Gui for x2svg

Hi,
project x2svg just released a new version that now contains a simple graphical user interface.

You can download it from Sourceforge.

x2svg 1.1 released

Today version 1.1 of x2svg has been released. Notable changes are:
* x2svg can now be run as ant tasks
* more output file types (eps, jpg, png, tiff, pdf) supported
* It is now easier to do mass convertions of svg files or input formats (The svg to xxx converter can be used standalone)
* added an alpha quality XML Schema parser

Check it out and: please give feedback!

Real Benchmark on Postgres

Sun submitted results of the SpecJAppserver benchmark running on Glassfish and Postgres.
Josh Berkus discusses the results at his blog: http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/soup/archives/postgresql-publishes-first-real-benchmark-17470.
The benchmark results can be found here.

Congratulations to the whole team that made this possible. It is a big sign that Postgres is in fact fast (other than what urban legends are always trying to tell).

Of course no one has that configuration 'at home' and I would recommend JBossAS anyway :), but anyway ... :-)

Safari 3 (beta) rocks

Apple presented the new Safari version at WWDC yesterday. It is still a beta, but at least on the Mac it makes a great impression. It is blasting fast - if the server on the other side can deliver at that speed :)

There is now also a Windows version available, so PC users can now also use that great browser.

Ah and btw.: It now also has SVG support

x2svg , first contributor

Today I got an email with patch for x2svg from a user. I am really pleased that finally someone is providing feedback - and then even in such a form.

x2svg 1.0 released

I am happy to anounce the first stable version of x2svg, a tool to
render tree like structures in scalable vector graphics (SVG).
Currently the following three input formats are supported:
- Document Type Definition (DTD)
- Java properties files
- ant build-files

Please check out the release information at Freshmeat.

And as always: please provide me with feedback, bug reports etc.

Sleepless in Stuttgart - the second month

Marlene is now two month old. I have been at home for a month as paternitiy leave, as this is now quite nicely supported with the new Erziehungsgeld from the Government. Also my team lead at Red Hat was quite forthcoming on this topic.
Nights are getting better and better.; the intervals between feeding Marlene are getting longer and somtimes reach 5 hours already. And even if this is not the case, it is relatively painless, as she seldom fully awakes.
As the days are now longer and the nights shorter, it is rather Orlando who doesn't want to go to bed in the evening and wakes up too early in the morning.
I am back at work since last Wednesday and found my way back into the code. For our JBoss ON, we now have a nice gui based installer which is also I18N'ed with (some) German messages. It's fun to see this.
As written in the previous post I was also able to create a tools to render DTDs in SVG. Even if I don't plan to write a new book in the near future, I am interested in finding a solution that could be used in such a project.
Over the bank holiday a week ago, we made a family trip to the town of Weikersheim, stayed at a Framhouse and made some trips into the surroundings.

Kindergarden Dad

Yesterday I spent the morning at the kindergarden of Orlando. Parents have the possibility to stay there to lurk around and see what the kids are doing. As I am currently at home, I took this opportunity.
And I must say that I don't regret it. It was very interesting. For the start the kids are in the courtyard. At 9:30 they go upstairs in the group room, drink tea, eat some fruit and talk about different things. Then they have one hour / 1:30 from 10am on to play at various places or paint or build things etc. At 11:30am lunch starts where the kids pick the meal themselves. After lunch, they
uncloth, go to the bathroom and then to bed for a little nap.
That was the point in time where I left again.
Orlando was very proud that his dady stayed at the kindergarden.
It's also interesting how children's brains work. They asked "Do you stay in kindergarden today?" Me: "Yes" They: "Then you are a baby, because babies stay in kindergarden". Or course they don't consider themselves as babies :-)

x2svg first beta release available

A few days I wrote that I will release my dtd2svg tool as open source.
Meanwhile I refactored the code, fixed some bugs and also wrote a properties parser to visualize properties files.
As there are now not only DTDs accepted, I also renamed the project to x2svg, as I plan to add more parsers in the future.

You can grab the source distribution from here.
To build you also need fop and dtdparser, which need to be present in the lib folder.
Those can be obtained from

• DTDParser: from Mark Wutkas page at wutka.com. Use the 1.21
  version.
  


• FOP: from Apache at xmlgraphics.apache.org. Pick a 0.93 version
  

Have a look at the readme.html file in the doc/ directory of the distribution about details on how to install and run the tool.

x2svg is released under the LGPL.

SVG on Mac OS X

In a recent post I wrote that Safari on the Mac does not know about svg natively.
Inspired by a blog entry by Jeff Schiller, I just downloaded a nightly snapshot of Webkit, the browser engine behind Safari.
This snapshot is already quite well able to render svg on screen, even if it is not yet complete, as you can see on this chart.

Visit to a historic iron mine

Today we made an excurs to an abandonned iron mine in Aalen-Wasseralfingen (around 80km from Stuttgart). The mine itself has been shut down after WWII and is now open for visitors. With little trains one drives into the 400m into the mountain. After a little film about the history of the mine and its general layout, one walks for about 800m through the mine and gets a very good impression why it is a good idea to wear a helmet.
The tour gives a very good impression under what bad conditions our ancestors were pulling iron ore out of the mountains, and it is a perfect occasion to go there when kids start to learn about those things in school.

Where does organic food come from?

For quite some time now, we're getting each week a box delivered that contains organically grown fruit and vegetables. Our supplier is a company called Laisacker from about 30km outside of Stuttgart.
A nice thing about the box is that they put each week fruits and veggies from the current season in, which might be items that we would not buy ourselves, but which will always taste very well :) Laiseacker is growing much of the stuff themselves or buying it at regional partners. In total that organically grown food tastes very good.

Yesterday we made an excurison to the company, as they invited their customers to have a peek. For children there have been various stations to play or to get face painted. The adults could drink a coffe and look at how the boxes are packaged.

SVG resources

Holger and Juliane have a cool repository of SVG related resources, nice drawings in svg and (gui) components done in XML, XSLT and SVG. Among those are e.g. Login-Boxes rendered in SVG or various versions of bar charts processed in SVG.
All this is available at www.treebuilder.de.
Note that for visiting the site, you need a browser that is svg capable like Firefox or a SVG plugin for the browser (as for Apple Safari).

DTD2SVG reloaded

In a past article I wrote about drawing DTDs in SVG in order to convert them to PDF later.
Recently I found some time to work on this matter again (actually I got inspried to do so as I saw that Batik and FOP are making some progress as well). The code is still somewhat *ehm* ugly, but I think the result is already not bad:


I plan on releasing the code in the open source in the next few weeks, so one can use and adopt it to its own needs. Also one of the more interesting features would be to allow for parsing of XML Schema as well.

Sleepless in Stuttgart - the first month

Marlene is now one month old. She and her mom are all right. Nights are as expected 'shorter' than before. Currently Marlene wakes up every two hours and wants to drink. But intervals are starting to get longer.
Also during the day she wants to be close to me or her mom. Luckily we have a baby-sling (see e.g. http://www.didymos.de/english/index_e.htm) so the one looking after her can have both hands free (actually while I a writing this, she is in the baby-sling).
Her older brother Orlando is very excited about his baby sister and likes her very much.
Last wednesday her 3th medical examination ("U3") took place and everything is ok with Marlene.

Stay tuned for another month of "Sleepless in Stuttgart" :-)

Nice new Red Hat videos

Yesterday Red Hat Entreprise Linux 5 was released. And for this release, Red Hat also produced some nice new videos, that you can now find on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+hat+real+technology+lesson&search=Search. The videos are also available on Red Hat website

Slides from JUGS Talket online

The (German) slides from my yesterday talk at Java User Group Stuttgart are online at bsd.de/e3fu/ as PDF.

Eclipse 3.2.1 performance patch

I was recently complaining that Eclipse is taking a nap after a right-click before displaying the context menu.
When looking for an updated Findbugs plugin the update manager also offered me an update called
"Eclipse Java Development Tools 3.2.1 performance patch (bug: 159325) 1.0.0", which is related to the this bug :
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=159325
After installing the Patch, the context menu appears again directly after a right click without any nap.
So this was no problem with the Mac or the Apple VM, but with Eclipse which I only never saw before in Win* times as I was not using such a big workspace together with Eclipse 3.2.1.
According to the bug notes, this is also fixed in 3.3.M2 and - as I understand it - an upcoming 3.2.2 maintenance release.

Timestamp comparision oddities

Yesterday a colleague of mine ran into a problem where code like this produced a ClassCastException:

.. av.getEndTime().compareTo(someDate);

av is a domain class in JPA with endTime like this

@Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
java.util.Date endTime

and someDate being a java.util.Date.

This just worked on my Mac, but failed for one colleague, while others had no problem.
Looking under the covers turned out that av.getEndTime() actually returned a java.sql.Timestamp, which in java versions between 1.5.0_00 and 1.5.0_06 (including) were suposed to throw a CCE when the argument of compareTo() is a Date. Interstingly before() and after(), which also compare, did not have this restriction.
In Java Version 1.4.x the CCE was also not present and SUN seems to have it changed back to the original behaviour in 1.5.0_07. Unfortunately the manual page was not updated, adding to the confusion.
This blog entry also talks about this problem. Sun has a list of page about incompatibilities where this problem is listed. Unfortunately, the original bug report is not accessible (to me).

Some people argue that one should write own comparators, but I think it is easier to update to a newer version of the JDK. Of course if the software gets shipped to customers, one needs to make sure the customer also has 1.5.0_07 at least.

Elvis^Wmarcf has left the building

Now it is official. Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss has retired from his position as SVP JBoss division at Red Hat. Many suspected this when he started to take his paternity leave. There are numerous posts around this like e.g. from Sacha Labourey.

I think it is a pitty, as Marc was a brilliant visionaire. I will aways remember when I was at the Advance Training in Paris in 2003. Juha and Adrian were teaching about various aspects (no pun intended) of the system (it was ealy 3.2 time) when Marc was coming into the room, watching the two for a minute and then running to the front of the room, saying "Forget all the bullshit - now we're doing it the AOP way". And then he started to draw on the flip chart his ideas about interceptors, applying pointcuts etc. Many students in the course have been very irritated, but for me this was really great stuff.

As I am a dad myself I can very well undertand that Marc is now taking care of his kids and his other interests. Some have even seen him as DJ Red Baron. And if you want to know what Marf is up to, you can visit his blog, where he can now freely comment on various things. Also something that he couldn't really do as founder of JBoss or SVP at Red Hat.

Marc, I wish you well - hope we meet again.