First Tapestry 5 Book

The first book on Tapestry 5, Tapestry 5: Building Web Applications, is available for pre-order. I've been helping out by tech editing the chapters.

Working on T5 Ajax Support

This is stuff people have waited impatiently for going on six months or more, and it's starting to come together. I'm continuing to work using Prototype/Scriptaculous and put together a simple Autocompleter mixin. I've been working on a more general Ajax operations, wherein a link on the page will trigger a component event and the return value there (usually a Block) will be used to update a portion of the page (demarked by a Zone component).

I'm also simplifying a bunch of APIs that got twisted up for PageTester (Kent Tong's unit testing layer for T5). ActionResponseGenerator is going away which makes a lot of code and testing easier and simpler.

Right now the only thing slowing me down is some soreness in my left hand.

IntelliJ Watch: Change Sets

I've started using IntelliJ change sets, another great feature. A change set is very intuitive: a set of related changes. Typically the changes are related to a bug.

IntelliJ tracks those changes as a group: all the changed, added and deleted files. You can then commit those changes as a group, without checking in anything else.

This is just perfect for checking in a quick bug fix in the middle of a larger body of work.

Nice features: You create a comment when you first create the change set, this comment is the default check-in comment when you do commit changes. Further, they didn't skimp ... you can move a change between change sets.

The pattern I'm seeing is that IntellJ has features that cover specific things I've had to do manually and awkwardly in Eclipse. I can definitely remember times I've fixed a small bug and had to carefully pick and choose which files to check in, because I had many unfinished outstanding changes waiting to go. IntelliJ just picks up the slack and does it for me.

I'm not sure how you handle this situation in Mylyn, Eclipse's super-invasive ... tool? Framework? Filter? Nanny? Whatever it is, I guess it can do it, but I doubt it accomplishes the same goal as simply and comprehensibly.

Another IntelliJ Zealot

Wow that was quick. My first attempt with IntelliJ didn't really take, but I've had more time now to make the adjustment under less pressure.

What a difference. On my Mac at least, it's much faster and more stable than Eclipse. I've been running current versions of Eclipse, with the Maven plugin but very little else, and Mylyn disabled as much as possible ... and Eclipse has been agonizingly slow and very unstable with multiple lock ups and crashes per day.

IntelliJ is just ... better. Faster (note that you need to turn off the Mac L&F if you want best performance; I'm using "Alloy").

I've been so thoroughly used to the Eclipse development model, including constant compilation. IntelliJ doesn't compile until you need to run code. It does parse your code constantly, which amounts to the same thing in terms of refactoring and code completion, but IntelliJ is far more forgiving of syntax errors and the like.

Maven integration is better; I chose an option where it synchronizes from Maven on demand (and on startup).

For a multi-module projects, IntelliJ does a better job. Each module really gets its own classpath, whereas Eclipse merges together all the source paths and all the libraries for all modules.

A couple of Tapestry development notes:

• You do want to make sure that your exported resource patterns (in the Compiler project options) is !?*.java ... otherwise critical Tapestry files don't get copied and made available on the classpath.
• Also, for IntelliJ you have to perform a make (command-F9) after changing code or templates for those changes to be visible.

Yes, there's a number of nitpicks, especially on a Mac. It's extremely intimidating the first time you launch, with a wealth of confusing options. Documentation is spotty and key concepts are never explained. There's too many modal popup windows. Regardless, I'm already working faster, using the mouse less, and keep finding new features. I'd say I'm using about 20% of what IntelliJ can do right now, and I'm already well ahead of the Eclipse curve.

Apparently, IntelliJ is like snowboarding: you need to give it three full days before you're hooked. Counterpoint: I'm still on skis.

Another analogy: IntelliJ is metric and Eclipse is english. If all you've ever known is feet and inches and pounds and ounces, then metric doesn't seem worth the effort to switch. Metric just seems like a different set of numbers, mixed with disconcerting nuances (such as the difference between mass and weight). On the other hand, once you make the transition, many difficult tasks become easier, since most conversions are multiplying or dividing by a power of ten.

IntelliJ's 30 day evaluation is long enough to get hooked. Give it a try.

A Leopard Upgrade Story

I haven't been having the easiest time with my Leopard upgrade.

After my first attempt to upgrade, I got the dreaded "blue screen hang" on startup. This afflicts some number of systems, where after the install, all you get is a blue screen. After a couple of tries, I did a clean install and that worked better. Fortunately, I didn't follow Ben Galbraith's advice and "pull the switch", and I'm so glad a made a complete backup first!

I imported my settings from my backup and the vast majority of things just worked, including applications (/Application and ~/Applications) and most settings. Not my printer, though.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get svnserve up and running again, which is no fun, as I had just figured it out for Tiger. I'm getting a permissions problem accessing the files as user _svn (Leopoard puts an underscore in front of all system or daemon user ids and groups). I don't understand exactly why.

Other fun ... I decided to move to Mail.app from Thunderbird, since Mail.app can import Thunderbird mailboxes. For some reason, it only imported my older mail, so I have to keep Thunderbird around to access all my mail from 2007. 2006 and earlier imported. I don't get it!

Eclipse has become unstable for me. That's no fun, it's been getting memory access violations and crashing hard. So, this is a new chance to try IntelliJ. I'm already like some things, but I've also already hit a couple of bugs and the shear wealth of options and terminology is overwhelming.

I haven't tried out Time Machine yet, I may give it a whirl tonight.

I'm starting to adjust to using Spaces and have closed up my Mac's screen; with multiple desktops, it's just simpler (and better for my posture) to use a single screen. I may have to get a camera for iChat.

I immediately moved the Dock to the right side of the screen, to turn off the awful, stupid, distracting look they introduced.

Leopard includes the svn suite by default (I'm not sure if Tiger did); using MacPorts to install Hugs and erlang was easy, but ghc is a mess because of something that's changed between tiger and leopard. But who has time to study anything new when they're busy trying to finish Tapestry (and learn IntelliJ)?

SVNServe on Mac OS X

Somewhere along the way in switching from Fink to MacPorts (ostensibly because MacPorts is better supported) I shutdown my local SVN server. Strangely, the SVN for MacPorts doesn't include anything to assist in running a local SVN server.

Fortunately I found this useful snippet and it seems to work great, even after a reboot. Be careful to change the user name (at the bottom), the group name (at the top) and the SVN root repository (towards the top). For my system, I created a www user and www group as the owner of the SVN repository.

It may seem odd to run SVN server on a laptop; but this laptop is my development machine, and it goes with me everywhere, so I'm never in a position where I can't access my repository. Dave Thomas encourages you to store everything in version control, and I do my best.

Over the weekend, I'll be upgrading to Leopard, hopefully this will continue to work. I'm optimistic.