My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

James Gosling has posted a video of Project Green - the one that gave birth to Java. Considering the technology was developed one and half decades back, its really amazing to see what the little hand held device can accomplish. Full touch screen, speakers (yeah, but ugly sound theme), infrared and yes smooth scrolling in the touch screen interface. Is this where iPhone copied it from?

Watch the video and decide yourself. I think if Sun had patented it, it could have sued Apple!

written by Prakash G.R.

You have too many credit cards. One card gets you reward points for a dress purchase; other will give you cash back for swipes in restaurant, and so on. Too many cards, too many offers. Its best to carry all your cards while shopping. You wallet becomes heavy and if you loose it you are in a real mess.

Is there a solution? Yes, iCache is a wonderful nice solution to this. Its actually a rewritable credit card with a device to write in it. The device is so small so that you can carry it along. If someone steals it, you are safe, because it has fingerprint scanner. And no, although the name hints, its not by Apple

written by Prakash G.R.

BEA is one of the biggest Java vendors; Macs run Java & many Java developers use Mac. But still Weblogic is not supported on Mac. So I have to follow the unofficial informations to install it. Here are the steps:

BEA’s download site lists the officially supported OS. Mac won’t be there in the list. If you select IBM AIX/ HP Itanium, you will see that the downloaded file is server<version>_generic.jar. These jars can be used to install Weblogic on any machine with a JRE.

The generic installer is “intelligent” enough to find that you don’t have any space in your disk to install and will give you this error dialog:

To avoid this you have to tell the installer that you are running on a Unix machine: java -Dos.name=unix -jar server100_generic.jar

The installation will go smoothly without any troubles. When you are done with the installation, the wizard you show you an option to run the QuickStart uncheck and press Finish. (If you are happy with the Example Server and want to start it, you may want to show the Quick Start)

Run the <bea home>/wlserver_10.0/common/bin/config.sh to create your own domain and go to the domain directory and run startWeblogic.sh. Its all the usual stuff. Nothing specific to Mac.

The only trouble is you will get the login screen for console and the login will take for ever with more than 90% CPU usage Don’t worry, I’ll give a solution soon

Related Posts:

Weblogic on Ubuntu

written by Prakash G.R.

A nice way to improve productivity is to open up a long progress bar for every other operation the user will perform and display productivity hints below that progress bar.

Courtesy: IntelliJ IDEA.

PS: I’ve been using Eclipse as my primary IDE for the past few years and I wonder why Eclipse lacks this feature

written by Prakash G.R.

Did you notice that the Google Reader now offers offline mode? It can download and save your files so that you can read them even when you are not connected to the internet. It is powered by Google Gears. I tried to create an application by going thru the steps in the Developer Guide Tutorial. It was not that easy to follow it. It could have be a bit more simpler. If you are looking for a simpler version, its available here.

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ll be there at EFI India 2007. Its a 3-in-1 conference, so there will be three parallel sessions. There is no suggested tracks and the seats in every session is limited (and so is the parking space. Only for 80 cars and 150 bikes!). So if a session is full, then we have to attend the other. The sessions I plan to attend:

May 28:

Fundamentals of Eclipse Plug-in and RCP Development

May 29:

An Introduction to the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP)
Architecture of Java Persistence Implementations
Best Practices for Developing Interoperable Web Service Applications
SDLC for SOA - Where are the Models?
Polyglot Programming

May 30:

10 Ways to Improve Your Code
Simplifying Enterprise Applications with Spring 2.0
Web-Service Transactions with WS-Transaction
Building an Ajax Java Web Application Using the Dojo Toolkit
Web-Service Specifications – An Orientation Guide
SOA: The Future of Distributed Computing?

May 31:

IBM’s WAS Community Edition Initiative with Eclipse
Leveraging SOA and ESB for an Enterprise Architecture
Building an Ajax Java Web Application Using the Google Web Toolkit
Introduction to the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)
Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

In case you are planning to attend, drop me a line. We’ll meet.

written by Prakash G.R.

The first time I heard about Google Web Toolkit, I was excited. I immediately downloaded it; wrote few samples and found that it was really a nice piece of software. But it lacked one thing - IDE integration. Although “GWT was intentionally designed to work well in any IDE”, there was no direct support for GWT in any IDE. I thought how about writing an Eclipse plugin for that? I’m not an Eclipse plugin developer. I was a pure C++ guy who has jumped into several layers of J2EE and .NET and settled as a mainline developer in a top SOA product. Eclipse plugin development is something I’ve to learn. I decided to give a try.

Result? Googlipse. That is my first plugin. With over 25,000 downloads and counting, it generated a good amount of interest. So I get bugs (yeah, sometimes I write embarrassing code) and people extend it. It was a wonderful experience in learning Eclipse and gave me a better understanding about the Open Source from the contributing perspective. Googlipse has shifted my career and now my day job is also plugin development. Besides all this, I’ve to kill Googlipse. Why? Because of the name!

I was over enthusiastic that I coined the name by joining two names: Google+Eclipse. The logo is also the same way, Google colored text in an Eclipse background. I thought who cares about the name. I was wrong.

Google’s legal department had “some trademark concerns about the name”. I was pointed to Google Branding Guidelines. So I decided to change the name and logo. Hmmmm. That means its virtually creating a new product (at least to the users who don’t worry about the code!) That is what I’ve done now. I’ve created a brand new product called “Cypal Studio for GWT“. It is hosted @ Google Code. Its essentially the same code base (with the same Apache 2.0 license) but with little changes and few bug fixes.

So what happens to Googlipse now? Its dead. Means there will be no more bug fixes, no more features. The existing downloads & code base will remain there @ SourceForge. The home page will be soon pointing to new product’s site (which is under development). Thus ends the story of my first Eclipse Plugin.

written by Prakash G.R.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of US has done a brave move, which is to be welcomed by every e-mail user. Confused? Read this. It takes lot of guts to take this decision. These kind of decisions will definitely reduce spam mails. What next? Ban the sites that sell the software at “unimaginable cost”? Ban the pharmacies which sells the viagara and “increase my length”? Ban the banks which “approved loans”?

For me above all, I’m willing to donate my

• 3yr old PC loaded with Ubuntu
• my Adidas T Shirt that I bought with 50% flat discount
• my Project Manager

all to Google, if they can freeze the email ids of persons who forwarded me the great “Vijaya T. Rajender & Mumtaj in Veerasamy” photo.

written by Prakash G.R.

Now that I own a Mac, I’ve to kick M$ and M$ products and praise Apple’s product. At least thats I’ve seen with every switcher. On the contrary, I’m now praising a M$ product - Photosynth. Its really cool and nice one. It analyzes a set of photos and presents you a 3D view of it. Its really wonderful idea and an amazing implementation as well. More over its not a desktop product like Picasa, rather its on the net. Check this out for yourself: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve whole lot of plugins (Mylar, WTP, Subclipse…) installed in my Eclipse. Sometimes, I will have OutOfMemory Error and the workbench will close after showing an “Internal Error” message box. Today the “Internal Error” message box had an interesting error message. Here is the screen shot:

written by Prakash G.R.