I catching up on some reading today, and I hit this article, drinking coffee… really bad idea.

A Java database framework: Maintaining control of the development environment – Java World

I’ve had the “pleasure” of supporting JDBC implementations from both Sybase and Oracle, and they are an excellent contrast in approaches. I often joke that Oracle is Dad, and Sybase is Mom. If you head outside without your coat in winter, Mom will stop you and stuff you in it so you don’t get cold. Dad will watch, say nothing, and assume you will figure it out once you freeze your butt off.

Having had the pleasure of working with Oracle, and with SQL Server (Sybase’s mutant cousin), I can only agree.

Frankenfight: IE7 Vs. Firefox 2 – Gizmodo

While IE 7 was away training in the Himalayas for a year and a half, living off walnuts and squirrel meat, Firefox was poking his wife, being a fill-in-dad for his kids, wearing his favorite tighty whities and learning all his secrets.

I followed a link from Tim Bray’s blog, about Sun hiring the JRuby developers, and ended up here. Interesting charts, but I wonder if book sales are a good indicator.

O’Reilly Radar > Programming Language Trends

Programming Language market share trend in computer books

I wrote yesterday about the rise of Ruby and Javascript, driven by the move towards Web 2.0 applications. Also worthy of note in these graphs is the long, slow decline of Java and C/C++, and the continuing rise in market share of C#. You can see how Ruby’s sharp ascent follows the introduction of Rails, and that PHP’s fortunes reversed before book sales showed that web developers in search of rapid development languages moved over to RoR (and Microsoft’s ASP.Net suite of technologies.)

Maven – Guide to Moving From Maven 1.x to Maven 2.x

It is possible to establish parallel Maven builds, one using the old M1 settings, and a second using M2. The Maven 2 configuration file names and uses have been modified, so the two builds should not conflict.

A Maven 1.x build is configured with the following files:

• [project.xml] Project Object Model (POM) definition
• [maven.xml] Custom build scripts
• [project.properties] general build settings
• [build.properties] local build settings

  A Maven 2 build is configured with a different file set:

• [pom.xml] POM definition
• [settings.xml] local configuration

I was just going back over the Maven build that I put together almost one year ago. At the time, I picked the official release, so we used Maven 1.x. I knew we’d have an upgrade down the road, and since I looked into some of the Maven 1 to Maven 2 changes, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. But I see they have managed to put everything together in such a way that you can have both versions available to build without conflicting. Brilliant! I wish everyone that was putting together major new releases, with major changes, did such a good job of taking the pain out of the process.

Now I can install the new Maven 2, and upgrade pieces and parts of our build as I go, when I have the time. And when I’m done, I can just switch the continuous builder over to Maven 2 and I’ll be done. I like it.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

The way to avoid deeply nesting is to do early exit as soon as possible. The trivial example could be rewritten as:

<br />if (!foo) return;      <br />if (!bar) return;      <br />if (!anotherVariable) return;      <br />… and this is the logic<br />

I violently disagree with this solution to the unreadability of deeply nested if’s. IMO, you are just trading one problem (poor readability) for another problem (really hard to debug). If you have deeply nested if’s, then you probably need to apply the state machine design pattern to your code.

Coding Horror: Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe

The top 9 responses are reprinted here. I’m disheartened to see that Visual SourceSafe is still at the top of the list. If you are serious about the practice of software development, you should avoid SourceSafe.

I don’t know how many times this has to be said before developers start paying attention, but let’s try it one more time. Never, never, use SourceSafe.

A J2EE Moment of Zen – Miguel de Icaza

Microsoft’s Avalon is the J2EE of GUI APIs

Interesting. Even more interesting is the plea for the “Rails of GUI”. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Rails is gaining popularity because it is “opinionated” software which favors convention over configuration. What this means for the programmer, is that the plumbing is just assumed to be there, and it works.

Why not a “Rails of GUI”? How hard could it be?

I couldn’t resist posting this screenshot from Microsoft Windows Live Mail Beta.

The only reason I ever got a Hotmail account was to get a “passport”, so I could access my MSDN account online. Now, Microsoft is telling me that an MSDN email, sent from the microsoft.com domain, is failing the SenderID check. How embarrassing…