin selection”. Subversive also is unable to keep the target/classes directory out of the synchronize view, which makes committing changes rather challenging.
Installing subclipse is much better than installing subversive: just add subclipse’s update site and install all plugins. No hunting for external sites, and no chance of installing the wrong stuff (I’m on OS X, so the win32 HL binaries are of no use to me). But again the team synchronize view is borked. This time subclipse won’t remove all updated files, double clicking on a folder throws an exception, etc.
I know that GIT is the SCM du jour, but please can someone at eclipse.org take note and finally implement a working, pleasant integration with subversion? Is that so much to ask after 5 years of Subversion availability?
Tags: eclipse, Rant, Subclipse, Subversion, Subversive
Posted in general, technology | 31 Comments »
May 4th, 2009
Just upgraded WordPress to the latest and greatest (stable version), and took the liberty of downloading and installing a new theme. I’m hoping that the new WordPress makes the site faster and easier to maintain.
I’m trying to find a good plugin to manage a conference: CfP, publishing the schedule, registering attendants, etc. Our company website runs on WordPress, so a WordPress plugin would be great. If not, I’ll have to convince the powers that be to move to RadiantCMS and use the ApacheCon conference plugin, created by J. Aaron Farr.
Tags: blog, conference, Wordpress
Posted in wicket | 2 Comments »