dow.ngra.de

I knew once a very nice tool
that made Java programmers drool:
it reloaded their classes
without any passes
and was all around very cool :)

iPhone is a tricky device. It was the first mobile device I ever saw that solved the problem of web browsing on a tiny screen in a usable and enjoyable way. That was the main (and basically only) selling point for me when I bought it.

However the more I used it the more I understood one important thing — iPhone is essentially a reading device. It’s great to get and read e-mails on it, but it’s a pain to answer them. Same goes to everything, the on-screen keyboard just doesn’t cut it for anything bigger than an SMS or Twitter message. Most business users see this as a limitation and choose BlackBerry with it’s real keyboard. But after some time I understood that for me it’s a blessing.

The typical problem of an engineer (and many business users to boot) is information overload. I get e-mails every couple of minutes, RSS and Twitter messages even more often and am usually compelled at least to skim through them. This kind of constant division of attention is very inefficient, but I never could get myself to break this pattern.

With the iPhone everything changed. I set the e-mail checking to Pull/Hourly. Now at most every hour the phone will buzz and I will scroll through the e-mails and see if I need to answer anything. If I do I’ll fire up Outlook and go at it. If I like any RSS links, I will read them right there, on my iPhone, protected from the temptation to follow links ad infinitum. And I might answer a couple Twitter messages while I’m at it. That’s it, I’m done in 5 minutes, iPhone is back in my pocket and I go right back to work.

I never measured how much time and energy I spent fighting the information inflow before, but it sure as hell took more than 5 minutes every hour. Plus the constant multitasking took it’s tall from the quality of my efforts. Of course it wasn’t really just iPhone that solved my problem, but its limitations made it way easier to keep myself in check, and perhaps the same will work for you.

Visited the JetBrains booth at Devoxx and confirmed why their build numbers are 9xxx but the version of the product is 8.x. They ran out of build numbers :) This means there were 1000 numbered builds before a release.

Devoxx is an annual European Java conference with a total of 3200 attendees from 35 countries and again has been completely sold out. The place is packed. Lots of people, lots of movement and too little internet.

Second day at Devoxx and it is going well. I’ve attended three sessions so far, it is not so much me being lazy but more about being at the JavaRebel booth most of the time. Still I’ve seen many cool things here. Random ramblings will follow.

The conference passes have embedded RFID chip and every movement (hopefully not) is being tracked. From the local paper I read that they will measure session popularity by how many attended the talks, how many left early and so on.

Don’t know if they’ll realease any of it to public (probably not) but it will be great input at least for the next devoxx. The information is said to be anonymous, although I would like to see if and which sessions did the speakers themselves visit.

I presume we are being monitored by these devices that are present on any entrance of the session halls.

The venue is just excellent, having the cinema as the location means that the seating at the sessions is excellent. You have even cup holders and room for popcorn:). The screens are huuuuge and they have added live video of the speaker to the screen.

Which application server is the most popular?

Besides Websphere being evil we see that Spring App Platform has now managed to get two users! Depending on the interpretation of the study I would say Tomcat is in the lead!

Something that I really like compared to all the other conferences I’ve attended this year are the tables with the power cords. You don’t have to worry about your laptop’s battery dying.

But! when compared to the other conferences where your battery actually died you were able to use the internet. Write emails, read news, hack on projects and all the other stuff until you ran out of juice. Here at certain times you have internet, most of the time you don’t. Even if you have it, some domains don’t resolve on certain occasions and it is dead slow if it works.

Is Bruce Willis working for IBM? Sure, he was in a movie Tears of the Sun.

Remember that post about Typesafe DSLs that had a part one and no follow up? Well, meanwhile Juhan Aasaru and yours truly were joined by Michael Hunger of jexp.de and JEQUEL and together we have created the Squill project that came right out of the ideas in the paper we wrote with Rein Raudjärv. The announcement follows, enjoy!

It is with great pleasure that we announce the first release of Squill. Download it now or check out the quickstart guide, the step-by-step tutorial and the Devoxx presentation.

Squill is a slick internal DSL for writing SQL queries in pure Java. It uses the database metadata and generics to catch as many errors as possible during compilation and is almost completely typesafe.

At the same time it is designed to allow everything SQL allows you to do, exactly the way SQL is meant to do it. This means that you’re encouraged to select only the data you need and no hidden queries are generated for you, leaving you in full control of the query performance. Squill supports database-specific extensions, allowing you to both use advanced features and fully tweak your queries.

Squill also has special support for CRUD operations and table relations, adding some sugar over vanilla SQL. A typical Squill query looks like this:

Squill is a very young project and you can follow (and help) its development by joining the user or developer mailing lists.