Previously, this blog was hosted on a SAAS-solution. I was not really satisfied, because the (proprietary) software was too limited, less easy to use than promised and there were no signs that it would improve soon. So I decided to go for a more common and more open solution, a self-hosted WordPress blog. The reason I went with the SAAS guys some years ago was I didn’t want to fiddle with manually uploading PHP-files, managing MySQL-databases and that sort of things. I found out that this is not needed anymore, even for self-hosted installations. My hosting provider (iXL hosting) offers a nice control panel (DirectAdmin) with a wizard (Installatron) to install and update software. So installing WordPress was just a matter of some mouse clicks and entering some names!

I also found out that WordPress (3.3) has become a very mature platform, for which a plethora of useful plugins is available. This is what I did to create my redesigned website:

• Luckily, my old SAAS-blog-host had a WordPress-export module. So I could easily import my blog content using the WordPress Importer plugin.
• I found the Pilcrow WordPress theme very nice, but I like sans-serif typefaces more than serifs, so I made some small changes to the CSS style sheet.
• I didn’t like the default images of the theme, so I removed them and added some pictures of my own. I slightly adapted the theme functionality to automatically use all images found in a certain folder and add an optional description for each image.
• Of course the old blog software created different URLs than WordPress does. Luckily, I found a wonderful plugin called Redirection, which made it possible to redirect the old URLs to the new locations, based on powerful regular expressions. The plugin also monitors 404 errors, which helped me find even more old URLs to redirect than the ones I’d figured out myself.
• Being a blog about programming, I needed a solution for syntax highlighting code examples. I went for the Syntax Highlighter ComPress plugin. Simple and easy to use, with very nice results.
• Sometimes I write multiple articles on the same topic. The Series plugin by Justin Tadlock offers a nice solution to group those articles together.
• I tracked my old site via Google Analytics and I wanted to continue using that. I found quite a lot of WordPress plugins for Google Analytics and I chose Analyticator, which seems to work great. A side effect of continuing to use GA, is that the site statistics just continue, as if the site wasn’t moved. Nice!

One of the nice things is that I didn’t have to down- or upload any file in the process. All plugins can be installed easily from within the management console of WordPress. Kudos to the WordPress developers for creating such a mature and easy to use platform!

Let me know in the comments what you think of the new site and what your own experiences are with blogging solutions!

Neo4J! What else?

This was one of the “early bird” sessions, taking place before the offical opening and keynote. Despite the early start, there were quite a lot of attendees. I think it was worth getting up early! Ron van Weverwijk did a good job introducing graph databases and Neo4J. Most of the time, I find sessions about NoSQL databases and the like very interesting, but often it is difficult to see any practical use in the near future. After all, most of us aren’t working on the next big thing in social networking. At least, I am not. Most of the time I am working for clients that already have a relational database and they just want a new front end for it.

The nice thing in this session was, that Ron told us about a project he did in exactly such a corporate environment where there was already a relational database. They didn’t change or remove that database. Only for the specific case where the graph database was offering an advantage, they exported the data they needed to the graph database. A clever and pragmatic approach. I hope I’ll find an apportunity to do something similar once…

Keynote by Tomas Nilsson

The Oracle-keynote was a little disappointing. Although Tomas is a fascinating storyteller, it was difficult to get a big picture from the collection of anecdotes he told us. If there was a big picture, I’d say it was that Oracle isn’t such a pleasant company to work for. And despite the fact that the company is run by lawyers and marketeers, we should trust them to be good for Java, since half of their revenue depends on Java. Well, I guess I will never trust any large corporation, but I think we as Java community have to admit that Oracle did a good job in getting the development of the Java platform back to speed again. So, let’s just hope Tomas was right on this…

JBoss Forge

Paul Bakker did a very interesting session about JBoss Forge, formerly known as Seam Forge. I had never heard of it before, but after this talk I’m certainly going to try it. JBoss Forge offers a CLI for creating and maintaining Maven POM files. With the JBoss Forge shell, one can rapidly setup a new project. This type of project setup is of course known from frameworks like Spring Roo, Ruby on Rails and the like. But the good thing about Forge is, that it can be used for any Java project, as long as you are able to build it with Maven. Paul put an emphasis on the fact that Forge not just creates pom-files, but also maintains them. (And it can also create and maintain other configuration files and even Java classes…) He also showed that it is relatively simple to create your own Forge plugin. All in all, this was a very good session, packed with demos. I really enjoyed it. I hope I will be still as impressed when I try Forge myself…

Introduction to JavaFX 2.0

A nice session by Michael Heinrichs. The downsides of this session were the lack of code demos and the fact that I didn’t learn anything new. But there was also one really cool aspect of this talk: Michael coded all his slides in JavaFX. And the slides were, of course, very fancy. Unfortunately his code was not clean enough to share, he told me afterwards. Nevertheless, it’s still a very cool idea!

Microsoft keynote on a Java conference…

The afternoon keynote was provided by Microsoft. I think it’s brave of them to show up at a Java conference. Of course, they were there to tell about their Azure platform and how it can be used to deploy Java apps in the cloud. I was not impressed. It turns out Azure is not much more than a bunch of managed virtual machines running Windows Server. In order to run a Java EE application on Azure, one has to tinker with Windows .cmd scripts to bootstrap an application server. And of course, the application server itself also has to be deployed. Although Microsoft calls it a PAAS, I think it’s actually not much more than a IAAS…

Migrating Spring to Java EE 6

Again a very good session by Paul Bakker. He showed a pragmatic way to migrate an existing Spring application to a standards-compliant Java EE 6 application. He was honest: his approach isn’t a silver bullet and it still takes a lot of time to migrate. But, as Paul put it: “Given an outdated application that needs to be migrated anyway, why not migrate it to the standard?” I think he’s totally right! And he showed us a doable migration path. Afterwards, I heard other attendees complaining that “he told us upfront that the talk wouldn’t be a shoot out, but is was.” I assume those people were mainly Spring-fans, having trouble saying goodbye to Spring. But let’s face it: we really don’t need Spring anymore, the good ideas from Spring are all incorporated in the Java EE 6 standard, most of them even in an improved form. Of course, we should be grateful to the guys from the Spring framework, and I think Paul gave them enough credits. But we have to move on!

Looking at Groovy 1.8

The last talk I attended was by Hubert Klein Ikkink. He had almost no slides, but instead showed us lots of cool new features of Groovy 1.8 with simple and illustrative demos. The talk also served as a nice (re-)intruduction to Groovy for people (like me) lacking any experience with the powerful alternative JVM-language. I don’t know if I’m going to use Groovy in the near future. But I hope for sure that Groovy can be for the Java language what Spring was for the Java EE platform.

Short after switching to the Mac, I was pretty satisfied with the default file manager on Mac OS: Finder. Finder is a pretty good file manager, at least it is better than the Windows Explorer. But, like Explorer, Finder needs some tweaking to make it more suitable for programmers:

• First of all, as a programmer I want to see the file extensions, so I enable the “Show all file extensions” option.
• Since changing file extensions is more common in programming, I disabled the “Show warning before changing the extension” option.
• Then I set the list view as default view, via “View” > “Show View Options”, “Always open in list view”, “Use as Defaults”.

After applying these tweaks, I was pretty satisfied for a while. However, after using Finder for a longer period, I had collected some annoyances:

• I too often found myself positioning two Finder-windows next to each other to be able to drag files from one location to another.
• It sometimes confused me that directories were not listed at the top, as I was used to on other systems.
• There’s no easy way to open a finder window without using the mouse, unless you remember to keep always one window open, so you can Command-Tab to it.

Then I stumbled upon TotalFinder, an add-on for the OS X Finder. It adds several very handy functions, which helped me to overcome my annoyances:

• TotalFinder has a “dual mode”, which shows two adjacent views. Pretty much like the good old Norton Commander and its clones (Midnight Commander, …). No more aligning Finder windows before dragging and dropping files!
• TotalFinder adds tabs to reduce the clutter. Although this is the most prominent feature, it is not as important to me as the dual mode and the other tweaks.
• TotalFinder can show directories on top, just as I was used to.
• The (optional) Visor mode can make TotalFinder to slide into view at the press of a shortcut key. Now I have the finder at my fingertips!
• TotalFinder adds a pretty handy “copy path” menu to the context menu; especially time-saving if combined with the Terminal.

Long story short: File management on the Mac is a joy since I found TotalFinder! It keeps the good parts of Finder and adds some excellent features to make it more suitable for a software development environment. At US$ 18, I think it is reasonably priced. I have only one wish for a future version: it would be very nice to have an “Open in Terminal” option in the context menu, that would also integrate with TotalTerminal…

So I started looking for an additional text editor. Since I use such an editor only as additional tool besides my IDE, I’m not willing to pay (much) for it. On Windows, there is a plethora of free or cheap text editors available and although the number is lower, there are quite a few good options for the Mac as well. I picked a few for evaluation…

jEdit

Of course there is jEdit. Being open source and written in Java, it instantly gets some sympathy points from me. However, it suffers from a common problem of cross-platform applications: the user interface feels non-native on every platform. It seems this distracts even more on the Mac platform, where slick design is the standard. On the other hand, jEdit is very versatile and the project exists for many years, still releasing updates regularly. The editor isn’t very lightweight though, and it can take some time getting used to. All in all jEdit is a capable editor and I keep it installed on my system for some special functionalities offered by some of the many plug-ins that are available. (You should browse the plugin directory to get an idea of the huge amount of plug-ins.) Despite all this, jEdit didn’t become my favorite text editor for everyday text editing…

The classics

A text editor overview is not complete without mentioning the “classics”: VI and Emacs. Being a Unix operating system, Mac OS X comes with the command line versions of Vim and Emacs pre-installed. They’re accessible by typing the right command (vi or emacs) at the OS X Terminal. I’m not a huge fan of either, but I do use Vim occasionaly when I want to view a file or do some minor editing from the command line. But if you are a fan of one, it is good to know that GUI versions of both editors are available: MacVim and Aquamacs. And if you ever try one of the command-line versions and you don’t know how to exit: VI can be quit by typing a colon (:), followed by ‘q’. If that doesn’t work, you might have to press ⎋ Esc before typing the colon and/or you might have to add an exclamation mark (‘!’) after the q. Emacs can be exited by typing Control-X followed by Control-C. (That is ⌃ Control, not ⌘ Command!) So to round up this section: I only use the command line version of Vim occasionally and I don’t feel the need for installing a GUI version of one of those classic editors.

Smultron

Smultron is a Mac-only editor. What I understand is that it was quite popular a few years ago. Back then it was developed as an open source project and was available for free. The open source development stalled in 2009, but the last released free version can still be downloaded from Smultron’s Sourceforge page. It seems to work, even on OS X Lion, although I didn’t test is very thouroughly. Recently, Peter Borg announced the reincarnation of the Smultron editor as a commercial product in the Mac OS App Store. Two versions are available: version 4 is for OS X 10.7 (Lion) only, while version 3.8.4 also works on previous versions of Mac OS X. Both versions cost US$ 4.99, which Apple converts to € 3.99 in the European App Store. I did not test the commercial version, as I found a good free alternative (see below). However, some features of the new version 4 sound attractive: Smultron seems to be one of the first Mac text editors to support the new Resume, Auto Save and Versions features of OS X Lion. Maybe I’ll give it a try someday…

TextWrangler

A very good and free text editor on the Mac is TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software. The company calls it the “little brother” of their BBEdit product. While “little brother” sounds as if we’re talking about a rather limited product, TextWrangler actually is a very capable and versatile general purpose text editor. (It seems the BBEdit product, priced at US$ 39.99 at the moment, is targetted at web-developers to be used as their main editor.)

Apart from the usual features, like line numbering, syntax highlighting, advanced search and replace, TextWrangler even has an excellent compare tool, that handles file-to-file as well as directory-to-directory comparissons. (The compare tool is somewhat hidden though, it is reachable via the menu: Search > Find Differnces….) As with Smultron, TextWrangler is written exclusively for Mac OS, so it integrates really well with the system and it sports a slick look and feel, just like other Mac OS applications. For now, TextWrangler is my favorite text editing companion for every day use.

Conclusions

Well, this is clearly just a personal evaluation of some text edit options for the Mac. There are way more options available, but I didn’t have the time to evaluate them all. There’s a list of Mac text-editors on Wikipedia, although the list isn’t updated since October 2006. Various other websites publish such lists as well. I want to stress that I just mentioned my personal favorites here and I wouldn’t dare to say that one solution is better than another in general. I hope you enjoyed this article. Please feel free to share your experiences with any of the mentioned editors or any other editor.

I have also worked on an Ubuntu system for a while. I did not like it so much. But one thing I did like very much, is a nice little application called Guake terminal. It’s a terminal window that’s always available within one keypress, but never gets in the way. It just slides into view when you press the right key, and slides away when you press it again. Making the window semi-transparent, you can even see your desktop or other open windows behind it.

Until recently, I did not find a Guake alternative for Mac OS X. But today I stumbled on TotalTerminal: the search is over! TotalTerminal is a Terminal add-on. That means it extends the existing OS X Terminal with hotkey powers, instead of being a separate program to run in place of the terminal. That’s a good thing, since the OS X Terminal already has a lot of good features, which still can be used with TotalTerminal. So by configuring a display profile for Terminal with a nice, translucent background and a pretty font (like e.g. Monaco) and combining that with TotalTerminal, I now have a beautiful pop-over terminal available anywhere, with just one press of a button!

However, after years of developing Java software on Windows and Ubuntu boxes, I had to adapt some habits, reprogram my muscle memory and find some new tools. The good news is of course that nearly all Java software runs smoothly on a Mac. For the major Java IDEs, special Mac installers are available, doing a great job to integrate with the Mac OS X platform. After a few weeks of working on the Mac, I have also found some pretty nice additional tools that make the life of a (Java) software developer a lot easier. This is the first of a series of articles dedicated to (Java) software development on a Mac.

Copy and Paste

Although copy and paste programming is not a good practice in general, copying and pasting is still a popular habit for programmers. So I had a hard time reprogramming my muscle memory the first few days on the Mac. But now “copy” is remapped to ⌘C like it has never been different…

Anyway, I recently stumbled upon Jumpcut, an open source OS X utility that creates a clipboard stack. Every time you copy something, it is placed on the stack. And if you just use ⌘V (Cmd + V) to paste, the last thing copied is pasted at the cursor position. However, if you use ⌘⇧V (Cmd + Shift + V), you can browse through the clipboard stack with the cursor keys. That way it is e.g. possible to paste things from “three copies ago”. And if you’re mouse-centric, there’s also a nice little scissors icon in the menu bar, that reveals a list presentation of the clipboard stack when clicked.

All in all, Jumpcut has become an indispensible tool for me. Admitted, the idea is nothing new. On Windows there is the “Office Clipboard” that has roughly the same functionality. However, I didn’t use that one very often, back when I worked on Windows. I think I have used Jumpcut more often in the past few weeks than I have used the Office clipboard on Windows in all the years that I worked on that platform. Jumpcut does it’s job very elegantly and goes out of the way when you don’t use it. I really like this tool!

If you attended my talk in Vienna, I hope you enjoyed it and that I’ve convinced you to start using ExtVal in your Java EE projects.

CONFESS starts tomorrow. There are a lot of very interesting talks about Java EE and JSF. I’m looking forward to meeting many JSF enthusiasts!

As of December 2009 there is a new version of Java EE with JavaServer Faces 2.0. It therefore seems a little odd that still many books are published on JavaServer Faces 1.x. Like Bart Kummel’s book Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development. Fortunately this is not just another book.

Like every introductory book this book also starts with an introduction, this time of Apache MyFaces. A brief summary of this JavaServer Faces (JSF) implementation is followed by a list of the sub projects of MyFaces. Finally the reader is pointed to further extensions of JSF that are focused on extended scoping, portlet integration and validation. This tells us that we are dealing with a modern book on JSF.

As Oracle has turned a large part of their ADF component set into open source in the form of MyFaces Trinidad, it is not surprising that Oracle has also cooperated with all kinds of integration of MyFaces and Trinidad in both Eclipse and JDeveloper. The book explains in great detail how to get started with each of these IDEs. The book then shows how a developer can get to work with Maven. Fortunately, most IDEs nowadays support Maven, in spite of the author’s claim to the contrary, so that there is a free choice of IDE available. Finally a complete chapter is dedicated to Facelets. Those who cannot say goodbye to JavaServer Pages (JSP) I can recommend to read this very thorough chapter.

All the other chapters, except one, deal with the rich component set of MyFaces and its subprojects. Because Trinidad has a large number of components and options, three chapters are dedicated to this subject. And rightly so! The only part that did not surprise me was the chapter on Skinning. This remains, in my view, too complex in structure in Trinidad although I see it is less complex than what I remember from earlier implementations.

The last chapter is dedicated to best practices, but I have the impression this chapter should have been called ‘Miscellaneous’. The chapter deals with a number of general JSF points in a MyFaces jacket. However, the book is full of best practices and that alone makes reading the book more than worthwhile.

The book Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development is more than a ‘getting started with’ book that I enjoyed reading. The author writes well and shows a very thorough knowledge of JSF in general and MyFaces in particular. That he sometimes moves over useful hints rather quickly will not be held against him by those with a little experience in JSF.

What might scare off a beginner in this subject is the early introduction of a dedicated component library in the code examples. If you intend this as a reference book, the examples may be a little difficult to follow because of this. This means you will have to read the book as a whole which gives you a lot of information for your money if only because the excellent hints and best practices found throughout the book.