The Bark Blog

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.

At long last, the officially stable version of Eclipse 3.2 is out. Honestly, I haven’t been using Eclipse much lately. TextMate is so much more flexible, clean, and lightweight…ditto for Ruby on Rails.

On the other hand, as soon as you start digging into Java and J2EE, you hit a maelstrom of boilerplate java code and XML config files — all the cumbersome repetition that Rails works hard to minimize. In this department, Eclipse does a good job. It offers top notch code completion (which TextMate as a more general purpose text editor isn’t equipped to handle), graphical editors and a huge selection of plugins.

Finally with this release, the J2EE platform is looking healthy and strong, including brand new support for JavaServer Faces and EJB 3.0-style persistence code generation with the new Dali. The Callisto Project is a worthy effort to gather 10 big Eclipse projects together, test them as a unit, and release them in a single rollout. Eclipse also has a nice upgrade feature that lets you pull the entire Callisto plugin codebase with a few easy clicks. Well done guys!

While Rails will always be more sane and fun than J2EE web development, at least JSF and Facelets is a step in the right direction, removing a lot of the complexity and gritty low-level hackery typically required for Java web sites.

Tracking hours for a handful of billable projects can be a lot of scribblin’ and calculatin’. So I was pleased to find the PunchClock time tracker application for PalmOS. It’s missing a few features I’d like, but on the whole it does a great job. The main problem is counting hours for my bi-monthly timesheet. PunchClock can show summaries by day, by week, by two-week, by month, and by year…but not bi-monthly. So I’m still stuck with hand-calculating it myself.
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First there were Music Mashups, collages of existing songs spliced together to make “new” music. You got chocolate in my peanut butter! Now there’s Video Mashups. Except this effort is more deliberate. They are making blue-screened films for the explicit purpose of handing it over to amateur mashers, whereas music mashers tend to yoink commercially released songs without the express written permission of said artists. I think it’s a great idea (both mashers, actually). Give amateur filmmakers a chance to experiment with special effects and compositing techniques.

What’s next, real-life mashups? Reorganizing someone’s life for your personal amusement? Oh wait, that’s The Game.

Or is that healthily insane? We just dropped a pretty penny on a top-of-the-line Hoist home gym. Looks pretty simple, but it’s solid as a rock, easy to use, and as flexible as we’d ever need. We’ll still keep our Gold’s Gym memberships (what are we, insane?) for the kickin’ cardio equipment. But what was I thinking? There goes my handy list of excuses for not exercising, right out the window. Yeah, it’s a pain to drive the two miles to the gym and back, to brave the cold, to get all sweaty and have to take another shower, to have to touch all the icky, sweaty gym equipment. I’ll have to invent a whole new class of excuses…my shoulder hurts, I’m feeling lightheaded today, my cholesterol is fiiiiiine. I’ll have a week and a half to generate a new list before they deliver the monster. No problem!

Finally got around to transferring the blog to a standalone domain. This makes it much easier to manage the graphics, and possible to maintain the stylesheet in a separate file. No more CSS hackery inside a browser text box, right on! I’m really diggin’ DreamHost. Was a snap to add a new shell account for the SFTP Blogger.com connection (not about to give blogger.com my main account password!).

If you were to write up a master list of everything you wanted to accomplish in life, how many items would you come up with? Five? Ten? How about forty-three? 43Things is a fun little web site that encourages you to list your 43 top goals and share them with 150-thousand pseudo strangers. Stuff like, “Visit London” and “Save someone’s life”…and let’s not forget “Learn the Napoleon Dynamite dance”. It keeps track of how many other people share your goals and lets you surf from list to list. For example, check out the list for “make a documentary film”.

I haven’t set up an account yet, but I do like the idea. The site also has a nice Cool Factor, since it’s implemented in my new favorite programming language Ruby using my new favorite web framework Ruby on Rails.

Computer programming is like any other career: you have to give it a kick in the John Henry every once in awhile to keep it interesting, otherwise you risk boredom, stagnation, or worse. That’s how Java feels lately. It has lost its luster, its challenging crackle. The initial discovery and adventure has been buried in a paradoxical swamp of rote boilerplate coding and dizzying Enterprise Specifications.

Time for a change of pace.

My first breath of fresh life recently was Apple’s Cocoa Toolkit for developing native Mac OS X applications, using the Objective-C programming language. So far so good, but it’s a huge code library with tons of great tools, and it only works on modern Apple systems. Great for my hobby projects, but it doesn’t really help me at my day job.

Enter the Ruby Programming Language, a fully object-oriented scripting language with solid cross platform support (OS X, Windows, UNIX) and a wealth of built-in libraries. I’ve just scratched the surface, but it does seem to light up that special spark that I’ve been missing from Java lately. A change of pace will really help fire me up again at work, and shake off those creeping doldrums. Let’s hope!

Saw Lowen & Navarro last night at the Fine Line. It was a great show in its own right, but was also a sadly poignant event. Eric Lowen has been battling with ALS, which doesn’t mix well with the hard life of touring. This tour will probably be their last. On the up-side, Eric seems to be in good spirits and still has excellent guitar chops.

But speaking of Art and Science, I was very surprised and impressed by the tech setup they have. You can toss down $15 before the show, and they will burn you a copy (Science) of the entire show (Art) to take home that night. Simple and obvious in hindsight, yet still cutting edge. Haven’t listened to the CDs yet, so I don’t know how good the sound quality is (nor if it includes their traditional unplugged encore). I expect good things, though.