Author: Matthias

Opera 9!

Finally, the much anticipated Opera 9 final version has been released!!! Still plenty of bugs of course, but for me, no excuse anymore to not start using 9 on daily basis. 😉 I have like 20 drafts, but it’s too hot weather to write anything else. 😉

ShowROTGui

So, while I’m at it, why not add a first one. 😉 This is actually most recent. It is a very simple tool to inspect the ROT. The ROT (Running Object Table) is a system wide table in Windows, into which objects can register themselves, making them visible to and accessible by other applications. Inspect could be the wrong term: the tool just lists all objects in the ROT by their display name. There is a refresh button so that you don’t have to restart it all the time. 😉

ShowROTGUI

Coding category added

Coding excrjmblk.. what the? 🙂
yes, there went some thought in the correct naming of this category. 😉 It’s been already some time now that I was looking for a place to put my small tools I’ve been programming in the past year. Since they are so small, it’s overkill to dedicate a whole new blog to each of them. So I decided to group them in some subcategories on this general blog. I used to think of a “projects” category. But that sounds so mature. 🙂 My projects are only little beta thingies. 😉 Almost not worth to talk about, so “projects” would be overrated. So utils or tools would be okay? Mmmm… I don’t think so. Then I thought about “excursions”, sounds nice. =) To quote wikipedia:

An Excursion is a trip, usually made for leisure or educational purposes. It is often an adjunct to a longer journey or visit to a place, sometimes for other (typically work-related) purposes.

I think no other term would manage to define my tools any more accurate or subtle as this one. 🙂 So “coding excursions” it became! Now let’s find some time to add some subcategories. 😉

Bruce Eckel on python

Python seems on a revive to me. Actually for some time now… 🙂

First time I heard someone “still” programming with it, was about 4 years ago. The guy used it more as a glue language to combine several image registration scripts. But these days, it is very “in” again to be programming in python. It seems to be used heavily in web related stuff too. So it made me wonder: should I try it out once in a time? What’s the fuzz all about?

I found an interview with Bruce Eckel about Python. I know it’s a bit outdated by now, but still an interesting read from the guy who dissected C++ and Java in his “Thinking in “-series…

It seems B. Eckel also has a blog of his own.

Google Web Toolkit

I know I’m praising Google maybe a bit too much lately, but when Peter tipped me about the GWT I almost started to worship them! 😉 The GWT is actually a dream come true for me. Trying to write a dynamic web application these days is really a pain in the ***. If your background is from a world in which all programming languages are nicely typed and have nice informative compilers, nice IDE’s, nice debuggers, etc then it’s really a chock to start web development. It’s like being in the stone age again. I don’t want to offend anyone, but I hope, somewhere, you can agree that web languages are in general less mature than for example C++/Java.

Now, what did Google actually do? It seems they kind of shared my opinion. They thought, instead of starting another framework in some web language, why not offer an SDK for an established, proven development platform, which can be cross-compiled to nowadays web technology, taking care of all the nasty little details like cross browser compatibility and fumbling around in javascripts.

They chose Java as the source language. I don’t say it had to be Java, but I happen to be a Java developer in my day job, so this makes it extra interesting for me. 🙂 I can use my favorite IDE and actually start debugging an AJAX app, refactor some code, design a gui! Debugging is also nicely cross platform. Google calls it

hosted mode, where your code runs as Java in the Java Virtual Machine without compiling to JavaScript. To accomplish this, the GWT browser embeds a special browser control (an Internet Explorer control on Windows or a Gecko/Mozilla control on Linux) with hooks into the JVM.

Last but not least, you are not really stuck to the auto-generated code. Normally, the generated code suffices, but as it’s in a beta phase, and there will probably always be some case in which you want to do some manual tweaking, GWT provides the JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI, nice pun! ;))
It seems they have everything nicely documented and there’s even a weblog so we can be nicely kept up to date about any news/progress. 🙂

Conclusion: way to go google! 🙂