New Blogging Site

I posted a little something on Intertech's blog -
Nexus OSS hosting - fast and easy

Switching Basic Editors

I spend a lot of time working in Eclipse or its derivatives, depending on my customer environment, so most file editing occurs in it. However, many times we need to view or edit a file quickly in a simple environment, but one that has some great features (language syntax highlighting, word completion, file type conversion, text conversion, etc.).

For the past 5 or so years, I have been using Crimson editor (http://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor). It started life as Crimson, and another group forked it into Emerald Editor project when Crimson development stopped. Crimson is still the key product while they plan out Emerald. Sticking with the FOS theme (free open source), it is a great, full-featured editor, and I really like its features. I like its key mappings and other feature more than TextPad (a number of people like TextPad, but it is not FOS). I have also used UltraEdit at one of my prior customers; a very good product, but again not FOS.

While Crimson is a very popular editor, the new team has also had development slowdown. I can live with that, but support for problems has greatly reduced. In fact, it doesn't play well with the Win 7 security "features", i.e. UAC. Recently, this came to the worst possible result for me - it had an error in saving (privs problem) and resulted in a zero length file! Yes, I lost the contents of this file. This was a product's XML config file, so was never in a SCM.

With that, I finally had enough, and began searching for a FOS replacement. After some helpful googling, Notepad++ was consistently a recommended product. I also recalled regularly seeing it on the Sourceforge top 25 list.

I've been using it for a couple of days now, and it is pretty good. I have yet to be 100% happy with it (long time Crimson user needs adjustment to the new way!) - I don't see features like filters (ability to include/exclude lines of text from view - very helpful for log files); however it has a lot of additional text processing features that are very useful (begins to remind me of the text processing power of ye ol' Emacs! Yes, I typed Emacs...).

How about you - do you have any recommendations for me to try?

Perforce has shelving feature

My fav SCM, Perforce, has a new release with great features. One of them is the "shelve" feature. I planned to write some notes here about it, but found Laura Wingerd of Perforce beat me to it:

http://blog.perforce.com/blog/?p=1872

25% off Hibernate intro course

A little ad of a big offer for those interested in Hibernate training: Intertech is offering 25% off the first offering of the updated Hibernate class, August 4-7. Great deal! Just provide extra detailed feedback during and after the class...

Class info is here. Call and request the discount at time of registration.

Pull it out and replace

From http://thereifixedit.com/2009/07/10/epic-kludge-photo-utility-belt

Does this image remind you of updates you or your team have made to your product?

There are many times when it is the correct decision to perform minor updates & edits to fix or enhance features. Typical bug fixes, minor enhancements, the normal daily work.

However, this image is a perfect example of when it is the correct time for a "hot fix" and then seriously do a major refactor - pull it out and replace! :-)

When the system has accumulated technical debt, it is expensive to fix or add to, or even nearly impossible to change without extraordinary means.

If you were in charge, would you decide to fix the pole or replace it with a new one?

JavaOne Tech Sessions & Labs online

Wonderful - Sun has published the 2009 JavaOne sessions. Dig in!
JavaOne online

JavaFX and Mobile?

Are you working with JavaFX yet? It is certainly an interesting and flexible technology.

Sun Developer Network just posted a thought-provoking article: Developing Content with JavaFX Mobile, Java ME, and the Messaging API (JSR 205) - Background
It shows you how to use the JavaFX mobile user interface with existing Java ME APIs and the Messaging API (JSR 205).

I'm curious to see how JavaFX adoption continues, not only for web and desktop, but now mobile!