Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

Why does every Java IDE that supports Web development force the structure of your coding artifacts on disk to be the same as a war file? To my mind it is an extremely un-user friendly structure. I’ve just been looking at the latest copy of Webtools for the Eclipse IDE and it is no different.

Take a look at the attached screen shot to see what I mean.

Now not only does it force me to keep everything so it is diplayed in the horrible war file format, but because of this is doesn’t leave me anyway to organise my extraneous artifacts. I mean what the hell does WEB-INF mean to anyone intuatively? Do I have to dump all my hibernate configuration with my log4j configuration with my application configuration and my urlfilter configuration, quite quickly we are going to end up with a mess of crap in the classes directory. Where as I would like to have a configuration directory with subdirectory for each component that needs configuration files.

Where do I put my unit tests? Where do I put classes and jars that I depend upon at compile time but not at runtime, for example JAXB compiler jar files. I could have them as “external jars” but that stops my web project being self-contained, I like my projects be self contained. I want to checkout from source control and be able to compile without spending two weeks tracking down dependancies.

The solutions to my mind is fairly simple, some form of mapping needs to be allowed that enables you to declaritively instruct the IDE what should be where for the war but still allow you to structure things in the way you wish. This is what I usually do with ant but Eclipse isn’t yet clever enough to understand my ant file.

So although I’ll be evaluating Webtools some more I’m immediately turned off by it.

Today Novell announced Xgl and Compiz the new window manager and composition manager to go with it. Whilst this doesn’t sound particularly exciting to the uninitiated this things can do some pretty impressive stuff. Such as:

• True transparency
• Zooming
• Desktop Organization
• 3D desktop

Miguel de Icaza the lead on the Gnome project and Novell employee blogs about it some more. There is also an official press release for the release of Xgl and Compiz to the open source X.org project. That’s right this stuff is all open source and all free! Woohoo.

Commentary from CNET

<sarcasm>
As we all know the Waterfall approach is probably the best project delivery mechanism ever conceived and it is ideally suited to custom software projects.
</sarcasm>

More in this vein can be found on the Waterfall 2006 homepage.

As a bit of fun send this site to the some old guard PMs and see how long it takes them to realise it’s a spoof.

Now that I have installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) I thought I would share my first impressions. The installation was fairly painless, very similar to Fedora’s really. Once installed sound didn’t work, quickly discovered that it was using my onboard sound card rather than my PCI card and that was altered fairly quickly though system preference.

I then decided to install Eclipse from the package manager. This went fairly smoothly but when Eclipse was run it was s-l-o-w. As Ubuntu uses gcj as the Java VM I thought I would give the Sun VM a try instead. Obviously because of Sun’s restrictive licensing I couldn’t just grab this from the package manager. I had to sign a EULA twice, once to download and once to install. I then had to offer up the the binary to the package manager and wait for it to pull it apart and put it back together in the correct manner. When will Sun get the message that this isn’t doing Java any good? For god’s sake Sun relax the distribution restrictions on your VM! Anyway the Java problems I faced can be laid squarely at Sun’s door and Eclipse ran much more smoothly with the Sun J2SE 5.0 VM.

Next issue I have hit is that Flash sound doesn’t work. I tried various methods of fixing this, creating Sym linking for the socket in /tmp and reconfiguring AOSS and offering it up to Firefox without success. Eventually after running the flash shared object through strings I noticed the linking was wrong and the following solved the problem (partially):

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

So not really stuff for the faint hearted. Even once this is done there is still a problem with the sound lagging slightly behind the video - I haven’t resolved this yet and it is bloody annoying.

The next problem that I’m facing is that video (WMV, AVI) plays at twice (I’m guessing twice) the speed is should do. I have no idea why but I do suspect that the binary codecs I’m using are to fault.

To summaries I’m surprised that Ubuntu has thrown up so many issues after just a few hours of using it. I was lead to believe that it was a leader in terms of desktop linux usability, quite franky both Fedora and Gentoo are easier to use than Ubuntu so far.

People say if you just want to check emails and surf the web then Ubuntu is for you. Well that, in my experience, is not true. If you want to read emails and surf the web without Flash sound and without streaming video and that is it then maybe Ubuntu will do for you. I will keep on try to get along with Ubuntu for a week or so and see if I can figure out what all the hype around it is.

If you read my post about Gentoo being slow to release software updates you might wonder which distro I moved to. In the end I decided to try Fedora Core 4, I switched over sometime in October 2005 and have had it on my main desktop for the last 3 months.

Now, as I thought Gentoo was slow to release updates I was in for a rude awaking. As I type this message in Fedora (Core 4) I’m using their latest release of Firefox (1.0.7) on Gnome (2.10). The fact is that both Firefox 1.5 and Gnome 2.12 have been out for months. As far as I can work out both these peices of software are slated for release with Fedora Core 5 on or around mid March and won’t be back ported to Fedora Core 4.

It’s all rather disappoint TBH. I have decide to move my Desktop Linux again and this time I’m trying Ubuntu. At least this Distro supports the latest Gnome and Firefox, I’ll see how easy it is to get a working desktop.