Thanks to this you’re able to commit always “refering to” some specific task. Using GitHub and Kanbanery such commits are linked back to the task on the board, which makes code reviews very pleasant :-)

As we’re using Kanbanery in our team, I’ll hopefully have some time and ideas to make this plugin even more useful over time :-) So in case you’re interested just download the plugin from your IntelliJ or head to github to look at the source code or vote for this plugin on it’s site.

Oh… Seems like I forgot to announce that I’ve also released a Android client for Kanbanery :-) Yup, that’s true, so got ahead and check it out if you’d like to. This one still needs some polishing, but the idea is to keep it in one codebase but develop for both, tablets and normal phones, so some things are a little bit tricky :-) I love to use it on my XOOM, but I’ll work hard to make the phone versions as awesome as the tablet one.

• Scala – the code is 100% scala
• Scala Parser Combinators – the “parser generation DSL” one might say, begind this parser. It’s very very amazing and pushing Scala to it’s best with some crazy implicit conversions flying around all the time :-)
• Scarg – a simple tool for handling command line parameters, it’s on github
• sbt – Simple Build Tool, let’s call it “what maven is for java” but with a Gradle-ish feel to it. A very nice build tool, actually my fav I’d say.
• Scalate – a template engine, which implements Mustache (which I used, as it’s a very clean lang, NO LOGIC in the view :-)) as one of it’s template languages
• and of course ScalaTest – as ‘thou shalt test thy code‘ :-)

It was a very pleasant expirience and I’m looking forward to implementing a 100% compatible Protocol Buffers parser in Scala… :-)

There is also a pdf I’ve written about this project but it’s not well written and in Polish (university requirements, bleh), but if you want to know more about Scala Parser Combinators, you can take a look at it here: doc @ github.com.

The project itself is of course Free Software and Open Source, licensed under the Apache 2 license, so feel free to fork protodoc-scala on github!

I’ll just quote the README from the github page for the rest of the description:

Oh, wait. That’s excatly what ProtoDoc is! ProtoDoc is a tool very much like JavaDoc, which scans your proto files and generates
an easily searchable and most informative website with all information about yout ProtoMessages.

It’s currently not production ready, and allows only for basic Messages to be parsed. But it should most probably be finished and fully working quite soon.

Live Demo
There is a live demo available here.

Coding notes

• ProtoDoc is build by sbt so if you want to help out hacking, first download Scala 2.8.1 and sbt :-)

Output screenshots
ProtoDoc takes this:

package pl.project13;

/**
 * This is a simple Message which has some Inner Message defined.
 * Also, note that it has a default value on the name property.
 */
message MessageWithInner {
    /**
     * A number is just a simple property
     */
    required int32 number = 1;

    /**
     * This can be a name of your likeing, the default value is "lorem ipsum" etc
     */
    required string name = 2 [default = "loremipsum"];

    /**
     * Whoa, this is a comment on an inner message!
     * ProtoDoc is so cool!
     */
    message InnerMessage {

        /**
         * This is a comment on an inner messages field, cool~
         * You may use it like this in your generated Java code:
         * setName("StringMyName");
         */
        optional string name = 3;
    }
}

and generates this:

Hooray!

Having that said… there is one thing I don’t like there… it’s SVN ;-) Of course I knew that I can’t be running from SVN all my life and that I’d end up using it someday in some company… As some may know, I’m a big Git (or mercurial) fan, thus – I kinda see what SVN is doring wrong. At XSolve we have this weekly-event called “Fridays at XSolve”, where one can present in a short 30min session, something he’s been interested in lately etc. It’s a really cool idea, that allows ideas do spread throughout the company – the HR team seems to really care to keep this atmosthere in the company… :-) This Friday I was given the honour and joy to be presenting Git – as we’ve been talking about it a few times during my first week here. Below is the presentation I’ve used:

You can download the presentation or the sources for the presentation here as they are also a simple (I’ve made one about Guava that’s a little more interesting from the TeX viewpoint) example of the LaTeX beamer – which apparently is also an favourite tool of some team members… :-) I’ve also talked a moment after the event with an v. good (so it seems) developer who knew really a lot about many different SCMs – we mentioned “cherry picking” which is really interesting but I don’t know much about it yet. If you don’t know much about Git – take a look at the above presentation, or better, start out your new (better) life with git by visiting these links:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 Linusa Torvalds on Git vs CVS/SVN
• http://whygitisbetterthanx.com – why git is better than any other SCM ;-) A biased site obviously ;-)
• http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html – side-by-side with SVN
• http://git-scm.com – Git homepage

The presentation worked quite well I guess – some team members who knew about Git/SVN/Mecurial/Bzr etc, where adding their bits of knowledge which really made the presentation a lot more than just a bunch of boring slides… ;-) All in all it was all of those: fun, interesting and yet another occasion for me to train presenting stuff (I’m still bad at it, but well… life is study, right? :-)) I’m really happy to have the opportunity to be working in such a environment – I’ll post whatever is inseresting on this blog (if I have the time to do so :<), so keep an eye ot for some Java/GWT posts… :-)

I’ve been coding an simple RESTful “ip to country” conversion service. I’ve decided to put it up to appengine – so that everybody may use it freely even if I’d change my server etc… And if looked quite nice the first day – buw when I got to do some “real stuff” app engine started to get in my way, here’s a quick rundown of the problems I’ve found with appengine:

1. I need to download and update the ip<->country database every few days. I’d use an GZIPInputStream and BufferedReader to get the file I was interested in and update the database. Did appengine allow me to use such an simple aparoach?
   1. pro: appengine provides a very nice cron-like mechanism. So I just had to create an cron.xml in WEB-INF and this part was ready to go! This was in fact easier and more fun than in classic Spring + Open Symphony Quartz.
   2. con:I checked if this tactic was OK with the JRE whilelist and checked the Quotas – http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#UrlFetch, “seems ok” – I thought – “nothing about per connection limits, only daily quotas.”. After writing the code, I discovered that even though on the main quota page there was no word about per connection limits, in fact there are such quotas, but a little more hidden: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/urlfetch/overview.html Max request/response sizes are capped at exactly 1MB.
      As my gzipped file is around 1.1MB, appengine killed my simple idea… I’d have to split the file into separate ones – on another server, and then fetch the separated files onto appengine.
   3. con:The mentione CRON mechanism is quite funny. You don’t call methods but URLs – and they are normally called as if one would launch them from the browser – thus, traffic and “max time” quotas do count there as well. So rather than calling an method, as you’d do with OpenSymphony – you create an Servlet that does all the work. This may me both good, and bad… You cound do all the CRON stuff by hand if it got out of sync etc… I didn’t really like it, and as mentioned… When doing my “big batch database update” the servlet would simply timeout…
2. Let’s talk about the dataStore. As you all probably know… AppEngine does not provide and “database” per se. It’s not relational and has quite some limitations. BUT! That’s quite ok, as it’s very quick and very very scalable! And most of the time… Do you really need all those fancy relations? ;-) It was an ideal place to hold my super simple data: “ip region = country” mapping in a persistent way. “Another nice thing on appengine for this application I’m going to write.” – I thought. Was I right?
   1. pro/con: Not really… I used JPA but JDO (which is prefered by appengine from what I’ve seen) also works nice on GAE. The setup did run quite ok while I was running tests on my local machine. Deployment is also an breeze and I didn’t have to use any complicated dependencies to get it running – “yay, no maven!”. You just have to enchance the classes you want to make persistent (just as hibernate does).
   2. con:The problems started when I wanted to clear my datastore. Nothing easier than that, right…? “delete from BlaBla” and we’re done. Yeah, but not on GAE. As even the “max rows a query touches” are limited – to 500. So there I am, with my 100.000 rows, and I have to delete them in 500 rows per query… Of course I can’t call this in an loop – as the timeout quota would get in my way and kill the app.From what I’ve seen, people do solve this using a CRON task that calls this “clearDatabase” servlet until it’s  done – ugh, not a nice solution but I can’t think of any other solution :\
   3. con:The only query I need to do in this app is basically:

      SELECT range FROM RemoteIpData as range
                   WHERE range.ipFrom <= ?1
                     AND range.ipTo >= ?2
      #and this would always return 1 entry!
      

      And guess what… AppEngine does not support multiple “less/more than” operands in one query! If you think hard about what BigTable is, it does make some sense. More information about “GQL” can be found here: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/gqlreference.html All the restrictions about the Queries you can do are documented here – some are really counter intuitive when you come from an RDBMS enviroment… Ah well ;-) Oh, and yet another great link about GAE limitations.

      Having this limitation, really sucks for my normally “super simple query”, and I’d have to change the data structure somehow or do some awful 2 queries and then combine them in Java (omg teh terrorr… :<). So, while developing on appengine, keep in ming – simple things might turn out quite complicated due to the nature of BigTable. If you know all the limitations when designing the system and not while finishing it, you’ll be a happier man… ;-)

   4. neutral: Primary keys can’t be Integers etc, as AppEngine uses it’s own “Key” type. :-)
3. Having that all said. Appengine’s administration panel is quite ok. And the not-so-newly-added log search etc are really fine tools. Something an plain old tomcat can not offer. On the other hand, the limitations can really be a deal breaker! My app was really fairly simple, and yet appengines quotas managed to really get in my way. Keep this in mind while thinking about using it. You may also try Amazon’s cloud or CloudForce from SalesForce etc… They all do offer a quite less restrictive enviroment.
4. If you’re interested, deployment does take about 5-7 minutes before the new version is visible on the web – so don’t panic if you’re still seeing the old version after deploying the new one.
5. My opinion about GAE…? (semi serious ;-))

“Screw you clouds, I’m going /home!”
(intended southpark pun)

I’ll finish this project using my ol’ pal, Tomcat6 which I’ve already got running for netbeans.edu.pl (but that was an grails app).

I’ve also decided to use Spring, which I didn’t really need on appengine – as the only thing I was doing was so small that all the logic was around 10 lines in the servlets… But if using hibernate and all the other “real” JEE stuff, I felt I’d need to “do this right” so I’ve decided for Spring 3 and Maven2… I’ll try to build this project from gradle soon too!

ALSO! If interested in an more experienced programmers view on appengine (I’m still a novice), go and read this blog post about GAE on Sławek Sobótkas blog. All in all we seem to agree that the limitations can be an pain in the a… ;-)

The source for the appengine version is on my github account. I’m porting it to an plain old tomcat environment and will post this version there too when it’s ready to run (tomcat deployment is somehow hell with such apps for me… Any tips are really welcome :-))

Amazing days and awesome people

It’s been some amazing days for me during (and before) the NBPTraining. As you probably know already – I’ve been the “one-man-army” behind the organization and basically everything around this training. I got lots of help from various people, such as Dr Jarosław Wąs (from KN Glider) – it wouldn’t have been possible to make this training such an success without his great and very active support. And of course – the PolishJUG, which I’m a proud member of! :-) But one thing I have to admit, Bureaucracy is a horrible thing and really made some things (needlessly…) difficult – thank goodness in the end, we had everything well organized – as Geertjan put it on dZone:

[...] There are also some illustrative pics to share, to give an impression of the group (really large), the trainers (really busy), and the organization (really good) [...]

Day 0: Welcome Dinner

What’s so worth mentioning about the guys just coming here anyway? Well it was a quite trip for some, especially Geertian, who had to come by train which took him about 27hours instead of just coming by car from Prague. All because of Eyjafjoell‘s eruption last week… And Toni and Geertjan were in Oslo at that time, doing a Training for an company (btw nice interview with Gunnar Reinseth) – so we were worried if they’ll be able to come to Poland due to all the flights being cancelled… Anton was lucky and but Geertjan’s original flight got cancelled… Well, he had quite an interesting journey as he called it himself :-) Later when Karol joined us and soon we all went to eat some pierogi and chat a little :-)

Days 1 & 2: The Training

Thanks to dr Wąs everything went smooth and without any problems… Even though some other students also wanted to use the room we had reserved – due to the chaos caused by the tragic plane accident and them wanting to make up for the classes they’ve lost last weekend due to the burial ceremonies… I’m really glad we managed to get the training rolling with absolutely no problems – we were really prepared for everything, along with backup projectors etc ;-)

If you’re not very familiar with the Java World – please note, that the training was NOT about NetBeans IDE. Yeah, we did use NetBeans IDE (there’s some nice little helpers/wizards), but that’s absolutely not a must – NBP is pure Java (just a bunch of jar’s) and XML – so you can use anything you want to code stuff based on NetBeans RCP. That said, the training was about real coding stuff such as patters used in the RCP, use-cases and “ how do I code such a feature  to scale well?”.

The agenda was the basic NetBeans Platform Training as outlined on http://edu.netbeans.org/courses/nbplatform-certified-training/ that’s a good thing, as only a few students actually have used the NetBeans RCP (or even ANY RCP) in their lives. The level of participants was quite diverse, some saw loose coupling in action for the first time in their lives, and others were already planing some advanced use-cases foe the things we were learning. The sources and videos for most of the examples are also hosted on netbeans.edu.pl, so if you want to know what you’ve missed, feel free to download/watch them (if interested in FullHD versions, contact me per email). The Lookup and Nodes/Explorer Views were the most interesting features of the platform I guess. Of course having an full blown app with menus etc out of the box is also nice, but not a “life changer” if it weren’t for those mechanisms. Sadly we didn’t talk about the Lexer API (for parsing languages) but I personally talked with the guys a little about it – and why schielmann was dropped etc… A really fun and interesting insider talk :-) I simply love such conversations…

After the training Geertjan gave away a copy of his book (“Rich Client Programming”), to the person who asked the best, most interesting questions during the course. Of course it was then signed by all the trainers. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the books’ winner, nonetheless – congratulations! After the training I also asked the guys to sign my copy of the book, hurray for signature collectors ;-)

Anyone interested in some of the response I got concerning the training? After the training plenty of you mailed me and thanked via forums etc, here’s a few responses:

przyznaje, na prawde baaaardzo fajne szkolenie

Faktycznie – świetna robota. Wielkie dzięki ;)

Tru. Gj.

[...] nie udalo mi sie zjawic a slyszalem ze bylo super ;/

[...] bedzie problemem jesli przyjde jutro na to szkolenie NetBeans’a? Bo slyszalam ze duzo ciekawych i przydatnych dla mnie rzeczy jest wiec chcialabym sobie posluchac :)

See you next time!

I hope you all enjoined the training – we certainly did. I’ve got some opinions from happy participants, so I guess everyone liked it as much as those did.

If you have anything (opinions, sources or even complaints) feel free to contact me: kmalawski@project13.pl or just leave a comment here :-) Also, when you get your NetBeans Certified Engineer and would like some more promotion for your open source project – let me know and we’ll add a link to it at netbeans.edu.pl!

Some students have already  have started their projects based on the NetBeans Platform – so what are you waiting for?! ;-)

What’s next for me?

Well, I’m going to GeeCON, to learn about Gradle, and tap into facts and myths about JSF and other things (the list of good topics is really long so I wont list them all here, just have a look on your own). The agenda mostly caught up my attecion and I’m really happy to be going there. What’s new for me + conferences is that I don’t have to go alone anymore. I’m going with a friend (some years older) and potentialy another girl – as she won the Google trip to GeeCON… ;-) I’m also really happy to be able to meet Adam Dudczak, thanks to whom the whole NBPT idea got ignited in me and the NetBeans Guys :-) Of course we’ll meet up  with all the PolishJUG members, (Adrian Nowak, Radosław Holewa, Marcin Gadamer and Kuba Dżon) and Miroslav will be comming too – lot’s and lot’s of programming-friends :-) Seems like Toni and Geertjan will also be comming, yay! Yeah, so that’ll be 3 days in May… but that’s not the end of my Java related stuff in May:

Later in May I’ll be on an Spring Source Training. It’s only the “short introductory one”, and I’m well aware that it won’t make me an spring-guru, but an insider insight about Spring, Roo or Grails is also a good thing to have.

By the way, did you notice that the netbeans.edu.pl is running on Grails? I’ll release it’s sources when they’re polished enough~! Viva la free software.

Geertjan, Toni, Konrad (me), Karol

Oh, and for those asking: Sadly I didn’t own an PolishJUG T-Shirt at the time of the training, so I took the most Java related I had – from Java Developers Day. Also a quite nice conference… :-)

NetBeans.edu.pl

Since Poznań JUG’s NetBeans Platform Training in January (yeah, the one where there was no place left for me ;-)), I’ve been in contact with Poznań JUG‘s Adam Dudczak, Polish JUG‘s Adrian Nowak, Sun’s Geertjan Wielenga and Eppleton’s Anton Epple and many more… And a little later Karol Harezlak joined the training team. We’ve been planing to organize an NetBeans Platform Training in Cracow – since there was really an gigantic response to the training. Now it’s April… and just around two weeks to the NetBeans Platform Certified Training Kraków 2010 ;-) All this could not have been possible if not the great help and support from both JUGs and an amazing amount of help we got from Glider from my University. Also I’d like to give a big thanks to everyone I’ve met during this long process of organizing such an meeting – you’ve all been a great help! :-)

Allright, so what’s this NetBeans Platform all about? To put it simply, it’s “something” (a platform ;-)) that allows you to use all the stuff you see when you do your daily coding in the NetBeans IDE and code up your own application really quickly. While WebFrameworks are really popular and there’s a ton of them, there is not much (worth mentioning) “Desktop App Frameworks” as one might call them. Such apps are then called Rich Client Applications (just a fancy name for “Desktop Apps” ;-)), which makes NBP an Rich Client Platform… You may have heard about “Eclipse RCP” or “SWT” or “Spring RCP” – they’re in the same legue as NBP. But why is NetBeans RCP more interesting than the rest? Well here’s a cupple of reasons I personally find important:

• It’s all swing based, and as Java programmers – we know swing, not necesarrily some “SWT” or “Swing RPC” – right? Less totaly new stuff = better learning curve.
• Your app gets an windowing system abstraction, file system abstraction,  lots of GUI elements out of the box – Tree’s etc
• You can just extend NetBeans IDE or build your own app that looks like an IDE… or doesn’t look like one ;-)
• It’s 100% modular – that means you can use just the stuff you want, or can easily exchange or “lookup” (important word in the NetBeans world) stuff in order to develop apps that can handle plugins and are easily extendible.
• There are quite some inteligent and interesting opinions about NetBeans RCP vs Eclipse RCP on Adam Bien’s blog – (found this blogpost thanks to @timoreilly)

I find the Lexer Api quite interesting but didn’t have the time to really dive into it yet – basically it allows you to write programming language parsing, support into your app or netbeans IDE.
The most amazing… Hmm let’s say “the most visually amazing” app based on the NBP I’ve seen is Gephi (video below). There are lot’s of very complicated apps for biology or airlines and stuff) based on NBP, but let’s face it such apps don’t create an “WOW” effect, unless you totaly understand what’s going on inside of it.

Take a deep breath, and enjoy
NetBeans Platform + Gephi = Graph Awesomeness

Anyways, I’m using github most of the time, but now I’d like to hava a non public repository (yet remote) for some small project. I’ve been commiting to a local git instance from the begining of this project so just pushing it into a new repo will be really simple.

I wanted to have som easy to administer localozed git to serve hit hosting for my friends etc. So this is how I did it:

On server:

Now we can do all the administration without being logged in into our server – just by using git!

You can then just pull/clone this repo:

git clone git://stratos/bla.git

Yeah, this post isn't much of an discovery - yet I wanted to show you how SIMPLE and SCALABLE a simple git repository can be. For mor information about git and gitosis see: a simple google search

Our server “Kopiec” is somewhat online (running CentOS off course) – we’re able to start/stop if thanks to a tool that’s called “remote insight”, and I’ve put 3 databases on there. MariaDB, InfiniDB and a clean MySQL instalation. We’re somewhat having problems with TokuDB, but that’s going to be our 4th database of interest. If you want to keep track of our test’s you can take a look at: http://mysqlintegra.project13.pl/.

The first step in getting things tested is filling those db’s with some data, and I mean a LOT of data. So we hacked up a more or less quick and dirty python script called dbfiller (source code avaiable on github) that would simulate a very simple table generation scheme (people working on shifts and checking in when they’re finished or start some activity). If you’re interested, our task is specyfied in the /doc/Opis.pdf file (sorry, only in polish). After a few days it’s up and running and we’re moving on to filling up those databases with some gigabytes of data.

Next we’re going to write some SQL Views/Procedures and then we’ll use Apache JMeter to run some performance benchmarks of some interesting data storage engines.

PS: If you’re wondering about my GWT-Crossword project – yeah, it’s still actual, and I’ll get right on it when done with some of the stuff here.
PPS: Yes, an Linux powered phone AT LAST in my hands! The HTC HERO is comming to me really soon – never again shall I use a ShitOS like WindowsMobile 6.5.

I’m coding this project to get used to some of the basic JEE stuff, such as Hibernate for example (it is quite amazing and very elegant – especially HQL), and to have a good time while coding in Java…

The source is avaiable under the AGPLv3 on github: http://github.com/ktoso/gwt-crossword
At some places it is still a mess so please keep in mind that it’s still under initial development (and I’m having a tough time at the uni and can’t code gwt-crossword everyday :\), that aside, feel free to take a look on the source!

• TokuDB http://tokutek.com/
• InfiniDB http://www.infinidb.org
• percona http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/Percona-XtraDB:start
• MariaDB http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Maria (Maria, PBXT, FederatedX)
• IBMDB2I http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-db2.html
• …ane some more…?
  

A simple comprehension will be the first thing we’ll do for this project… Later on we’ll do some simulated “real life” tests using JMeter. It’s possible that we’ll write some app based on this database later on – but that’s somehow far off at the moment. That said, I’m really happy to be involved in an interesting and open (it’s all open source & free software after all) topic.

Tomorrow I’m going to the university to setup our very own (awesome ;-)) HP ProLiant DL380 server. It has 6 hard drives, thus it should be very interesting to run HEAVY database LOAD tests – can’t wait. We’ll install CentOS 5.4 and think about it’s future then…