October 24, 2010

BeJUG Distributed Versioning Tools in practice

Last week Louis Jacomet and myself presented Distributed Version Tools in practice at BeJUG, we talked about the differences between the classic centralized versioning systems (CVS, SVN, ...) versus the modern distributed ones, next we compared GIT and Mercurial feature-wise and discussed new development workflows that DVCSes bring to the table.
We were lucky to have a very vocal audience, they've asked many interesting questions and gave great feedback. I was impressed by the number of people already experimenting with or wanting to move to GIT or Mercurial from SVN, clearly the dominant versioning system in used by the attendees. Someone wondered if in a team GIT and HG could be used together, while we didn't have an answer at the time, I can now confirm that a Mercurial extension to talk to GIT exists: http://hg-git.github.com/ 
We hope you all had an interesting evening, if you're looking for some reference material or couldn't attend the session, here are the slides:

June 08, 2010

Make JavaFX applets smooth on Firefox for Mac

Lately when I was browsing websites with JavaFX applets I noticed the Java plugin would either not work, load slowly, crash or flicker when scrolling the page. This wasn't the case on Safari, so I looked at the about:plugins URL which lists the currently installed plugins in Firefox.

I noticed 2 unknown plugins to me called MRJPlugin and Java Embedding Plugin, a plugin that's apparently shipped with every Firefox on Mac OSX. Basically this plugin allows to use the latest Java version in the browser. Since Java 6 update 10 with it's Java Applet Plugin v2 is available for Mac OSX Snow Leopard, it's actually not necessary to have the J.E.P. plugin enabled. In fact Firefox prefers this plugin over the official Sun Java Applet Plugin v2 wich offers improved load times, browser integration, stability, etc.

After I removed both plugins, Firefox was loading applets incredibly fast, near Flash load time performance. The applets don't flicker anymore when scrolling and so far haven't crashed on me.

To remove the unnecessary plugins you should remove both the files MRJPlugin.plugin and JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle from /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/Plugins .
To open the Firefox.app bundle in Finder you need to Ctrl+Click and choose Show Package Contents.

I hope this improves your JavaFX experience...

February 09, 2010

JSmooth Windows Service with custom JRE

For a customer I needed a solution to launch a standalone Java application as a Windows Service. After evaluating a number of solutions I ended up with JSmooth 0.9.9-7 http://jsmooth.sourceforge.net/ a very nice open source product with nice GUI to guide you through the process.

Because the product of my customer depends on a specific JVM version we decided to bundle our JVM version with the product. JSmooth supports bundling a custom JVM, however when running as a windows service it ignores this setting. It's been a while since the original author responded to forum messages or released a new version, so I decided to jump in the C++ code. I'm nowhere near a C++ expert, but managed to create a simple workaround.

My bugfix (source + skeleton binary) can be downloaded here.

Just drop the winservice.exe file in your JSmooth installation under /skeletons/winservice-wrapper/ and recompile your service EXE. The service logfile should now be populated with messages indicating it's attempting to run your bundled VM and so on.

Enjoy!