Application launchers

Now it's season of thinking (at least for my known circle) for improving productivity in workplaces. It happened to me to read few chapters in a book by Neal ford, called "The Productive Programmer" A somehow very informative book on introducing various tools which can actually help in increasing the productivity.

I still love command line tools, pretty fast, low memory footprint. Over the years, i always try to create batch files are shell scripts for my routine work, like start various servers with different settings, invoking project build, folder syncing. Once i create them, i put all together in one folder and make the folder available in the PATH. That's all. The problem i was facing with this approach, Whenever i change my machine, it was hard for me to transfer them in to my new machine and make them work as the path changes.

So i decided to give a try to launchers. I tried several application launchers and i settled with Launchy, pretty decent tool then. Though i like it's simple UI, It doesn't completey solve my needs. When i looked at Executor, i was impressed and currently playing with it. At first glance, it's UI looks simple and skinnable(I'm not a fan of fancy skins, but it allows me to choose my colors), its feature list also impressive. Mostly I'll end up with Executor.

Another application launcher is ENSO is worth to give a try. it may be strong by features, for me it is not user friendly.

Until next time,
Arunachalam

Adobe Flex

I'd like to refresh my UI knowledge after a long gap of 2+ years. By the time i left eclipse based plug-in development, i tuned myself in core application program. I did few XML server side stuff and managed a team in Java Swings and finally built an adapter for webMethods Integration server. I was into little bit of XQJ1.0 spec implementation. little bored? yes. now i get some time. Somehow i turned my attention from core application to UI.

By the time, i looked UI, it tremendously grown and more stylish too. JSP, Struts, velocity, looks like vintage classic tools to develop UI. Now i could see this is the age of Rich Internet application (RIA). As i want to part of this modern phase, i started learning Adobe flex.

I'll write my experience with Flex soon.

Stax parser's hard to solve problem

I ran into some sort of serious issues with stax parser(woodstox implementation) in the recent time. You might have also encounter the problem with woodstox.

WstxEOFException: unexpected EOF prolog row[0,1]...

According to the document, this would happen when the TCP connection is broken when the stream is being read. because of this, the XML read was not successful. But this was not in my case. My connection to http server never end. then what's the problem? what went wrong?

It took more than five hours to resolve. When the stream is received from the http connection, one of my API reads the header information of the stream and then pass the stream for further parsing, when it uses the same stream (half read by other opeartion) for parsing the rest of the response, it failed. when i reset the stream, it went very well.

So please be sure that your input stream is reset before you parse every time.

Big mess around XQJ1.0

One of the oldest JSR which has started in 2003 and not yet reached the final stage. I still doubt whether there is an active group working towards it's 1.0 spec release. Many of the comments from the approval forum says the interface level were not sufficient. There are quite a few XML databases in the market. Except XQuery there are no similar interaction layer. Data Direct is one such company trying to standardize this but in a wrong direction. As a key member in JSR-225, Data Direct might take a strong step towards its release.

Even after 6 long years, the specification fails to come to the center stage, there are chances that people might forgot XQJ. Whoever dealing with XML databases now with their own proprietary API will stick with them. Rewriting them would cost and might affect the stability. Quick releases in specification would increase the chances of stability and feature packed by early feed backs from industry.

I could find one open source implementation on proposed 1.0 spec is saxon.

Though there are chances for improvement, I'm waiting to see the XQJ spec in the limelight soon.