$ thought | blog

Updated: Sorry but following video is removed from YouTube!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjnxFyJT2I4]

Everybody is blogging! We get thousands of posts everyday and a wide range of topics and related information. I must admit that I can't even read all the information which I receive on "Technology" tag per day. There is so much to share and so much to read.
I came across Technorati page this morning

The tag "Foto" is in the popular list. What does that mean? I believe this word belongs to a non-English language. I found it very strange to see that tag. To help other people, there is other way, we can tag with "Photo" and "Foto" so the tagging is bilingual and other people also can find that very easily.

Tagging is the only way which make us reachable to post. We should tag nicely. Who would like to give me some guidelines of tagging your posts? Please share your comments.

Ever you wished about a feature in product and it happened right away? How quick? Well in my case it took 7 hours flat! Yesterday night before sleeping, I tried to organize my Google Reader subscriptions. I wanted to categorize them with labels. Man, that was real pain! For each label it will say "Fetching you subscription list" and the pane size keeps on changing. That was really painful for me to arrange my reading list.

I opened my mail editor to send feedback to Google Reader that I want you to make it simpler! But I didn't send the mail and fall asleep. I wake in morning, go to Reader and amazingly I could see the screen below

Man, that was quick! I happily organized the reading list and I have decided to be with Google Reader for some more time.

Kudos to Google team.

I read today about new protocol for reading and writing data on web. Google has put the client libraries and other information on their website. I really appreciate the style of Google for providing open standards as well open application interfaces. We all know that Google earns a huge amount of money from their Ad programs but still, they are doing many things for free. Their every effort to make the web better place is clearly visible. Take example of their vast range of applications, (Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Reader, Suggest, Maps...) all applications are wonderful and I love them. Undoubtedly they brought the Ajax wave to mass. Many people were using XMLhttp before Google too, but it was not to masses, Google not only made it visible but they demonstrated how you can really simplify the applications!

Similar things should happen for quite long from now. We need help from giants on the web. They need to help building and realizing the open standards so that Web 2.0 and subsequent versions of it will be much more powerful than anybody has seen or imagined!

It’s been a while since Callisto has been announced. I don't have statistics about how many downloads happened for Callisto since first release. Most of you might know that, Callisto is collection of 10 most popular eclipse projects which will be released as a distribution. That really helps! In fact, I was waiting for such thing from so long.

Eclipse has hundreds of plugins and each of them has different dependencies. Once I tried to update WTP 1.0.7 in Eclipse 3.0.1 and every time it gave me a version mismatch error. I did not even know how to resolve the plugin version dependency! That was good example of plugin hell! The same feeling I had in Windows when it used to say XXX.dll has this version and you need XXX.dll with some different version. Now where I am supposed to get the newer version? I finally downloaded wtp-1.0.7-all.zip which has all things in-built from eclipse 3.1 to wtp latest version. Then I faced another problem, after downloading WTP, I had two versions of eclipse on my machine!

Callisto is good effort to address all such problems. Many times, I ask one of my team-member that, "Hey pal, you don't have xml editing feature installed in eclipse? Go get WTP and then it will allow you to edit/format xml in the editor." That guy spends almost half-day to build his workspace environment for editing couple of xml files. That’s even worse example of increasing productivity by using tools!

Now Callisto will give me one URL which should broadcast throughout my team and within couple of hours everybody's eclipse workbench will be restored to latest version of top 10 projects from eclipse.org. For those who don't know which are those top-10 projects here is the list:

• Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project
• C/C++ IDE
• Data Tools Platform
• EMF
• GEF - Graphical Editor Framework
• Graphical Modeling Framework
• Eclipse Project
• Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform Project
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project
• VE - Visual Editor

This was needed by eclipse from long time. One URL, one distribution and you are ready to go. Really it should be that simple!

I was wondering will it beat NetBeans. There are few things which NetBeans is doing good. Good examples would be Enterprise pack and Profiler. These packs integrate very tightly with NetBeans. WTP needs that simplicity. Be it anything, BPEL, Glassfish or your favorite relational database, they just get part of IDE! That’s really a great feature of NetBeans. Visual studio always has such kind of integration with all available tools. NetBeans has exactly delivered same power.

I like Xml Schema editor, Schema refactoring, Web Services development and lots of other features which are great! I tried almost each type of project creation in NetBeans since my last post. I must say, its worth to give a try to NetBeans by all those people who love eclipse.

No! No! No! I am not advocating NetBeans, I am just saying just try another project which is powerful, next-generation and perhaps best Java IDE on planet! And above all, it’s free! So get your latest copy of NetBeans, Enterprise Pack & Profiler and start working on that. Remember it’s just another open-source project so there is nothing I can give to this community than my praising words! Soon I will get involved in editor development of NetBeans. (My current schedule doesn't permit me to blog too )

Cheers Eclipse & NetBeans team! I really owe you a, "Thanks!”