SigmaLab

Delle persone in gamba hanno avuto una idea per un linguaggio molto interessante. Hanno preso come modello c#, la libreria di tipi la stessa del gnome GObject. Alla fine, i sorgenti vengono compilati in file C e header, non soffrendo di overhead del runtime .net e non neccessità di un runtime di esecuzione. Fra le varie features: interfaccie, proprietà, segnali, foreach, espressioni lambda, inferimento dei tipi su variabili locali, generici, tipi non null, assistenza nella gestione della memoria, gestione delle eccezzioni, ecc. Se vi stuzzica potete cercare Vala qui.

I was programming away when I unintentionally deleted a file by mistake. As by law, that same file was modified and not committed in the svn repository. Thankfully NetBeans has a slick local history as well and you can revert a deleted file. This just saved my evening. While the subversion support in NetBeans was a nice inclusion into 6.0 it was flaky at moments and I had issues up until M9 but it would seem it was solved in M10 and with the local history it really does offer a nice feature set.

As I’m registered on the Borland developer network up until now I’ve been given the chance to answer two polls on the road they should take in the future. I personally dropped using the JBuilder IDE long time ago as it started to have too great machine requirements and also because of it’s mostly commercial orientation (something I didn’t need back then). When I received the last poll I’ve been using Eclipse in and out (and also tried their excellent Together for Eclipse IDE for architects) so as I was really hooked up on it I of course gave full support for to migrate JBuilder to Eclipse as well. Personally I don’t really know what did the JBuilder community loose with this nor do I care to make any comments on JBuilder 2007 but what I find really great about Borland is that they do these polls and actually take the time to analyze what do their potential and current users want. I really think that is a positive attitude towards software development that I hope in the long run will help CodeGear recover the grounds on the IDE market.

The fine people of Caucho Technology did a 100% Java implementation of PHP5 (released under GPL) called Quercus. While I don’t know PHP as well as Yoghi it presents a interesting platform that has an enormous community. As always, having choice is a great thing and this look like a really promising project that could allow PHP apps to scale better as it compiles to bytecode and enables usage of native Java libraries.

Couple of weeks ago I’ve tried a UML designer by Soyatec. They had a nice web page and a free version of the tool so I said to myself why not. In fact I must say I liked it very much even though it has some limitations over the commercial version and a bug in diagram exporting. It also features a nice reverse engineering of your existing code to a Class diagram.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t do any stories that my project was in code repository. This is a strong drawback that the free edition of Omondo has, a tool that I’ve tried on numerous occasions and also always had issues with projects that are in version control. One more thing I don’t like about OmondoUML was the fact that it used annotations in the documentation (ala xdoclet), instead separate files.

So there I was browsing the eclipse site and looking of new eclipse plugins to pick up when I saw this nasty thread on the EclipseDatabase plugin. It would seem that Soyatec was founded by ex-Omondo employees and Omondo is having issues with the Database plugin that Soyatec now distributes.

I think it would be ashame if Omondo sued Soyatec. The UML plugin shows some great potential and if a suit gets filed the only one that will get payed in the end will be layers and not developers, it’ll only set back both Omondo and Soyatec. Does anyone have any more info on this matter?

That said I think Omondo has really *great* modelling tools, even beside the doclet annotations and project-in-versioning issues. In fact I think I’ll download their latest plugin for the just released Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) which seems to bring very nice features on the table and I hope they are putting their modeling informations using the eclipse metamodel and in separate files.

To Omondo and Soyatec,

You are competitors, but  you should put your axes aside and do what you do best and compete on technical merits, if you start litigations other projects can and will surpass both of you. Be good.