The Bark Blog

Here is a nice long ABC News interview on Markos Moulitsas the guy behind the hugely popular liberal blog Daily Kos, and author of the book Crashing the Gate. There’s also an abridged online video of the interview, but the transcript contains the full interview. Highly recommended for people-powered political populists!

Seems like a simple question, and after a bit of digging, it does have a simple answer. The latest Eclipse 3.2 release, after upgrading with Callisto, contains two parallel database components. The first one was developed out of necessity for the Web Tools Platform (WTP), to enable a graphical interface for J2EE development. The second one is a more generic project, the Data Tools Platform (DTP), to create a broad interface for interacting with all sorts of data sources. The WTP component supports database-specific connections, while the DTP supports generic data source connections which happens to include databases.

The problem is that WTP needed to interact with databases before DTP was available, so its database interface mirrors the functionality in DTP. Although plans exist to merge the two, the timeline for that drags into next year, targeting the yet-to-be-started Eclipse 3.3.

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While reading up on Apple’s CoreData technology, I stumbled across one of those wonderful pearls of wisdom that seems so painfully obvious in hindsight, and yet never seems to reveal itself in foresight (especially when one is so focused on learning the low-level details). Funny that I’d never seen it before.

In a nutshell, three of Apple’s marquee developer products correspond directly the three components of MVC:

• The Model is the CoreData framework
• The View is Interface Builder
• The Controller is the Cocoa Bindings framework

And of course, we need a pretty picture, from the CoreData page above:

Kind of a silly epiphany, yes, but very useful for keeping things straight while sifting through the reams and reams of online developer docs, frameworks, IDE features, and APIs. Especially for those of us who are just starting to soak their feet in Mac development.