Seriously! Didn’t you think everyone and his dog in this world has a smartphone?
But I am being such a guy – showing up late at the party… You may call me a caveman as well. Just for the record – I still haven’t an auto and a TV box at home.
So, this is a Samsung Galaxy Mini, with Android 2.3 installed and I’m typing tbis pretty stupid post from the free WordPress application. My fingers definitely weren’t designed for such small keyboard, but for the sake of training, it’s worth trying.
I’ll definitely hack some ugly code for this thing, well, when I figure out how…
Meanwhile the caveman goes to keep up with other things… His arm hurts and eyes are tired…
09
Oct 11
I’m an Android Owner Now!
30
Sep 11
Zend Framework 1.11.11 (“All Ones”) Released
In fact, besides it’s an “all ones” version, it’s also a “double eleven” release number. Strictly technically speaking, this version introduces near thirty bug fixes.
16
Sep 11
Manning’s Blockbuster Week
Today Manning got to release seven new books on various topics – Rails, Android, Objective-C etc. Three of them being about Server Side Java, where two of them talk about portlets (Liferay in Action and Portlets in Action).
Take a look at the list:
Thus, portlets made the topic of the week!
Also they announced some October releases. Notably, Mahout and Tika apparently going to make Text Mining the theme of the next month!
By the way, this week’s promotin says, you can get a discount (depending on the volume). Here is the exact quote:
“…
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Weekly Special
Save 42% on any order over $50. Use promo code a1842
Save 50% on any order over $100. Use promo code a1850
07
Sep 11
Why Truck Driver is Hottest Trending Job on Indeed.com Right Now
I love Indeed.com, because it is a great tool for both job search and performing some kinds of research. Today I decided to checkout top job trends. HTML5, Mobile, Android, jQuery… So far so good. You know that techy stuff is really hot right now. But Twitter and Facebook both drew my attention because they both are heavily related to social networking, marketing and such.
So I went to to see which kinds of job titles are more prevalent in those categories. Naturally, what I expected to see is something like “Facebook app developer” or “Twitter media advertiser” or whatever…
But what I have seen just struck me! Was it odd? Man it was weird! Ta-raaaam… meet the bachelors! TRUCK DRIVER!!! I didn’t beleive my eyes! What the @#$% “truck driver” doing here?Then I found this line “…Please follow us on Twitter, Myspace and Facebook…” and the matter became clearer. Oh! Thank goodness, they have Twitter and Facebook accounts!
19
Apr 11
Top Twenty Most Demanded Java Development Skills
I have been in Java development for several years, doing mostly server-side(J2EE or custom) programming. But last two years I stepped aside into PHP & JavaScript. Long story short, today I’m considering to attack Java world once more. Sure, Java development landscape drifted around. So, to keep up with latest trends I need to choose wisely which skills to pick for acquiring/refreshing.
So I did my own little research.
The algorithm of the research was pretty simple.
- Log into Linkedin.com.
- In the upper menu go to “More”, then “Skills”.
- Search for “Java”.
- Write down into a spreadsheet all the related skills (with relative growth %), leave irrelevant ones. I ditched Lisp, Prolog and Scheme. I also left alone JBuilder and Swing, because they just irrelevant for me. I’m not going to make UI in Java, and not in JBuilder anyway.
- Repeat this process for every one of the skills in the first round. Eliminate duplicates. I got something like 100 skills.
- Open indeed.com and for each skill in skill list perform search. Write down its % of matching job postings.
- Sort by % of matching postings.
Here goes my top 20 list:
- Spring
- JSP
- Hibernate
- Tomcat
- Eclipse
- Struts
- JBoss
- Stripes
- Servlets
- JDBC
- JMS
- Ant
- JUnit
- EJB
- Maven
- JSF
- Hudson
- Axis
- Velocity
- GWT
This list is not full or precise, but gives a perception of what is going on there in Java jobs world. Then again, I threw things I dislike left and right, so you probably will get slightly different picture.
But let’s go a bit further. What about our trends? I’ve added another column, named “projected”, which calculated as amount of job postings next year (given the trend will remain the same). So, what I have get.
- Spring (remains the leader)
- Hibernate (1 position up)
- JSP (1 down)
- Tomcat (~)
- Stripes (3 up)
- JBoss (1 up)
- Eclipse (2 down)
- Struts (2 down)
- JMS (2 up)
- Hudson (7 up!)
- JDBC (1 down)
- Servlets (3 down)
- JUnit (~)
- Ant (2 down)
- EJB (1 down)
- Maven (1 down)
- JSF (1 down)
- Axis (~)
- GWT (1 up)
- Velocity (1 down)
If you look at next 10, you’ll see there some interesting items: Groovy, Grails, JPA(probably it contains JPA v2 too), iBatis, Ivy. All they have strong upward trends, and probably worth consideration.
Conclusion? It seems like Spring, Hibernate, JSP and Tomcat are must for server-side Java development. Then I should pick several upward trending topics like Hudson, Stripes and JMS(pure backend) and/or GWT(pure frontend). It’s clear even without spreadsheets, that things like Eclipse, JUnit, Ant and Maven are here to stay for at least another several years.
19
Apr 11
SpringSource released Spring Data Graph 1.0 with Neo4j support
Here is an overview of Spring Data Graph features:
- Support for property graphs (nodes connected via relationships, each with arbitrary properties)
- Transparent mapping of annotated POJO entities
- Neo4jTemplate with convenient API, exception translation and optional transaction management
- Different type representation strategies for keeping type information in the graph
- Dynamic type projections (duck typing)
- Spring Data Commons Repositories Support
- Cross-store support for partial JPA – Graph Entities
- Neo4j Traversal support on dynamic fields and via repository methods
- Neo4j Indexing support (including full-text and numeric range queries)
- Support for JSR-303 (Bean Validation)
- Support for the Neo4j Server
- Support for running as extensions in the Neo4j Server
18
Apr 11
JRuby 1.6.1 Released
Just a short update
JRuby 1.6.1 is our first update to 1.6.0. The primary goal of the 1.6.x series is to round out our 1.9 support by fixing any reported incompatibilities. Of course, as with any JRuby release, we will continue fixing any found incompatibilities and also improve performance. All users of 1.6.0 (and lower) are encouraged to upgrade to 1.6.1.
18
Apr 11
Git, jQuery, Rails and Other Interesting GitHub Repos with More Than 1000 Watchers
Recently I’ve browsed the GitHub website and indeed encountered a page with this very name, “Interesting Repositories”. There is no point to duplicate this constantly mutating list. Rather I would enlist here some of them, which currently are of interest for me. So, here we go.
- mirrors / linux-2.6 – Mirror of Linus Torvald’s Kernel Tree. Linux Kernel 2.6 is currently used and developed version.
- git / git – Git Source Code Mirror – Git was developed as dedicated version control system for Linux Kernel. Inspired the whole GitHub project. Recommended reading: Pragmatic Guide to Git
- jquery / jquery – jQuery JavaScript Library. jQuery is huge relief for any JavaScript developer/designer. Very easy to pick up, very easy to extend. It’s so popular, it seems like folks sometimes forget there still is ol’ good JS. Kinda ‘golden hammer’ stuff. Recommended reading: jQuery in Action, Second Edition
- sstephenson / prototype – Prototype JavaScript framework – used to be the default JS/AJAX framework supported by Rails. Featured in a PragProg’s book alongside with scriptaculous. Recommended reading: Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!
- madrobby / scriptaculous – script.aculo.us is an open-source JavaScript framework for visual effects and interface behaviours.
- yui / yui3 – YUI 3.x Source Tree – Yahoo UI is a vast collection of JavaScript UI components(widgets) and utilities (AJAX etc.). One of the most mature. Used to be the ExtJS’s base to built upon.
- rails / rails – Ruby on Rails - served as the platform for GitHub itself (and many others); had huge impact on the whole webdev landscape; matured to version3; has been merged with more modular Merb; dropped Prototype as default JS framework for views in favor of jQuery; now supporting Ruby 1.9. It’s really impossible to pick one book to learn about Rails, but in my opinion AWDwR wouldn’t be totally wrong choice. Four editions since the very early versions of Rails, what else title could brag about such a success?! Recommeded reading: Agile Web Development with Rails (4th edition)
- symfony / symfony – popular PHP web framework (are there non-web PHP frameworks?) still supported by latest versions of NetBeans. Why “still”? Well, they’ve recently dropped Ruby/Rails support.
- sinatra / sinatra – lightweight alternative to Rails.
- dpp / liftweb – very productive Scala web framewok. So, how it compares to Rails? It takes completely different approach, being non-MVC one.
- mongodb / mongo – very popular non-SQL(or non-relational) data store. This is one is of so-called document-oriented type.
- antirez / redis – just like MongoDB, another popular non-SQL DB, but unlike MongoDB, it is a key-value-pair oriented.
- ruby / ruby – perl-like, multi-paradigmatic, expressive, dynamic, agile, yadda-yadda… e.g. awesome enough for convincing DHH to pick it up for Rails development. Ruby, along with Clojure and Erlang, is one of seven languages, picked by Bruce Tate for his (in)famous “7 languages in 7 weeks” book.
- richhickey / clojure – Lisp on Java VM. Seems like both my favorite publishers got good enough books about Clojure. See both Programming Clojure and The Joy of Clojure
- erlang / otp – an exception in the list. They made ‘only’ 943 watchers, but this project definitely deserves an extra credit to be included. Functional language, suited for concurrent programming. CouchDB and RabbitMQ – the two post prominent Erlang-based projects. Recommended reading: Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
- jashkenas / coffee-script – JavaScript without its usual boilerplate.
- FooBarWidget / passenger – Rails deployment made easy.
- documentcloud / underscore – Powerhouse of JavaScript utility functions which fits your back pocket.
- DmitryBaranovskiy / raphael – Got some creative skills? Try Rafael to draw on JavaScript Canvas.
- wayneeseguin / rvm – RVM(Ruby Version Manager). There are indeed too many versions of Ruby around. Matz’s 1.8 and 1.9, JRuby (v. 1.6 currently supports both 1.8 and 1.9 modes), Ruby Enterprise Edition, Rubinius etc. Too much to try to install all of them side by side correctly and in a manner which would allow you to easily switch between them. This is exactly problem which RVM resolves. The installation is not that complicated, but isn’t trivial either. Close keeping to the up-to-date manual is advised.
I tried to keep the list no more than 20 items long, so many very interesting repos were put aside.
Among others I’ve mostly omitted:
- Python projects. Ignoring Python is unforgivable. So I’m not ignoring it. Python books are on my reading queue already.
- All Apple platforms/Objective-C projects. I’m not yet there, even remotely. Yes, it’s huge deal now. Just as .Net was and is.
- All .Net projects. Yes, I know, I should not ignore this part of the world. Probably I’ll consider that more closely, probably later.
There are still several projects I would like to see on the list but they aren’t there. Which ones I’m missing?
Node.js – o’kay, there is V8 in the original GitHub’s list, which somewhat compensates the ‘loss’.
CouchDB – it’s here, in the original list, but seems like it doesn’t generate enough interest, being shaded out by MongoDB probably.
RabbitMQ – developed by folks affiliated with SpringSource/VMWare. It’s a group of repos hosted on GitHub along with many other SpringSource’s projects. Only 54 watchers for rabbitmq-server. And it didn’t draw enough interest to even be included into the ‘Interesting Repositories’ list.
Spring Roo – productivity tool for Spring developers.
WirdPress & Drupal – because they are great publishing platforms.
14
Apr 11
WordPress 3, Rails 3, Spring 3 All Upgrading to Version 3.1
Three hugely popular projects upgrading their version numbers almost simultaneously. With WordPress leading the ‘race’(it’s already 3.1.1 as I’m writing it), the other two are reporting about their upcoming 3.1 releases.
It’s a rather strange observation for me to see like so disparate projects going in sync with their version upgrades. I really don’t know know whether it is a pure coincidence or a deep meaning synchronousness, but in my opinion, every one of the three is an example of brilliance in PHP, Ruby and Java respectively.
All three share similar philosophy and practical attitude. Concentration on usability, happiness and productivity. Every one of those three has a brilliant mind behind it who created it and brilliant and passionate community.