Software Engineering Radio On Model Driven Software Development

Great series of podcasts on model driven software development by the folks from Software Engineering Radio. I spend some time last weekend listening to...

• Episode 5: Model-Driven Software Development (Part 1)


• Episode 6: Model-Driven Software Development (Part 2)


• Episode 16: Model-Driven Software Development (Part 3 / Hands-On)

... and also pointed my coworkers to those episodes in order go get all of us jump-started on MDSD, a topic which will be becoming of major importance in one of our upcoming projects.

Ruby On Rails

If you are developing web applications under J2EE just like me, and also grew increasingly curious about all that hype around Ruby on Rails lately, you might want to have a look at the screencasts available at rubyonrails.org. Having watched some of the presentations, it's certainly too early to draw any conclusions yet. All I can say is that Ruby on Rails looks like an extremely productive environment. Hacking prototypes that way seems like a very natural thing to do. On the other hand, there is a lot of magic going on. And I don't like magic, at least not too much of it. I am also one of those old-fashioned developers who prefer to pass their code through a compiler before running it. Still, I will definitely take a closer look on Ruby on Rails as soon as my schedule allows me to.

Gates To Leave Day-To-Day Role At Microsoft

News of the day: Microsoft announced Thursday that chairman and co-founder Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company, effective July 2008, to spend more time working on his charitable foundation.

Having read a lot on Bill Gates' biography over the years, I am a little bit surprised by this step. He had been showing such a lot of drive and dedication for the software business for more than thirty years. The people who challenged him, Gary Kildall (DR), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Ray Noorda (Novell), Jim Cannavino (IBM), Philippe Kahn (Borland), all of them kissed the dust sooner or later. I am not sure about Eric Schmidt and Google yet ;-) Anyway, and whether people like it or not, Gates is leaving the ring as undisputed champion.

Dolphin Filemanager For KDE

My friend Peter has now published a first alpha version of his Linux filemanager codenamed "Dolphin". It is being implemented in C++, based on Qt. I know Peter's works from several years of joined efforts on a C++ framework, so I can really recommend Dolphin to Linux desktop users in KDE camp. Unlike Konqueror, Dolphin supports file operations exclusively and emphasizes on usability and performance.

Please give it a try, and tell Peter what you think about it.

Totally GridBag

Ironically I found this video scoffing at the infamous Java GridBagLayout the very same day I helped a friend on some GridBagLayout code. I thought I had finally achieved GridBagLayout mastery after years of practicing ;-). One of the first things in any AWT or Swing project used to be a subclass of GridBagConstraints with some convenience constructors for setting the property values all at once. But in the days of UI designers like Matisse I seem to have forgotten again some GridBagLayout specialities. Well, maybe that's not even a bad thing.