Ed Burnette's view from the asylum

Have fun at EclipseCon!

2007-03-05T08:02:00.000-05:00

It's chilly this morning in North Carolina (28 degrees F) so I'm a bit envious of all of you folks out in California for EclipseCon 2007 this week. I expect you all to keep the rest of us informed with lots of blogs and pictures of your experiences!

I have three special requests:

If you take any pictures be sure to upload them to flickr and tag them with 'EclipseCon 2007'. Please indicate whether or not it's ok to use the pictures elsewhere (for example I might put together a gallery for ZDNet if there are enough pics). Here are the pics for last year if you'd like to reminisce.
I'm a huge Dilbert fan so if somebody could get Adams' autograph for me I'd be eternally grateful.
If the new Ambassador has a party this year, be sure to go and get to know a few new people. Last year's party was a blast. The best thing about Eclipse is its community, and that means you. (Just be careful not to stand between Steve and the beer cart, that could be hazardous to your health. :) )

Have fun!
--Ed

If I'm going to screw up, why does it have to be so public?

2007-03-01T15:52:00.000-05:00

Grrr. And... Yargh. That's my reaction to seeing a story I wrote get picked up not only by Digg but by ZDNet's "Must Read News Alerts".

Normally that would be a good thing, except the title used for the story was "How to get 66.6 TeraFlops for $600". If you go to the link, it says "How to get 520 GigaFlops for $600". Just a tiny difference.

While the original title was much cooler, it was wrong. I didn't discover the error until about a half hour after hitting the 'Publish' button. The 66.6 TFlops number was based on two sentences in the GeForce 8800 Architecture Technical Brief. The first says:

Teraflops of raw floating-point processing power are combined to deliver unmatched gaming performance, graphics realism, and real-time, film-quality effects.

Teraflops, plural. Later it says that the card has 128 stream processors and that:

Each stream processor on a GeForce 8800 GTX operates at 1.35 GHz and supports the dual issue of a scalar MAD and a scalar MUL operation, for a total of roughly 520 gigaflops of raw shader horsepower.

Hmm, so if each stream processor gets 520 GFlops and there are 128 stream processors that works out to 66.6TFlops, right? Well, that's what it looked like to me. But if you look closely, 1.35 GHz times 3 flops per cycle = 4.05 GFlops per processor, not 520. The 520 number was for the whole card (128 * 4.05 = 518.4).

Doh!

Since ZDNet's blogging system doesn't let me preview my articles, I do my final editing pass after clicking 'Publish' so I can see the article in context. It was during this pass that I saw the numbers didn't add up and I went back to double-check the figures. I corrected the article, but by then the damage was done. People were starting to comment on it, and it had been dugg. One poster said that a card that delivered 66.6 TFlops "gives new meaning to 'fast as Hell'". Heh.

To make matters worse, when I got the ZDNet email alert several hours later it also had the wrong title. It's really too bad because it would still have been noteworthy with the smaller number. I sent a note to digg's feedback address to see if they could fix it there, but got no response.

Mea culpa. Sometimes, the internet is a little *too* fast.

All I can say is, "The devil made me do it".

Is this thing on?

2007-02-21T21:26:00.000-05:00

EclipseCon 2007 is weeks away so you'd think that the buzz it generates would be showing up in O'Reilly's Buzz Game. But it's not - why not?

Hmm... it's interesting to note that 15 people buying stock in Eclipse could close the gap with NetBeans on market capitalization.

Phear my bandwidth

2006-09-25T16:26:00.000-04:00

Who says Eclipse is big?

Resume pruning

2006-08-01T21:54:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Kevin Donlin's article on "Clearing deadwood from your resume", and illinidk's succinct review of Peter Norvig's resume, I decided it was time for some housecleaning. I don't remember when I started a resume for the first time, but it must have been more than 10 years ago. Since then it had grown into an 8 page monster! Using Kevin's advice, I was able to cut it down to 3 pages. Have a look and let me know what you think.

GWT book, subversion diversion

2006-07-30T22:56:00.000-04:00

Most of my free time lately has been going into a new project - an e-book on the Google Web Toolkit to be published by the Pragmatic Programmers. I have about 50 pages of rough draft written so far, covering topics such as why you would want to use GWT, how it ties into your web pages, developing in Eclipse, the differences between hosted and web mode, remote procedure calls, and more. The e-book is supposed to be about 60 pages so I'm happy with the progress so far. If you are interested in GWT and have some ideas about what should be in the book, let me know. See also my new site at www.gwtpowered.org.

This is my first project with the Pragmatic Programmers and things are working pretty well so far. One thing I like is that I don't have to use MS Word to write the book (both Manning and O'Reilly required that). The format is in XML, but actually I don't directly write in XML most of the time (I'll have more to say about what I'm using in the future). The XML files are checked into a repository (Subversion) just like source code. It beats the heck out of sending zips containing MS Word doc files to your editor, and trying to keep it all straight with naming conventions containing the date.

Speaking of Subversion, I'm using Subclipse for the book development because Subversive doesn't support svn:externals yet. Both of these plug-in teams have proposed Eclipse projects (subclipse - subversive) so it'll be interesting to see how that works out.

Subclipse developer Mark Phippard noticed I was using Subclipse because of a ZDNet image gallery on Google Code that I posted, and pointed out a new version was available. This version (1.1.4) works much better with Eclipse 3.2, though it was still being pretty slow when saving files. When I complained to Mark about this, he had a fix for me the next day that sped it up by a factor of 10 or more! This fix will undoubtedly make it in the next Subclipse build. Thanks Mark!

Call for discussion: "User experience" project

2006-07-20T09:48:00.000-04:00

I'm stirring up trouble again, this time trying to get people talking about the Eclipse user experience. Visit the eclipse.foundation newsgroup and add your two cents. An HTML interface to the group is available if you don't like using news readers.

And by the way, why isn't eclipse.foundation listed on this newsgroup page?

Ed on software

2006-02-15T00:24:00.000-05:00

Well, I'll never be as famous as Joel, but maybe I can at least get one of those "personal medals" for "blog-sledding" this year. My latest threads can now be found on ZDNet. I've been crossposting for a few days but now I'm ready to make the move. Hope to see you there.

Does anybody understand Ajax besides Google?

2006-02-13T16:56:00.000-05:00

We all know the story of Ajax and XMLHttpRequest, about how a little known feature of Internet Explorer was mostly ignored until it was duplicated in some other browsers and Google started using it in their Mail, Maps, and Suggest features. It'll be a year ago this Saturday that Jesse Garrett coined the term. Dozens of books and articles and tutorials later, I have to wonder, is this too complex for mere mortals to understand?

Consider this article about the new GTalk feature in GMail. Once again, Google has figured out how to do something that most people thought was impossible. Or look at this article about how they draw lines on top of maps. If it weren't for 'View Source', would anybody but a few wizards at Google know how to do this? And how do they feel about us learning by looking at their source code anyway?

Where I grew up we had these trees that dropped what we called "sweetgum balls" all over the ground every fall. They were impossible to walk on or even pick up without getting pricked. Developers are scrambling to pull together toolkits and consortiums and projects to get a handle on the prickly technique that is "Ajax". Will it work? Since everyone seems to want it to work very badly, perhaps. But I think most people are just going to be sporting band-aids until we're all wow'ed by a better, hopefully simpler, solution.

Lobby Google to include Java

2006-02-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

Google Pack is a bundle of software that Google "likes". Google Pack offers software that is free, easy to use and useful. Google chooses software that will be considered essential to users of all levels. They don't accept anything with adware or spyware. Most importantly, the software automatically updates itself with new versions of all installed programs.

This software bundle achieved a higher importance recently when it was discovered that Google and Dell were close to bundling Google's software on new Dell PCs.

This morning I'm trying to get the latest JSE 5 update installed on my workstation. Something was locking a directory so it wouldn't let the install finish even though I killed all the usual suspects. So I rebooted and now I'm in the process of uninstalling the last 4 updates that I had installed just so there will be a clean slate. Then I need to decide whether to install Mustang (JSE 6) before or after JSE 5. Then I expect it will take a few tries to get Eclipse to use the right JDKs. By then it will be lunch time. Is there a better way?

I think so. How about if Google included Java as part of its Google Pack? All the Google Pack installs and updates have been painless so far. Maybe somebody has finally figured out how to update PC software without losing hair in the process. But how do we make that happen?

It turns out Google made it easy by providing a page to suggest new software be included. So everybody reading this, if you would like Java or any other software that is "essential to users of all levels" to be included in this unique distribution medium, click on this suggestion page, select the option that says "I'd like to suggest software to be inlcuded in Google Pack", and then follow the directions to make your request known.

What is Oracle up to?

2006-02-10T22:19:00.000-05:00

Businessweek is reporting that Oracle is in negotiations to buy several open source companies including JBoss, Zend, and Sleepycat.

"Oracle is in talks to buy at least three open-source software companies in deals that could be valued at more than $600 million, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The transactions would extend the 18-month, $18 billion spending spree by Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison that has engulfed PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. They would also put Oracle in control of some of the most sought-after open-source projects. Overnight, Redwood Shores (Calif.)-based Oracle would rival IBM as the prime evangelist of a movement that's revolutionizing how software is developed and distributed."

Is the beginning of the end of open source? No, actually this is a validation of open source. Hmm, that's not exactly correct. How about a pragmatic realization that people don't want to pay anything for software. Well, that's closer, but not exactly right either.

Consider what the Internet did to stock trading. You used to have to rely on a specialist to tell you what to buy, and to do the trades for you. Now, most people do their own research and use an online broker. The same thing happened to hardware during the transition from big iron to commodity systems. And now, instead of waiting for some sales rep to tell them what they need, a potential customer has the option to download and try out software they need. There's no need for "price quotes" and contacts and intrusive callbacks when no money is exchanged up front. It's much more efficient and flexible for the customer.

I expect this to dawn on more and more ISVs like Oracle in the years to come. By getting in early and leveraging money made in traditional licensing, Oracle can buy recognized brands like JBoss and hit the ground running. It's not about buying the "community", or even the developers. It's the brand and the mindshare and the time to market that is more valuable.

We, as professional developers, will still have jobs. Money will still change hands. But it will do so at a different place. It will go towards consulting, support, customization, and general peace of mind. The value of the software is not in the bits, it's in what the software can *do* for the customer. How much it can save them, or how much revenue it can generate for them. Customers will pay when they're getting their money's worth.

Other industries figured this out a long time ago, with everything from razors to printers to no-cost mortgages. Red Hat was one of the early pioneers in software. As Larry Ellison says, "We are embracing it. We are not going to fight this trend. We think if we're clever, we can make it work to our advantage." Are you clever enough?

JBuilder and Delphi are alive and well

2006-02-09T21:45:00.000-05:00

Competitors of JBuilder, Delphi, and other Borland IDE products would have you believe that these are suddenly dead products and you should abandon them immediately. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just recently the IDE team came out with Delphi 2006, a major upgrade to its turbo-charged Windows development environment. Many popular programs such as the MySQL database administrator were created with Delphi. Also a new Eclipse-based version of JBuilder is expected to be demoed at EclipseCon 2006.

David Intersimone ("David I") Vice President, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist at Borland wrote in an open letter to the development community,

"The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."

So all that's happened is that Borland is spinning off its IDE business into a separate company so that the "Borland" company can concentrate on big ticket application lifecycle products. David himself is one the folks at Borland who will follow the tools to their new home. He writes:

"I’m really excited to be moving to the new company. We’ve got the right team members, we’ve got the tool and component partner eco-system, we have the authors, trainers, consultants, and we have the most important part – a loyal community. … I want to assure all of you that we are here in Scotts Valley, and around the world, working on future versions of Delphi, JBuilder and our other products. We are still listening to your needs, issues, and suggestions. We are tracking with the new platform initiatives for Windows, .NET, Java, open standards, and emerging technologies that you want to leverage."

That doesn't sound like a dead product to me. To the contrary, David writes:

"This is not the shutting down of a product line, but the empowering of it. This move is in the best interests of our customers, company, and community."

New version of IDEA to support Eclipse compiler

2006-02-08T22:48:00.000-05:00

The Java compiler developed for Eclipse is widely regarded as being one of the fastest and most capable in the industry, perhaps surpassing Sun's own javac. Due partly to its quality, and partly to its liberal open source license (which unlike GPL, lets it used by both open and closed source projects) it has found its way into a wide variety of applications. For example one major software vendor uses a modified version of the command line compiler to scan its code for I18N policy violations, and Apache has put it into their popular Tomcat web server to compile Java Server Pages.

Now JetBrains IDEA, which is putatively a competitor to Eclipse in the Java IDE realm, has announced plans to support this compiler in their commercial product. On the wiki page for new features in IDEA 6.0 (code named Demetra), one of the new Core Features is listed as "Support for the Eclipse Java compiler". With this feature, IDEA users would be able to enjoy super-fast compilations and superior diagnostics. Perhaps IDEA could even tie into the incremental compilation that gives the Eclipse compiler an advantage over ant-based alternatives. And since the Eclipse license requires any enhancements to be donated back as open source, it's possible that the wizards at JetBrains can make further improvements to the compiler that will benefit both the IDEA and Eclipse communities.

Callisto to push the limits of Update Manager

2006-02-07T22:27:00.000-05:00

David Williams is spearheading an effort backed by the Eclipse Foundation's Architecture Council to improve coordination of Eclipse's update sites. In particular, the focus is on the projects that will make up the Callisto simultaneous release planned for in June. In his ambitious proposal, David writes:

"We should be explicit, there [are] no plans to provide a big-huge-zip that contains all the Callisto projects … its expected to be provided entirely via update manager. "

There are 3 primary use cases being considered:

End-users will install a minimum "platform" program and from that be able to use Update Manager to install all of the Callisto release.
Committers and developers will install an "SDK" version of Callisto, to be used while developing their own plugins.
Adopters can provide their own update sites, and "point to" appropriate sites to pick up prerequisite features.

Some other notable details:

JARs from various projects will be pulled in using mirrors with automatic GeoIP detection to find the best mirror.
Mirror sites will be given at least 24 hours of exclusive access to the Callisto files before releasing them to the public.
A Foundation-hosted separate mirror site with additional bandwidth will be used to accomodate the expected flood of downloads immediately after the release.

This is just a proposal but if it can be pulled off it will greatly improve the user experience of downloading Eclipse (not just the Platform but also parts like Web Tools and C Development Tools). Initial testing will start this month (February) with the goal that "by the end of the M5 period (3/3), there will be a usable version of Callisto available via update manager". This will be demoed at EclipseCon 2006.

Read the full proposal here.

Hey Eclipse, come join the Sun party

2006-02-06T14:15:00.000-05:00

I was looking at JSR 198 again and noticed they had released a "Proposed Final Draft" last month. Some Eclipse member companies are on the expert group but as far as I've been able to tell, the proposal itself would be very difficult if not impossible to implement in Eclipse. It looks more targetted towards NetBeans and JDeveloper. One reason: the Eclipse Foundation itself isn't on the Expert Group. The Apache Foundation is, so why not Eclipse? Eclipse isn't on the Executive Committee either. In fact, Eclipse is not a member of the JCP at all.

I feel it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that Sun join the Eclipse Foundation without also suggesting that Eclipse independently join the JCP. JCP has its share of problems (such as Sun's special position and veto, and the lack of transparency in JSR development to non-EG members), but that's not a good reason not to join. Eclipse could follow the Apache model there.

In my opinion, JSR 198 shouldn't be approved until there is a reference implementation for all the major Java IDEs, including NetBeans, Eclipse, and Jetbrains IDEA. That's the only way to tell if it will work and be "helpful" both to the framework providers and their consumers, the plug-in providers.

Hey Sun, come join the Eclipse party

2006-02-05T15:40:00.000-05:00

Roumen Strobl recently referred to part of a post from Gregg Sporar which listed several reasons why Sun doesn't want to join the Eclipse Foundation. Although I'm a member of the Foundation I don't speak for them, but I just wanted to respond to the points in these postings.

1. Not liking SWT is fine but not a good reason to stay separate from the Foundation (in fact, I'd say just the opposite). SWT is only one part of Eclipse technology anyway, look at projects like Corona. Also, I think most users don't care what widget set is used under the covers, but for those that do, they can make the SWT API run on top of Swing if they want (there's at least one project that does that).

Regarding WORA, the JRE uses a lot of native code just like SWT. Does that mean the JRE is not WORA? The thing is that the JRE package includes all the native code so a Java Swing app hopefully doesn't have to include any of its own. If the JRE package somehow included SWT then it wouldn't be an issue.

2. For application developers, there's more than just Swing and SWT. We have to deal with HTML, Ajax, Flash, Avalon, and so forth. A better answer might be a widget-library neutral representation of user interfaces along the lines of XUL. Backed by logic in Java of course.

3. People don't have to use the 'base toolkit' (I assume you mean the Eclipse SDK), there are many other collections available. For example on the WTP download page you can get an all-in-one download that includes Java + Web development (HTML/XML/JSP editor, etc.). Also there are distributions like Yoxos and value added commercial offerings like MyEclipse. Lots of options there. But I concede that the NetBeans packaging is superior to Eclipse from an end-user perspective. Those end users are Java users, so wouldn't it be in Sun's self interest to help Eclipse improve this from a position within the Foundation?

4. Those third-party applications look nice. Why does it have to be a one-or-the-other decision though? If they wanted, Sun could join the Foundation to get a seat at the table and help drive Eclipse direction to the benefit of all Java users. They don't have to agree with everything or use everything or contribute to everything.

5. Again, who is saying 'abandon'? We could merge the best features of both on top of a common OSGi based platform.

6. Many of the members of the Eclipse foundation compete against each other but by joining forces and creating standard frameworks we can avoid duplicating work and better compete against non-Java solutions. Making Java solutions stronger is certainly something Sun is in favor of, so why not join in?

In conclusion, I see lots of up side and no down side in Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation. There would be a little bit of pride-swallowing, but many other joiners have had to do that. The long-term benefits to the Java community would far outweigh any temporary discomfort.

Eclipse updates still lag behind

2006-02-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

I was putting the finishing touches on an update to my Rich Client tutorials today and wanted to make sure I was running the latest maintenance release of the Eclipse SDK, version 3.1.2. So I selected Help > Software Updates > Find and Install, then selected the option to Search for updates of the currently installed features and clicked Finish. After several prompts for mirrors it said all there was for me was a new version of EMF (2.1.1) and two other modeling features.

According to the eclipse.org home page, Eclipse SDK version 3.1.2 has been available for download since January 26. But here it is, 9 days later, and the update site doesn't have it. I had to download the 100+MB zip file and do a full clean install instead, and migrate all my plug-ins using the links directory.

Unfortunately, keeping Eclipse up to date is still one of the weaker points in the Eclipse story. I think the reason is that most Eclipse developers do not use Update Manager. There has been some progress in 3.2 but not nearly enough. It's hard to do right - the client software has to be smart, the release engineering on the server side has to be top notch, and all the components, projects, and people have to work in step with each other. But self-updating software is not just a frill anymore, it's a necessity.

Good examples of self-updating abound, such as Firefox, Netbeans, Acrobat, Google Pack, and so forth. There's no reason that Eclipse can't do just as good a job, or better, than any of these. Improving Update should definitely go on my "Grand Challenges" list for Eclipse. If you're in a position to help out, please do.

Goobuntu (Google+Ubuntu) is real, sort of

2006-02-01T17:30:00.000-05:00

It seems that Greenspan watchers, left with nothing better to do, have turned their attention to Google. ChannelRegister reported that Google was working on a desktop Linux distribution called "Goobuntu", short for Google + Ubuntu. A Google insider says Goobuntu is real, but it's just for Google's internal use. Basically it's a pre-made image that their developers can install without having to stage it themselves. Besides, the insider writes, "Google getting into the Red Hat business would be kind of dumb, and it would distract from our moon teleporter and cold fusion projects".

Now if you really want to start a rumor how about this one: the next version of Google Pack will include Java 5 and Eclipse. Yep, I just made that up, but it would be nice, wouldn't it?

Browser Wars 3: IE7 first impressions

2006-01-31T22:35:00.000-05:00

As you may remember, the first version of IE was basically Spyglass Mosaic with a new name. IE2 was shipped with the Plus! Pack for Windows 95 but wasn't much better. In the first round of the Browser Wars, an upstart called Netscape landed a decisive victory against all comers. "Best viewed with Netscape" buttons were all the rage.

In 1996 I joined thousands of others in a unique online event, a "Midnight Madness" to launch Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. I still have the shirt to prove it. IE3 was the first really functional version of IE, and the first to contain CSS support. IE4 came out in 1997 and was integrated in Windows 98. IE5 came out the following year. IE6 (2001) was a relatively minor release. Round 2 of the Browser Wars came to an end with IE the clear winner. Microsoft was able to use IE's integration with Windows, its free price, and its technical advantages to bury Netscape. With the competitive pressure off, development stagnated. And then there was Mozilla/Firefox.

I use Firefox every day because of its speed, simplicity, usability, and innovative standards implementation. After peaking at a 96% market share in 2002, IE's share has steadily eroded, largely because of Firefox. Round 3 was under way and it looked like Firefox was going to run away with it. But faced with this stiff competition, the IE team was reconstituted, the sleeping giant awakened, and finally IE7 was released today in public beta. Looks like it'll be a good match after all.

My initial impressions are generally positive. Unlike in the previous rounds of the Browser Wars, the new browser does not uninstall or try to take over all the file associations of its competitors. It left Firefox as my default browser. It even left Google as my default search engine.

One thing you'll notice right away though is that the text appears blurry. At least it did on my CRT at work. The culprit is that IE7 turned on ClearType, which doesn't help things on a CRT to say the least. It's simple to fix though. Go into the advanced option screen, and uncheck the option, click OK, and restart IE.

If you're like me and you use Ctrl+Mouse Wheel to adjust your text size sometimes, you may be in for a little suprise. Unlike Firefox, in IE this zooms the whole page including the images and any absolute layout positions. I'm not sure if I like this better or not, but it's different.

Memory usage is higher than IE6, on a par with Firefox 1.5. Here's the output of the Sysinternals Process Explorer when both Firefox and IE7 are loaded with a blank home page. (Click for a larger image). This shows Private Bytes, Virtual Size, Working Set, Peak Working Set, Threads, CSwitch Delta, and CPU time.

Next I tried it with Eclipse. As you know, Eclipse uses the native browser (IE on Windows) to display its online help, Javadoc, and a few other things. The results were mixed. Here's what Eclipse's welcome screen looks like with the IE7 beta:

All the images are missing. However the main Eclipse stand-alone help screen looks fine. The Javadoc view and Javadoc hover (after you press F2) look fine too. However the embedded Help Search window is missing its navigation buttons until you resize it. I'm not sure if that is broken because of IE7 or if it was that way before and I just didn't notice.

I'm going to try using IE7 instead of Firefox for a while and see how it goes. Will Microsoft succeed in "taking back the web", or is this too little too late? Will we see IE8 and IE9 in quick succession? Time will tell, but the good news is, no matter which browser takes the championship belt, web users like you and me will come out the winner.

Yet another blog

2006-01-19T09:20:00.000-05:00

Did you ever see that movie, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"? The aliens were slowly replacing people by placing a pod next to their bed. 2006 started kind of like that for me.

Anyway, after spending a few days fighting with WordPress I decided I really don't want to mess with that anymore. I've heard good things about blogspot so I thought I'd give them a shot.