Persiflage and Piffle

Some may argue that the development and release of the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform is a pointless waste of energy; why on earth should we need to learn yet another way of building AJAX apps - don’t we have enough already?

The point here is that, if you already know how to write Eclipse applications there’s very little you need to learn :

The RAP project enables developers to build rich, Ajax-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins with the well known Eclipse workbench extention points and a widget toolkit with SWT API (plus JFace).

So, if you already know SWT and JFace, if you understand how to write Eclipse plugins and how to package them together to create an application, then you’ve got a very small amount to learn to be able to package your application as a rich web app.

To get an idea of what it can do, have a look at the web versions of (reasonably) well known RCP mail demo and the example SWT (or rather RWT) controls demo.

Pretty neat, eh?

I hit an out of memory problem today on an Eclipse 3.3 installation on Ubuntu. Thanks to this article by Alex, the problem has gone away.

Coincidentally, the rain has stopped and the sun has just started to shine too.

I have to admit that I cringe at every new person I see using climate change to justify some change or decision. Sure there are some things that may have a real and direct impact on the environment, but it’s a very complex and emotive issue. The thing is, you just know deep down that many ideas and announcements are just people and corporations jumping on the ‘climate change’ bandwagon.

So, here we have it - green software.

I just can’t help myself… I’m off to bang my head against a brick wall.

I spotted the announcement of Riena on Wayne’s blog.

The Riena platform will be the foundation for building multi-tier enterprise client/server applications. As such Riena will broaden the usage of the service oriented architecture of OSGi/Equinox by providing access to local and remote services in a transparent way. Using this uniform programming model the components of Riena and the business components of the enterprise application can be developed regardless of their target location. Components are later easily placed on client or server depending on the business requirements.

It will be very interesting to see what’s produced by this project that adds real value on top of RCP, Equinox/OSGi and a mediocre programmer’s brain.

I’m hopeful that it’s something that will make this really quite easy to achieve; unfortunately the realities of this rarely turnout to be quite so simple. Even ‘obvious’ optimisations, such as allowing ‘pass by reference’ semantics across the component boundary in the name of ‘performance’ tend to erode away at benefits such uniform programming models. Only time will tell… It’s pleasing to see a team having a go though.

[The riena project’s homepage can be found here. They also have a newsgroup at news://news.eclipse.org/eclipse.technology.riena.]

Today I received an utterly abusive email from someone I don’t know. I’m not going to put the content here because it’s just too abusive.

The person is easily traceable; it’s from their own domain, it’s clear who it’s hosted by, and the mail headers are consistent with that information. Essentially, it seems that they have received a spam email where it would appear to be “from” me. I’m not going to report them though because it’s clear that this person hasn’t got the faintest idea how easy it is for spammers to fake the “from” email address in a message.

My rant really is to vent my feeling that, if you reply to a spam email where the “from” email address has been harvested off the internet and is being used fraudulently, you have become the lowest of the low - you are now a spammer yourself.

Just take a deep breath and delete any spam email without replying to it (and preferably without even bothering to read it).