Archive for the 'a compiler' Category
Wordpress Gallery Plugin
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006I have written a small wordpress plugin to integrate my photo galleries with the blog. As you can see I have been using it already in the last couple of days. It displays the random picture in the side bar and is also responsible for the picture viewers in my posts.
it requires a software called gallery installed on the same computer as wordpress to work. you can find all the information and download it here.
Tags:gallery photos php plugin programming wordpressActually programming flash
Thursday, April 6th, 2006i’ve always hated flash because of the (to me) totally weird gui, which made it damn hard to create flash movies. now nico on progchannel.net discovered an open source solution based on eclipse where you can create flash simply by programming in an editor. he even created a screencast tutorial
Tags:actionscript eclipse flash programmingthe fluent interface pattern
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006martin fowler recently presented a new pattern called the fluent interface. it is mostly useful for building objects in a more comfortable way than you normally would. here is an example i developed today. i had to build a large number of sql strings in java code and as that code smelled quite a bit i decided there had to be a better way than this:
Tags:fluent interface martin fowler patterns programming sqlgoogle code jam india 2006
Monday, February 27th, 2006The 2006 Google Code Jam is coming up. registration has opened today.
programming language is either java or c++ (can be chosen). there is a qualification round on March 20, where people will have a limited amount of time (~ 1 hour) to complete a couple of given tasks on-line. the fastest coders proceed to the championship round in bangalore on April 7.
as usual you can win cash prices + jobs at google.
update the competition is open only for residents of india and neighboring states. WTF
Tags:google programmingfreeing myself from the bonds of tools
Friday, January 6th, 2006since i started coding in ruby (did i mention that i still haven’t tried rails? so i can still say not to be a member of the hype) using plain text editors i got increasingly annoyed by eclipse’s automatic code assist feature when being with java again. while it’s cool to have it tell you all the member functions of an object available it often enough overwrites a piece of my code with its own suggestion. (especially method calls on objects, after typing the dot).
using said text editor for ruby and typing all those variable names and method calls myself felt in a way refreshing. i was the one in control again, not my IDE.
to gain the same comfort for java/eclipse, all i had to do was to switch automatic code assist off (window -> preferences -> java -> editor -> code assist -> untick ‘enable auto activation’). so now i still have it at hand when needed using [ctrl]+[space], but it does not interfere with my coding anymore. and i am using it much less now - power to the people 
rails in eclipse
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005there finally is an eclipse plugin for ruby on rails - RadRails
New features include being able to setup and run a WEBrick server, new wizards for generating models, controllers, and running the scaffold command. We have started work on the documentation, which is available under the Help Contents menu item now.
Tags:language verbosity
Friday, September 16th, 2005In Java, you write Person person = new Person("alex").
In Ruby, you write person = Person.new('alex')
In Java, variables are statically typed, so whenever you declare one, you have to prefix it with its type (Person in this case). Now this does not seem like much of an effort, but it has become a real annoyance to me, now that I’ve writen 80,000 variable declarations or so. Now that there is Eclipse, I don’t have to write down the type anymore, I can just say person = new Person("alex"). Then I position the cursor over person, press <ctrl>+<1>, and select create local variable. Wow, what a relief.
Not having to write it at all is so much nicer.
Tags:software quality in open source
Monday, August 29th, 2005on the drunk and retired podcast, there recently was a discussion about software quality. it was mentioned that open source software might be of higher code quality because of it being mostly developed in a distributed way, i.e. the chartacteristics of open source development - being developed by people that are spatially distributed - enforces a higher quality.
when developers share an office, it is much easier to solve problems. if a piece of code is not working as expected, you just go over and ask the person that wrote the code. the answer you might then get could be something like “i know, it doesn’t work that way. but you can do this and this to work around the problem and then it’s going to work”. so, instead of fixing the code, a team might tend to work around problems.
in open source, it is usually much harder to get a grip on the person that has written a specific piece of code. you usually don’t know him or her and the only way to contact someone is using email, which is typically slow and won’t solve your problem in the next couple of minutes.
a way around this communication problem is to simply write code that does not have this problem and can be used in all kinds of ways - better code.
Tags:wingS is net generation Swing
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005just read an article in java mag’s issue 05/2005 about wingS. it’s basically yet another web framework that wants to hide the hassles of html/http/css from the java programmer.
what the article said and showed looked promising, though. the programming model is very similar to swing’s. there are SPanels, SButtons, SLabels, STextAreas, and you can add ActionListeners to them. not a single line of html, no HttpServletRequest - pretty cool so far. now i’ll have to decide which one i wanna give a shot on my next project, rails or wingS.
