Tag: bbweblog

Geert Bevin, known for his work on the full-stack open source framework ‘RIFE’, has an interesting post on artima developer about an interesting sounding IDE that I’ve never come across before called X-develop.

Geert mentions a couple of benefits of this IDE that I realize now seeing them in writing I find extremely infuriating with Eclipse – X-develop gives you ‘permissive’ code completition that still works even if you have compilation errors (which not many other IDEs including Eclipse do not), and the IDE itself takes up minimal screen real estate, something else that drives me crazy with the different perspectives and views in Eclipse.

Another cool feature which I would love to see in all IDEs (I’ve only read about this but have never seen it in an IDE before), is ‘back in time’ debugging, which allows you to step backwards through your code as well as forwards. This is an awesome feature. One of the most annoying features in current debuggers is that you are stepping through your code looking for that one particular place where you have some bug, and then you step too far by mistake and you miss it, and now you have to start again to get back to that one crucial place. If this feature is what it sounds like, then it would allow you to step back to previously executed code to see where you came from – that is an awesome timesaving feature.

After this week’s news that production has not yet started on the PS3 which is due to start shipping worldwide in November, Sony has confirmed the shipping numbers. They are planning on 2 million units to be available for the mid-November launch, with a further 2 million available for end of year 2006.

Something is strange with this annoucement as it doesn’t seem to fit with the fact that Sony has said they are not yet in production – time is counting down, and if they haven’t started production yet they don’t have much time to get 2 million boxes out of the door.

I can only imagine that there is some marketing strategy going on here, and by giving consumers the impression that they will be in short supply on day 1, people will be camping out over night to get their hands on one, and therefore helping increase demand. Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft did with the limited numbers for the XBox360 launch?

Jason Rudolph has a great article showing how to use EJB3.0 Entity Beans step-by-step with the Grails framework.

Last time I tried with Grails 0.1 with Entity Beans there was some issues with package names and the generated scaffold code, so I hope that’s been resolved now. You can also define Groovy classes and mappings using Grails ORM (GORM) as an alternative approach.

Grails really is an awesome framework for rapid web app development, and I urge you to check it out if you haven’t done so already.