Some people have a love-hate releationship with certain pieces of software. Others, a love to hate relationship. My releationship with Eclipse is more of a respect-hate relationship.

Perhaps I make that categorization, because I cannot admit a more purer dichotomy of love-hate, I’ve often described eclipse as being put together by a hippie commune of developers. The features are all nice. However, the complete lack of central planning is very apparent. The fact that there are at least three “Find” dialogs in Eclipse PDT, the Eclipse distribution designed for PHP is testament to this. In the Edit menu their is a find dialog for the current document. In the Search menu there is one dialog for searching for PHP methods, fields, etc. There is also a second that has several tabs for searching for javascript, plain file search, and others.

This is all somewhat acceptable, as Eclipse not only an IDE, but a Framework for making IDEs. There are third party eclipse distributions for editing java, PHP and other languages in eclipse that are more polished. Perhaps its best that the “reference distributions” have the full hodgepodge of features, and third parties take the “less is more” approach.

However, one missing feature I cannot forgive is the lack of an installer. All mature software projects should have proper installers for their platform. For an Apple, this means a .dmg file with a .app bundle built in. For windows this means an MSI, exe, or an exe wrapped around an MSI. For linux this means an rpm and debian package.

That’s not to say I am against the concept of a binary zip or tarball. On the contrary, some people don’t like installers, and they should have the option of just unzipping. Freedom of choice is a good thing. However, I am saying that an installer is one of the necessary choices for all platforms.

As a final aside, I realize that a dmg with a .app bundle is not really an installer on par with an RPM, MSI, or EXE installer. I also realize there are real installers for MacOSX software that a minority of Mac Software uses.  So I acknowledge that Mac OSX is an exception to this rule.

A clear article explaining why simpler is better with web service libraries.

I am an avid Reader of Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. I usually agree with him. However, I must disagree with his hatred of Window’s XP’s continuing popularity. I don’t care.

Disclaimer: I still run Windows XP at home and at work.

So now that I’ve stated my prejudice, I’ll talk about a similar situation that does bother me, people that use MacOS9, and why thats a completely different story.

Why do I hate the, now very small number of, MacOS9 zealots? Because of their fear of change. I try not to hate them for their lack of appreciation for a true multi user OS based on unix and the mach microkernel. Most of them just don’t care. I could never convince a client that ran a SECURITY guard company who was a retired NYPD Detective Sargeant of the neccessity of passwords to SECURE computers. Most people want to use their computer to accomplish a task. These are the same people that take their cars to their dealer for maintance, and don’t question their dealers reccomended service schedule. All that being said, these MacOS9 people, at least the ones using Quark and Photoshop, need to realize that the newer versions of these packages will improve their daily workflow.  Grouped masks and the like transformed how most people use photoshop. I’m sure in the past ten or so years quark has improved greatly.

Now this excert from a recent coding horror article seems to sum up Jeff’s position quite well.

Thus, I’ve been following the development of Windows 7 with cautious optimism. It’s important to me not because I am an operating system fanboy, but mostly because I want the world to get the hell off Windows XP. A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Windows, of course, but given the fundamental inertia in most people’s computing choices, the lack of a compelling Windows upgrade path is a dangerous thing.

The thing is I don’t have any problem with anyone using a 9 year old operating system. As long as they are updating the software running on top of it regularly. @Crazygeekchick, whom I follow on twitter, spent a good portion of saturday installing all the Microsoft Software she regularly uses on top of a fresh windows 7 install. People that Windows Vista or 7 and never run windows update, install a third party browser, or use a non microsoft program for any of their tasks bother me. My friend that ran windows 2000 until forced to do otherwise to use the latest version of DirectX does not.

Running XP in this day and age is a purposeful decision. Running Vista is the easy thing to do. If Vista is what you want, due to UAC or WAS, go for it. However, if you hate Vista, use XP, or Windows 7, or Linux, or even Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

In the proud internet tradition of taking an original joke and making a cheap deraritive, I, Justin Dearing, would like to announce that I’ve launched the following domains:

• lmsotfy.com Let Me Stack Overflow That For You
• lmsftfy.com Let Me Server FaultThat For You
• lmsutfy.com Let Me Super UserThat For You

Please enjoy playing stupid jokes on your friends.

Today I attended LIPHP. While I began attending LIPHP since I was programming in PHP at the time, I am mostly a .NET programmer these days. The fact that I have recently inherited an abandoned OSS projet written in .NET, further entrenches me as an open source .NET programmer.

I was told by a fellow LIPHP member that I cannot truely write open source applications in .NET, or something to that effect. Naturally, this is where I attempt to disprove that.

If we study the history of open source and free software, we can see a gradual evolution marked by periods of puncuated equilibrium. RMS created the free software foundation to recreate a software ecosystem that he believed existed in the software industry earlier in his career. Linus Torvald releases a kernel that does all the things minix would not do. ESR coined the term ope source to reject the Free Software Foundation’s idealism in favor of pragmatism. Microsoft releases the WiX project on sourceforge and eventualyl launches codeplex. Java becomes more and more open source.

During this time, compromises had to be made for ideal situations to be realized. pieces of propietary unix had to be recreated piece by piece and released as open source. First the basic unix shell commands, followed by things like the text editor vi. Some peices fell out of favor as other alternatives developed. The linux kernel as opposed to the hurd. Open sourced sun Java code replacing reversed engineered clones.

Somewhere along the line the pc revolution and Microsoft happened. Unix is now completely open sourced. Sun has open sourced most of its code, including newly developed code such as ZFS and dtrace. But no one uses unix or its clones. They use Microsoft Windows now.

Of course that previous statement must be qualified. There is a sizable minority of desktops running some form of unix. Mainframes still exist, and unix has a strong server installation base. However, Microsoft has a dominante share of the desktop at the moment, and a good share of the server market.

So where does open source fit in in the Microsoft world. Well first of all, many opens source applications written for unix have been ported to windows. Secondly, many open source apps have been written primarally targeting windows. This much is obvious, but does nothing to counter the claims that my .NET code is any less open source than open source code that runs on unix.

So how do I counter his claims. First of all I can point out WINE and REACTOS. Wine allows you to run windows applications on linux. Its good enough these days to run World of Warcraft and internet explorer. It can also run important, boring business apps, but those two applications demonstrate the true power of Wine. ReactOS is a windows NT clone. It is buggy and development is slow. However, quality is continually improving, and while windows is a moving target, it has several advantages. First of all as windows matures, it adds few new core feature. Secondly, ReactOS uses Wine for its usermode dlls. Most Reactos programmers concentrate on kernel development.

Secondly I can point to Mono, the .NET implementation that runs on Windows and unix. Now in my particular cases, I write .NET apps that would be hard to port to mono, but not impossible.

Thirdly, I can point to the fact that users of my software gain the utility benifits of open source. While they have to invest in the sunk costs of the Windows OS, I avoid them specific other expenses. At the moment these are Visual Studio, Microsoft Access, and QueueExplorer.  Certainly I can function with more “pure” alternatives on windows. In fact I have in the past and continue to attempt to. However, at times external factors (those that pay me) compel me to use a Microsoft stack. Therefore, I spend some of my free time writing open source solutions that make it easier to support the Microsoft stack. In other words I scratch an itch.

Now, I am no superstar programmer, this I admit. However, I do believe I am fairly intelligent, and have a decent breadth of knowledge and ability when it comes not just to programming, but IT as a whole.

This weekend, I decided to spend a little time attempting to re-invent an intranet app I created using Java in Applet form, as opposed to the present PHP/Ajax solution. To provide a little background, the present application is basically an administrative tool which keeps track of computers & users. It presents several tables identifying e-mail accounts, Southware users, PCs, and the relationships of these various items to each other. For now, I use PHP5 with Smarty templating, and use XMLHttpRequest calls to update just certain portions of the page instead of reloading the whole thing each time you want to sort a table, or edit a field.

I am pretty pleasd with the solution thus far, however I like to experiment. Previously, I tried using Flex — and did OK until the point that I hit what I believe was a limitation of Flex itself, having to do with binding controls to the gridview and having changes propagate back to the control that the edit controls were bound to. So this time around, I said to myself “Hey, I took Java back in college and even did my senior project in that!”.

Can’t be too hard right? Taking some data, displaying it on a grid, edits, etc. Boy was I wrong!

CHALLENGE #1 — Finding a decent IDE

Good luck! I tried probably 5 different IDEs, and ditched them all for various reasons — mostly because they weren’t free. Finally I ended up with Netbeans, which I happened upon completely by accident, as I was browsing around Sun’s website. It’s actually a pretty nice IDE. It has several built in project templates, a drag & drop WYSIWYG designer, code completion, etc. This IDE also had a cool feature where you can easily set up a JDBC connection to several database servers, in my case PostgreSQL. I was able to connect, browse around the tables (however, you must have a primary key before any tables can be used!?), and bind the tables to various controls for example a list or a data grid. I had some problems with the IDE though — I had a tough time wrestling for control. It wouldn’t let me delete function declarations, variables, etc.. They were just simply a different shade of gray, and somehow untouchable.

CHALLENGE #2 — Getting anything done

Once I had finally gotten everything set up with my little project, I tried to compile it. UHOH it seems it couldn’t find javax.persistence. WTF is that you may ask? Well, apparently it’s necessary (at least with this IDE) to bind the database to the control. After another half an hour of searching, I resigned myself to having to download the enterprise edition of the SDK (100+ megs..) and then trying again. After that was finally done, I tried to run it again… It compiled, but now it was giving exceptions on start, and it STILL wouldn’t work..

CHALLENGE #3 — Debugging!

There may be a nice quick solution for this (if there is, please let me know). If you’re writing an applet you should be debugging in your browser right? Well if you do, then your browser will cache the Applet, and your subsequent rebuilds will not be represented.. I am using firefox, and to counter this, it is suggested you load up your Tools -> Java Console, and hit ‘x’ to clear the java cache.. So I did it. And did it again. And again and again. NO EFFECT! I discovered I had to exit firefox in its entirety after clearing the cache, then re-launching, and THEN it would show the new applet. SO, what kind of way to debug is that?? As I said above, i’m no superstar.. I like to code a little, then check it. Then code, then check. I just can’t work like that. Yes, you can run the program as a regular application then switch to be an applet, but then you have various security permissions issues which may come back to bite you if you’re not careful no?

The above may not seem particularly frustrating, but all of this came after several hours of playing around with SOAP. I had gotten one of the functions of my app set up via SOAP, and was going to test that with java. I was looking around the web, and all the samples I saw were horrible… They were hand-crafting the request XML, OR using some 3rd party framework to get the job done. I didn’t want to do either of those things, so eventually I gave up on SOAP, and that is when I tried the direct database connection.

In closing, those of you out there who are PROs at Java will read this and laugh — no problem there. What should be taken away from this though, is that while Java may be perfectly good once you immerse yourself in the intricacies, it is not for the faint of heart, and in the age of integration, polished languages & IDEs, it’s just not up to the hype.

When I start or join a new open source project, I usually make sure they are registered on several websites relating to open source that I frequent. Two of them are http://koders.com and http://ohloh.net. These sites offer different services. However, they both take the code from your version control repository, download it periodically, and report information derived from that data on their website. What the derived information is different.

Koders is a source code search engine. It lets you search for source code. Ohloh is a website that calculates and reports various metrics about open source projects. While you cannot compare the services they offer directly, you can compare how their project submission and user interactions work.

The first thing you will notice if you register with both sites is that ohloh is totally automated and koders reviews all projects individually. Ohloh will let you register in minutes. If you are lucky and server load is low enough, your project will be imported in less than an hour and you will have what it calls “shallow metrics,” or statistics about your code such as code to comment ratios and the breakdown of languages used in it. Koders, on the other hand, will inform you that your project must be reviewed by hand. My personal experience is you will have to wait over a month to be informed that your project was approved. They claim the purpose of the review is to ensure the code is legitimately open source.

Feedback mechanisms are similar for both sites. They both have forums and the site admins read and respond to support requests on them. Both sites are small in terms of forum volume at the moment. I’ve used Ohloh’s forums at various time, but never had a need to use Koders’. I predict Ohloh’s forum volume will grow faster than Koders’ simply because Ohloh is a community and Koders is a search engine. There are various activities that you can do at Ohloh, such as review projects, give other users “kudos” and updaste your “stack”, a list of open source applications you use. However, at koders, your options are to register a project or search source code. Therefore, there is more to talk about on the Ohloh forums than the Koders ones.

Another thing you will notice about Ohloh is the extensive use of the honors system. For example, I can login, find a project with a developer not associated with an Ohloh account, and click on the button that says “I am this user.” I’ve not tried to see what happens if I claim to be Linus Torvalds, but I do know if click on that developer profile for linux or git I see the “I am this user” button. There is no honors system or trust in the community at Koders. They hand reviews projects, and once the project is in the system, its in the system.

One final thing I noticed about Koders is unlike Ohloh, they seem to seek open source project to add to the repository themselves. In a blog article they proudly announce they have “partnered” with IBM to add all their developer works projects to the repository. Ohloh is using crowdsourcing to get all their data, where koders uses it as one avenue, but also seeks out projects on their own.

To put all this in perspective we must look at each websites motivation, or to more clearly define it, business model. Ohloh is building a community. It is a social networking site of sorts. I expect either ads to start appearing, the site to start selling aggregate data, or some other income source that basically revolves around selling their demographic. Koders, on the other hand, sells a professional version of their product. You can buy Koders Pro Edition, install it on your network, point it at your repositories and search your internal code. Ohloh needs active members that constantly go to the site, so they offer things to do there. Koders, on the other hand, needs people to find their search engine useful enough to want to use it internally, so they would want all the source code to be legitimately under the license it is listed under and would want to make sure that the majority of the source code on their site is worth reading and reusing.

One of my more insignificant accomplishments as a software developer is discovering an digression between the actual error code two Windows API functions returned and the ones the MSDN claimed they returned. These two functions are NetUserGetGroups and NetUserGetLocalGroups. It took Microsoft three months and one day to get back to me with there response informing me of the changes made and thanking me for my feedback. Also, towards the bottom of there response was the following text.

A recent change on the MSDN Library has ended our ability to provide the
e-mail based feedback system you have been using for the past few years.
In the future, please take advantage of the two new mechanisms provided
by MSDN:

(1) Ratings and Feedback – a feature that pops-up when you hover near
the stars in the upper right hand corner of the Windows SDK
documentation pages on MSDN.

(2) Community Content – a feature added to the bottom of each page to
allow users registered with MSDN using a LiveId to ask questions and add
content

We invite you to use the Ratings and Feedback features to comment on and
give your rating for the topic itself. Please use the Community Content
option to ask questions and add your own developer guidance on the
topic. And continue to use the MSDN Forums for developer questions. We
appreciate your patience with this change to our system and very much
want your continued feedback, suggestions, and critique of our developer
content.

When I originally sent the bug report in there was no Community Content section at the bottom of every API doc page on MSDN. However, it was there when I received my response. Normally one would think that their response queue was backed up, and as a result it takes 3 months for them to get to these minor issues. However, it should be noted that on March 25th, the day before I received my response, I sent an email to the WiX users mailing list about some issues with their documentation and received a response the next day from Microsoft Technical Evangelist Bob Arson.

Many of you will say its coincidence. However, personally I feel Bob pulled the Microsoft equivalent of my FBI file to see if I had any negative marks in the eyes of Microsoft. After seeing this was not the case he noticed I sent an as yet unanswered email to the MSDN SDK feedback team, and he made a phone call to bump that to the top of the queue.

While I don’t believe Microsoft has a file on me, I do think that Bob or another Redmond employee could easily search for all correspondence I’ve had with Microsoft’s feedback mechanisms under a given email address. I know someone that that works for Microsoft. He has found bugs in products his team is not responsible for. Since he is a project manager, he can file a bug report internally and assign it directly to the appropriate programmer. The bug is usually closed unresolved and he is requested to file the bug through the public feedback mechanisms. This tells me two things. The first is their programmers don’t enjoy getting bug reports and hide behind bureaucracy. The second is that there is a unified bug tracking system at Microsoft. Assuming that public feedback mechanisms all filter into this, it would make sense that an appropriately entitled person could search for all tickets that reference my email address. If follows of course I assume that Bob was appropriately entitled.

So tell me folks, does anyone have any experiences with Microsoft Feedback teams that support or detract from my theory? Leave a comment because I would love to hear from you.