Moving

Hi:

(play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fajvqa50Jc while reading this post)

I just wanted to tell you that I moved to my new blog http://roundcrisis.wordpress.com/ I actually just bought roundcrisis.com so that should be the new address from about tomorrow ( waiting on dns to update)

Happy new year ! Hope life will be cool :)


Andrea

Linking imges in Monorail

A quick one 

Say you have an image or god knows what and  you need to add a link to it, in html you ll do something like

<a href="http://foo.bar/something.html">
<img src="..." /> </a>

in a view you can do this

<a href=$UrlHelper.For("%{ controller='product'}")>  
    <img src="$!Image.Path" alt="$!Name" />
</a>

Ruby Ireland Meetup - 9th of December 7.30 Fitzwilliams Place

It looks like Ruby Ireland is getting a bit more attention from people, and that is great to see
I had my own reservations about if I should continue going to these meet ups because basically I haven't been doing much Ruby in the last months, but I do love to hear about it and it does give me ideas about how to work on my own code. I see people solving problems in a completely different way to what I would do and I think that has value and I hope they don't mind me showing up there.
Also ,there is a common ground in software development and web development in particular. This is why we are gonna start a podcast on software development and I hope it will work out
and by work out I mean that it makes us learn more about how we develop software and hopefully get some feedback from the community, no matter were they are.

Declan McGrath came up with the idea in a thread in ruby groups, we met up and came up with some ideas for topics:

Ruby

• in general about hosting an Ruby on rails application,
• how do mongrels work and what do they actually do,

General Software development Topics

• What is Inversion of Control Dependency Injection and why do you use it
• Improving your tests . Test Driven Development

Tools / frameworks

• What Tools are you using for software development productivity
• The Linux distro Declan is using for recording/editing the sessions
• Funnily enough I would probably mention castle
  

After, we got some interest from Justin McCarthy (haven't met him yet) but its great to see more involvement.
These are initial thoughts would welcome any suggestions , corrections later on, etc

What s happening

Since my last post I ve been trying to avoid writting about trivial small things however meaty post take time and I just dont have it right now.

Questions in my head now

- when do you create a service?

- where can I find an example of a well designed GWT app?

Events that Im interested in 

GGD 4th of December in La Taverna di Baco in the Quays (in dublin)

IJTC its the 7th of January in UGC, some good speakers but it feels like thi IcTC conferences are a bit desorganized

FOWA Dublin -  March 6th. I want to go but dont know really why

Edit: missign OSSBarcamp Dublin - 28th March 2009 this is one I want to go to as well :)

Cool Things

 - I ve been using Pencil ( a  pluggin for firefox) and its pretty cool because its easy to use, lightweight, free. Great for putting screens togheter quickly 

Ruby Ireland Meetup

I was in ruby Ireland last night ( good turn up btw) and it was great to see Paul Campbell talking about Couch Db, a non relational DB in their own words

"Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free
document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other
features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional
conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a
table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition
language."

Anna showed some interesting rake tasks and i did a short intro to jQuery (slides here) hopefully someone found it interesting.

This Saturday the 13Th is the open coffee meeting in the New York Grind that will include the talk about trying to come up with something similar to alt.net Ireland. as discussed in previous post

And the universe didnt disapear (aparently) thumbs up.

jQuery ExtJS talk

I m doing a lighting talk about jQuery and ExtJs (maybe mention GWT) in the next Ruby Ireland on the 9th of September link

I ll add a link to the slides as soon as i finish them, any suggestions very welcome.
so far i m doing a quick intro, some of the features, stuff i found useful or interesting or use with code samples and finally some links. For jQuery I m touching on ui.jquery and themeroller and the event observer implementation link

For ext again intro and show some code and then maybe touch on EXT (GWT implementation of EXT Js) just started to have a look at this but it does seem very promising

Cheers

From Code Monkey to Code Crafter II

Hi again

Well hopefully that meeting will go ahead on the saturday the 13th of september

http://www.opencoffeedublin.com/september-saturday-opencoffee-dublin-1392008/

looking forward to it now :)

Trying GXT (ExtJs in GWT)

Today I'm trying out Ext GWT

To use Ext GWT

Installation was simple ( i needed the java sdk i got 1.6Update 7 )


downloaded GWT1.5.1 and decompressed it. happy days!


then i ran the sample hello and I was running, really fast





[if you have problems with some error that ends with <0.49> and then an exception, it s very likely to be that your path is reading some other version of java first, if so go to environment variables and change your system settings so you have the recently installed java sdk first]





to check the java version open the command line and do java -version


Why Ext GWT?





GWT is a compiler that converts Java source into JavaScript


this means you write and test java code






Getting Started


as in the sample i went and changed the email application and it changed properly and that was cool, lets get to the business now


lets create our own app and try to handle some event



Creating an Application


There is an ApplicationCreator that generates a series of files including a java file with a sort of hello world, an html file a css file and two cmd files this all following a naming convention.





Adding support for GWT -EXT


OK I went to the Ext GWT documentation web and there are a few screencast, if you follow them you get to the EXT-GWT (from extjs.com) hello world however there isnt much more sample applications , there is one but seems like a big jump




To be honest this took a while to get right, i m not used to java and the path convention is a bit too strange, i followed the video in the docs above and finally its working :)

From Code Monkey to Code Crafter ftw

This idea has been in my head for a while now, I'm sure all developers get here at some point where you want to move forward but not terribly sure how to get there, how to get better, how to write elegant maintainable code that you are proud of.
For me it all started when I saw how ruby on rails worked and now i m on the path (i think ) to become better and coding using principles like mvc, active record, etc
I remember I started assisting Ruby Ireland meetups and there was nothing like that for .net or java and it still feels like there still isn't a place(maybe i didnt look properly please let me know) or group that you can say, hey lets do

• A code jam about data models or
• A talk about how to do high performance Persistantent Domain Models or
• A talk about a particular project the talker worked on and what they learned in a very detailed technical way [not interested in company secrets but how to become a better dev how to learn from other peoples experience ] or- hey lets compare javascript frameworks or
• This is how you do unit testing in lolcats(im making this up but i recon this exists).
  

I would like to think this is possible, I would like to think that the group can be technology agnostic to a certain degree as i believe most best practises are general for all languages, however I am a c# developer so I talked to Martha Rotter about this and she was interested so we met and talked about this and we will be meeting in open coffee with other (hopefully) like minded people I will post here a date when this is decided but please let me know any thoughts and comments

Baiscally I m interested in relevant, higher level developer talk, in concept very similar to alt.net groups around the world. http://altnetpodcast.com/ http://altdotnet.org/ following good design principles from the Patterns book from Martin Fowler, apply XP , etc

Cheers

EDIT: Ozone thanks for agreing to the use of code crafter :D

Note: Thanks jaime for the proof reading :D

SSIS Pain

hi
This post is basically a rant, a rant about SSIS, whoever designed this UI please take a good look at your career and either retire or consider a career change.

I think the idea behind this service is great; we all need data migration tools; but why make people suffer?
Some examples of why this tool drives me insane; in a data flow, you can createa Derived column, say for some crazy and ridiculous reason (please ntoe sarcasm here) you need to change your something on your source, well then the aforementioned Derived Column thing gies u a nice error(to a level fair enough), but then you deal with the problem you click ok, the dialog closes and then you have to open the same dialog again, why?

Anyone that say that they think SSIS is great is just because they haven't used it.
Rant over ( however i need to keep going with this data migration)

Time picker / PNG Transparency fix

Hi. at some point we all need a click time picker, found this one (in ajaxian)

Also in Ajaxian, I found a PNG fix I used the sample and it works, however I can't make it work on my server, it doesnt even hit the *.htc file.
The instructions say that you should give the path to the htc relative to index.html however I dont seem to be able to get it up and running for my web app, anyway... will try again with a little bit more time later on.

NVelocity Parse

A little thing that drove me completely insane

when using parse (appache ref) the path to the view includes the folder that you are in

say you are in the folder .../views/Blog
editing a view called one.vm
if you want to parse something in the same folder as one.vm you have to use

#parse("Blog/two.vm")
and if you happen to use a / before blog you ll get a nice exception that has a very unclear message

Just to note

NVelocity - creating urls

I always forget these two:

$Url.Link('label', "%{controller='controllerName',action='actionName'}")

and this:

To Create a form


$Form.FormTag("%{id= 'formId', action='save', immediate = 'true'}")
$Form.EndFormTag

I really wished there was a MR RC4 :D

Transparency Fix for PNG on IE

Saw this on ajaxian and i think is really handy and at some (not too far in time i ll need this)
http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/ basically to add some transparency you just add a few files to your sever and a line of css and thats it.
Will tell when the time to use this comes :)

Small but interesting find

Yesterday I was coding and I needed to create a criteria like

....
Repository.FinOne(Restriccions.Eq("Email", email));
...

however I wanted to make sure that there was not prblems with caseing
it turns out IgnoreCase exists and can be used this way :D

Repository.FinOne(Restriccions.Eq("Email", email).IgnoreCase());

I was really happy to find this, thanks NHibernate in Action!

Speed is all

PDF Readers

I m thinking about a serious of "meaty" post for this weeked or at least the one decent one, but meanwhile I though I should post about the incredible diference in speed between Adobe Reader and Foxit. A friend of mine (one of the two suscribers to this blog) told me about foxit like a year ago, i went yeah yeah but then about two weeks ago i actually download it and it is really fast, i love it.

FF2 vs FF3
OMG i m so happy with FF3 I m still testing it in only one of my machines but so far much better performance and now that firebug is behaving, happy days. The Add ons I have are: Firebug with YSlow, Jiffy, Web Developer, and of course Google Toolbar. The best feature is no memory problems :D

Now tempted to install the Beta 2 of IE8....

Jiffy

This is a firebug extension for measuring accurately the JS performance I have installed and tested it in this site sounds like a good idea and to see it running makes sense will start using it from now on,particularly on extJs sites ;p

Nokia Open sources Symbian

Talking about open sourcing http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1230415

Sign the Entity Framework Comunity Vote of no Confidence

OMG I just saw this http://efvote.wufoo.com/forms/ado-net-entity-framework-vote-of-no-confidence/ and I had to post it.

IOTC Conference

Last Thursday and Friday I was at the IOTC, an Open Source Conference. I went to a few talks

1) Saw Geoffrey Grosenbach talking about Phusion Passenger. The talk target was a bit too wide, however i think he was good at explaining some of the basics. It would have been good to see some sample code but hey. All in all interesting

2) Talk by Clint Oram the guy from Sugar CRM, well he was basically evangelising about Open Source in general, TBH It was really boring, maybe i just didnt understand the whole topic of the talk ... I believe most of us in the audience were developers, I wish he showed us some goodness, some features, some smart API ...or how do they manage their interactions with all the developers in !=locations, how do they evaluate whats code to include or not, who is in charge of that, etc ...
He mentioned some deal that they(Sugar CRM) made with hosting 365 and Clint is now living in Ireland.

3) WURFL and WALL. This talk was the start of a really interesting day and a great talk about something I might be using at some point . WURFL is a Device Description repository, it uses a tag that the device send to find out what capabilities does the device have, WURLF seems to fit in nicely with WALL, a markup language (that reminded me a little to nVelocity) that renders according to the querying device. Really interesting and real cool the way the WURFL file is organized (and a surprising 8Mb File)

4) ZOPE. A Phyton Framework. I think this talked turned out to be very different to what was originally intended however it was good to hear practises applyed to a OS Irish Shop. There was a lot of talk about how their complete process flows, from development to deplyment. For example he mentioned how they use subversion, firebug, how do they use versioning of their phyton and db versions... and then he talked about Zope, I only had a very diluted idea of what was Zope Architecture and what was it supposed to do, I m still not terribly clear however there were some interesting details all the food related stuff was real nice(and good easy to remember names) Eggs, cheeseShop, etc. I must check the entity generation as it sounds very interesting.

The presenter, Con Hennessy works for a company called OpenApp interestingly they deploy solutions for the government, he mentioned the HSE. All in all real interesting

5) PHP Frameworks. This talk really took me by surprise, David Coallier is part of the php core team and he knew what he was on about. He talked about web frameworks: Cake, Zend, Symfony (all MVCs) and Prado( an event driven one that I dont find interesting at all) then he went on talking about testing frameworks (this was really interesting as I knew nothing about php testing frameworks) here the list was PHPUnit, SimpleTest (it looks like he liked this one and I liked the asserts syntax) and another one that was for real low leve testing (hence not interested as I know for sure I m not gonna be debugging php core anytime soon )


ok that s all for today I wanted to add some nice pics but as I was searching I realised i don't know how to make sure i m not breaking any law by using the image so I ll find out later and go to sleep now

Super easy image replacement with jQuery

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/demo/jquery/img-replacement.html
look at the source code for this, is it clean or what?
took me little time to get something up and running in a real nice way
This is a sufficient reason to love jQuery and whoever it is wrote this :)

Cheers

Js Frameworks usage amongst top sites

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=305

First Prototype, closely followed by jQuery :D then moo

Theme Roller and UI.jQuery

I really like this UI.jQuery.com
Will post more later...

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Installation

I saw Scott Gu's post about Silverlight and I decided OK I ll go and get it. Well the install took 10 minutes and i had to close everything (Visual Studio ,IE Firefox), such an nuisance compared to the instal of Yahoo's Browser plus.
Did not try anything after that, to be honest , it doesnt call me or something... I ll need to be pushed into this one.

New release of Nhibernate EAP

The most interesting thing today was an email from Manning with the new release of the EAP of Nhibernate in Action (still in chapter 3 :( ) .
On the plus side, first time I ever bother reading the table of contents in detail, and yes, I found an appendix called Introducing ActiveRecord and MonoRail, at first this made me really happy, but now that I think about it, the appendix should really only be about Active Record, else its gonna be too short.
I think I would like to see a mention of Machine Migrations (and similar tools)

PS: Did I just say this is the most interesting thing in the day ? ( well appart from lunch in the park yeah, it pretty much was)

No Non-sense jQuery

John Resig just posted some talks he gave and they are so easy to understand that it hurts. I really like the jQuery syntax, ok is a different approach to a JS library than ExtJs, and I like it, unobtrusive and lightweight with loads of plug ins available.

I really like this grid (ok ok it does use a table for layout but hey, looks good and you read the code and immediately know what's happening) .

MS Word save to PDF

hi there
I dont think this is ultra necesary or anything like that but i know i ll need it at some point
Micro$oft has a plug in to save a document as a pdf its well integrated and seems to work ok.
here is the url http://url.ie/f9v
there are other options if you dont have word 2k7 I think is called pdf95

Another Debugger for IE

We all know how painful it is to debug websites in ie, (particularly 6 what a terrible browser that.... i ll rant properly about it another day) today i stumbled across this little tool call DebugBar it was all great until I installed it in my machine and it doesn't work. (no contextual menus, no nothing)
However I ll have to give it a try in another machine as mine is a Vista Home Edition ( yuck yuck) I should be updating to ultimate pretty soon ( hopefully Saturday) when I know I m safeguarded by at least a virtual environment to work in.


All for now if anyone has comments/ opinions very welcome :D

Hidden Doc Gem - ExtJS

hi again


OK i just found this out last Monday and it was there all along i just never paid attention to it and found it extremely handy.
This http://extjs.com/learn/Ext_Manual there is a lot of JS introduction and also good to read about the component model http://extjs.com/learn/Ext_2_Overview#Component_Model
I just though i d blog about it cause It was easy to miss

Umbrella

Today ayende blogged about this and i found it really interesting
here: http://www.codeplex.com/umbrella# you can get the code and tests

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/06/04/Review-Umbrella-project.aspx ayendes blog

Some Cool Things

Today's interesting find is Browser Plus I heard about this first a few months ago but there was not much real info about it.
I have to say i was really impressed by the installer short, sweet and very intuitive.
Also the capabilities that it provides seem simple but powerful, i m very interested in the Ruby Interpreter Service
Promising.

Nhibernate from the begining

I ve been suing NH for a while now, but i never started a project from the begining or used purely nh (I mean without Castle Active Record) started to read NHibernate in Action ( the EAP edition) so let see how it goes.