Tuesday, May 28, 2002

NetBeans - Not your Fathers IDE I've today decided to take a look at NetBeans.  I must say I'm rather impressed with it.  There's quite a bit of initial complexity in setting it up but once that's done it seems to slot into place quite nicely.  Now if only I can find some way to have my brief emulation I may actually be in heaven.....  Further updates as warranted. 9:49:16 PM    comment []

From the Gadget Department Anyone who knows me knows that I am the ultimate gadget geek.  You can then understand why this Handspring: Treo 270 turns me on.  I'm still waiting for true wireless internet that isn't hampered by some scaled down browser (read that WAP).  The Japanese sure seem to be going in the righ direction. I'm pretty excited about the new Sony Clie certainly seems pretty darned...well...gadgety.  My only concern is that with it's paltry 66mhz processor can it handle the load that people are going to want to put on it?  Will it play an MP3 file while I'm surfin' the web?  For the price it certainly seems that Compaq's iPaq 3835 would certainly seem to be a more powerful platform.....so many choices....so few pockets to put a Digital Assitant IN. Anyone else think that Apple has the right idea with it's iPod?  I think it's a little pricey (though I suppose that's always the case for Apple's products) but it has the right feature set.  I also like the G4. Saw an amusing review of it and OS X 10.2 on DDJ.  Pretty amazing technology...almost makes me wanna run out and buy one..... 12:36:13 PM    comment []

IntelliJ IDEA....looks awesome...doesn't work with JDK 1.4 ....*sigh*... On a recommendation I have taken a look at this.  This has got to be one of the nicest Java IDEs around and it seems pretty all en-compassing but it's lacking two things for me to take it seriously. Native support for JDK 1.4 Brief Key support With those two things I would be willing to drop my current environment (MultiEdit 9 and JDK 1.4) but until then you'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.  Anyone wanna share their development environment of choice? 9:48:29 AM    comment []

Tomcat is Dead I just spent an entire day attempting to get Tomcat working for me, a day that could have been spent playing Dungeon Siege or Asheron's Call or maybe writing that detective story I've been thinking about...alas 'twas not to pass. I have 2 servers for my development environment.  One of these (named appropriately enough "server") uses Sybase SQL Anywhere 7.x and is my database server.  This has got to be one of the most under-rated databases out there.  Really nice performance and a low price.  The other server runs (or at least is supposed to) the application server.  Up until very recently this was running a development version of ATG Dynamo.  The problem I had with this was that with 256 megs of RAM in the server (a P2 366 Mhz) it was taking forever for it to start up.  No problem says I, I'll just convert our app over to Tomcat and install that.  Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.... I ran in circles for approximately 8 hours when I ran across Mike Cannon's article Is Tomcat Crap?  You can understand at this point I was pulling what little was left of my hair out by the roots and this was a life preserver to grasp in a sea of conflicting results.  Needless to say it gave me a completely different perspective on things.  This persepctive included the use of resin which I downloaded, installed....edited the config with what would seem to be logical values and *poof* (well, no actual *poof* per se...) it just worked.  I was also quite shocked by how much faster it ran then Dynamo.  Granted there are some pretty heavy memory requirements for Dynamo so I'm gonna have to build up a better app server to test it but.....all I can say is "YIKES"....seriously...no really...I tried saying some other stuff and all that would come out was that.  Maybe I should see a Doctor. One of my biggest beefs with Tomcat has GOT to be the supremen LACK of documentation for Tomcat 4.  There's a ton of stuff out there for 3 but whatever docs have been written for 4 are generously sprinkled with a "Fix Me" label.  Google searches where fruitless and JGuru was just not helpful at all....except of course for pointing me in the Resin direction. Tomorrow it'll be time to see what my boss has to say about all of this.  Our group has little to no budget for new app servers but considering the licensing fees are coming up for the Dynamo Servers we should have no problem slotting these in....though of couse at this point it's all just aimless rambling..... 1:39:05 AM    comment []