A Wicket Diary

I’m an avid user of gmail and since I have started using it I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. As with all webbased mail services the best part is also its weakest part: the mail is always available, provided that you are online. Last week I had to stay in a holiday vilage without internet access inside the appartment, and that made reading and sending mail quite troublesome, not to mention it showed how much dependent we (I?) have gotten on being online.

IMAP is a much better protocol, but the problem is that I find email clients quirky at best compared to the gmail reader where you can read a discussion (which happen a lot on the @wicket-user and @wicket-dev lists) in one go. The Google mail interface shows the whole discussion without threading. It took a while to get used to, but when I noticed that keeping up with the mailinglists was considerable less effort than before (somewhere around one quarter of the effort and time before gmail), I was hooked.

The likes of gmail:

• always available - just start up any browser and voila
• zero configuration - no need to do any configuration of mail clients
• quick - depends on the internet connection and browser (safari load times can be long)
• reading discussions - read all 19 messages in a dicsussion in one go, no clicks required
• massive storage - 2.5Gig’s of mail storage is a lot

Dislikes of gmail:

• not available offline - you can’t respond to messages in your inbox without being online
• claiming of browser tab - when you open gmail and other tabs to start your online day, gmail focusses its browser tab

What is scary but often also very funny are the google ads displayed next to heated discussions on developer forums. I often saw ads for communication consultancy firms, process improvement etc.

GMail is probably the biggest reason why Wicket’s user and development list is highly regarded as fast, quick and friendly. The core developers are able to keep responding to the onslaught of messages by using this web mail service.

This time I agree completely with the Microsoft marketing department: Microsoft Office 2007 is the best Microsoft Office for 10 long years. But I probably have other reasons than they have. Finally they removed the annoying paperclip from the suite.

Clippy-be-gone-forever.

Now, if they also ditched that infuriating search dog in Vista that plagues Windows XP…

Ohlo just surfaced on my radar. Ohlo is a open source catalogue, similar to the O’Reilly codezoo effort. We have Swik, Freshmeat, etc. How many of these efforts can the internet bear?

Ohlo does looks like a good effort. They parse the code repositories and base some of their statistics on that. A lot of sourceforge projects will fail the test as many will be flagged as one man, inactive projects.

Strange thing is that for the maven project (which is pretty heavy under development) they say that the activity is in decline. Probably the pointer to their repository was not correct.

Is such a catalogue any good? I think it is. I usually try to stay away from one man shows, and projects that haven’t seen much development (unless the software tracker shows no bugs and the project is feature complete). This catalogue shows in a blink of an eye the status of a project and adds nice qualities to it.

Their summary for Wicket:

+ Large, active development team
+ Well-commented source code
! Apache Software License may conflict with GPL

They flag the Apache Software License as conflicting with GPL. Apparently this is caused by one file in our repository trunk which is GPL licensed. The one problem I have is that they are able to discover one file with GPL code, but don’t provide a link to which file that is. Anyway, I doubt this will still be a problem in the next weeks. We are removing all (L)GPL code from our code base as our effort to incubate at Apache continues. The comments in our code seem to please the Ohlo gods:

Wicket is written mostly in Java. Across all Java projects on Ohloh, 35% of all source code lines are comments. For Wicket, this figure is 51%. This high number of comments puts Wicket among the highest one-third of all Java projects on Ohloh.

They conclude this factoid with the comment that the Wicket team is a [...] helpful and disciplined development team.

Read more on Wicket at Ohlo. Oh, and you can stack Wicket, which is something like telling that it is part of your software stack.

With a flick of a switch I moved my blog from jroller to my own hosted wordpress powered blog. The movers did a great job at packing all my stuff here into nice boxes, and moving it to my new place, including the comments. Even though the moving service was very professional some china may have been broken.

Now why bother moving, and shelling out money for a service that is available for free? Several things triggered me to do the switch:

• speed: jroller has its bad days when it comes to speed. It hosts several hundreds of blogs and needs to serve them all.
• editor compatibility: several blog editors exist, but most of them don’t support the roller api. I’m typing this message using Flock, the social browser. Probably it is possible to direct Flock to be able to post to jroller, but I didn’t want to work with a half baked solution.
• own domain: I like being master of my own little universe, probably a left over from watching He-Man too much during childhood).
• wordpress: I think it is the best blogging tool around at this moment. Some of the templates are beautiful (vertigo squared, jillij) and more are available. On top of that the spam prevention for comments (akistmet) is great.
• statistics: being master of my own domain I get statistics for free with my subscription. Who, where from, when, etc.
• greener grass: when I read the blog of Nathan, I immediately thought: that is what I want: more control, more freedom

So here we are: on martijndashorst.com. I’m still contemplating splitting the Wicket part from my own private life ramblings. However, if I promise to keep the main writing about Wicket with a peek now and then into my personal stuff would you mind?

Soon to be launched: A Wicket Diary at http://wicketdiary.org

I have moved my blog from jroller.com to a shared provided server (didn’t want to open up my home network just yet). I didn’t want another huge blogging service such as wordpress.com, rather I wanted a bit more control over what I could do with the service. I installed Wordpress as my blogging application. Having my own (part of a) server is pretty sweet, too bad it isn’t Java hosted.

My hosting provider is bhosted, a PHP/mysql provider in the Netherlands, and I find the service pretty decent until now. Yes, the domain registration could be smoother, but I doubt it is any worse than other providers.

I wanted to preserve my old blog entries and migrate them to my new home. Unfortunately the wordpress installation doesn’t have a connection to jroller to download all posts and import them. So I searched the internets and found more people facing this problem.

Finally I settled on exporting my entries using the wordpress xml format, and thus preserving the comments made by other people on my blog. I then only had to go through 250+ posts to recategorize them (jroller didn’t put blog entries with category ‘java/wicket’ on the front page).

I really have to thank Zeusville for his efforts in creating the Wordpress export template for jroller.