The final version 0.7 of the Eclipse WebTools Platform (WTP) was released a few days ago. I’ve been using the recent milestone releases for a few months now, and they’ve already been very stable and functional. If you’re using Eclipse 3.1 or planning on upgrading to 3.1, I highly recommend that you install WTP as well. If you’re installing 3.1 from scratch, you may want to grab one of the All-in-one packages that include Eclipse 3....
IBM published a nice article on their developerWorks website that compares Ruby on Rails with J2EE. To be more precise, the article compares the complete Ruby on Rails stack to that of a typical Java web application that combines J2EE with the open source Struts and Hibernate frameworks. This is a very valid comparison (Spring and other frameworks would be valid alternatives as well), as both stacks provide similar functionality. There are however crucial differences in the way these are achieved....
My hosting service, DreamHost, finally upgraded their Ruby installation from 1.6.x to 1.8.2. This should allow me to play with all the recent Ruby software, including the Ruby on Rails web framework, which I’ve heard great things about. I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby, and Ruby on Rails may be a good opportunity to finally do this (I wrote a few simple one-off scripts a couple of years ago, but not enough for the language syntax to really stick)....
I just moved the Subversion repository that I created on my Windows box some time ago over to my Gentoo box (actually the same box, just a different dual-boot OS, now that I’m phasing out Windows in favor of Gentoo Linux). This was a very smooth operation, and I’m pretty impressed with the way Gentoo’s Apache configuration already accounts for Subversion (which is generally exposed as a WebDAV repository using an extension of the Apache mod_dav module)....
I just had a funny debugging experience. I had added a new Ant target with a Java task, but when I tried to execute it Ant complained with the following error message: The <java> type doesn’t support the “classame” attribute As I didn’t see anything obvious, I did what I often do in those cases: I copied and pasted the error message into Google. This time there were no search results, but Google responded with a helpful message nonetheless:...