Orlando's first birthday

My little son Orlando had his first birthday today. We had a party with his grand parents and a friend of him was walking by with his mom.
Orlando very much liked the fact that everyone took care of him and all that. He did not sleep during the afternoon - normally he sleeps for one to two hours.

It is so incredible that a year has passed now. At the start he was a tiny little something that slept, cried and filled the diapers. Now he is walking on his own, eating Pretzel with us, is starting to talk and will start going to the kindergarten next week.

SourceForge.net support

Ok, first: you get what you pay for ...

But an entity that claims to be the best and biggest platform for Open Source development should give better support.

Slowly from the beginning. Andrew uploaded the files to the download farm and set the release to 'hidden'. Then after uploading everything he set the release to 'active'.
Now people get the files in the download list, but when you select one, on the mirror page you get a notice that the mirror doesn't have the file and that sf.net will fix this.
Andrew opened a case with sf support, which was more or less 'just closed'. I also opened a case. And after not fully reading my initial submission, the support guy closed it after exchange of some questions and answers with "if it was hidden, then it will resolve itself in ten days".
What the heck? I see nowhere written, that hidden releases only reappear ten days after setting them to active. No notion why this is the case to what to do to increase re-appearance speed. Users are waiting for the files.

I was thinking about buying a sf.net subscription. But if this only gives me a bad answer faster than when I have no subscription, then no thanks.

Xdoclet: Release 1.2.2 is out

Xdoclet 1.2.2 has been released yesterday. This release is a big improvement with more than hundered closed issues and support for J2EE 1.4 Webservices, JDO 2, Java Server Faces and EJB 2.1.

JDK 5.0 support is still missing, but this will be supported in the next release.

The release entry on Freshmeat will tell you the details. If you use and like Xdoclet, then please also vote for it.

One of the interesting questions will be how much Xdoclet will be used in future now that annotations are part of the languge. Should Xdoclet try to process those as well? As an example: Thomas Diesler of JBoss is currently rewriting the ws4ee part, which is currently based on Axis. In a forum entry, he wrote recently, that JBossWS won't support Xdoclet, but support JSR-181 Webservices Metadata. Bill Burke already has some 'annotations for J2SE 1.4' in his AOP framework, so this will probably also be used in JBossWS. Ok, this is JBossWS only and other manufacturers won't provide such a thing. On the other hand, a translation from JDK 5 annotations to JDK 1.4 + Xdoclet tags might be useful.

Got my copy of "hibernate in action" today.

I got my copy of Hibernate in action today and made it through the foreword so far.

Amongst the reviewers of the book are a few Xdoclet developers: Ara Abrahamian, Matt Raible and Nick Heudecker. When I looked at Amazon sales ranking for the book I also saw that Eric Pugh, who also works on Xdoclet seems to write a book on Hibernate as well. It's a small world.

Now I am uncertain, as I was using Hibernate in the past: should I read the book chapter by chapter or just skip around and perhaps miss important things.

Well, I am glad that my copy is here im my hands now.

AOP: JBossAOP vs. JBoss-Interceptors

I am currently playing with JBossAOP in JBoss AS 4.0. Cool thing!
You basically write a POJO with a method that follows a signature pattern, do some xml mumbos-jumbo and throw everything in the app-server, which deploys it. That's all.

There is one drawback though: currently it is not possible to intercept calls to methods on the EJB home interface. That's still the domain of the old JBoss interceptors that exist since JBoss 2.x.

But else, JBossAOP is really fun.

Orlando is walking on his own

My little son Orlando is now at the age of close to a year walking on his own without any help from us and also without holding a chair or other helpers.
I am very proud :-)

Eclipse plugin horror

I am currently working with webservices. Bruce Scharlau has a nice picture of a graph how the various elements in a .wsdl file are linked together. This picture is generated by a plugin contributed by IBM. The eclipse page also has a download link to it.
Now I am downloading this 55MB zip file, then some EMF stuff and and and.. Sometimes data is flowing in at incredible speeds ro 3kBytes/sec (over DSL!). Then some parts of the download are missing and the update has to start again .. In the end, this sort of action takes ages *sigh*
I really like Eclipse, but this is nightmarish.

And the worst: the feature to generate the diagram is not even available due to some error or incompatibility or missing whatever.

BlogThis for FireFox PR available

Under Mozilla Update :: Extensions -- More Info: BlogThis, the BlogThis context menu extension is finally available again for Firefox.
This tool works like the BlogThis! button in the Google Toolbar for IE.