jsPgnViewer & stuff

I’m running Debian Unstable and every now and then I have some problems after dist-upgrade. Couple of weeks ago I pumped into gimp-data reconfiguration issue and all I got was “subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1″. As I was in a hurry I just edited /var/lib/dpkg/status to mark the packages not installed.

Today I got the same error for Liferea and now I had the time to investigate. Firstly to turn debugging on for dpkg is a matter of dpkg -Ddebug_level_no. More info with dpkg -Dhelp. Next I ran dpkg -D10 –configure liferea and saw that the post installation configuration is held under /var/lib/dpkg/info. There was a script liferea.postinst.

In that script the line gtk-update-icon-cache –force –quiet “$dir” was failing with a message “The generated cache was invalid.”. I did not start debugging why this was happening. As the list of installed gtk related packages is quite short then I just installed gtk2-engines-pixbuf and the cache update started working. Lucky guess

Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the product and this might be taken as a commercial but nevertheless things will start to change.

Before moving to Java (mostly JEE) I did couple of years PHP development. The thousand levels of abstraction, tons of third party libraries and most importantly the ever taking change-check cycle were something difficult to accept. I was so used to getting feedback automatically and could not even imagine that one day I will even have to re-traverse some application just to store some state.

For the past months I have been working on team battling the change->compile->redeploy cycle. Today there is a release. It is called JavaRebel and the product brings the cycle down to change->compile->check. Classes loaded by the container can be changed and JavaRebel inbetween will load these changes (adding/removing/changing fields, methods etc.).

When I was working on my Google Summer Of Code project I had to buy extra RAM just to be able to run couple of instances of Eclipse. I was not willing to buy a new CPU to make the restarting these instances of Eclipse faster. JavaRebel does not have Eclipse support but it is in the roadmap.

There is a screencast up that will demo some features of it. Java development will change.

After three weeks we have the next release of Eclipse Plugins in Php ready. The update site is the same. The main changes include:

• Reworked API (more in this post and the wiki page)
• Method arguments passed to PHP
• Quercus (GPL software) bundled in an Eclipse Fragment (separate project @ sf.net)
• Tests subproject
• Quercus issu 001859 fixed
• Licenses added
• Nature removed
• Updated Quick Start
• Updated Step-by-step sample

Reworked API
Class level annotation to define the PHP file. Method level annotation to define the PHP function. To map Java to PHP only an interface is needed. Sample:

@ScriptableClass(fileName="helloWorld.php")
public interface HelloWorld {
 @ScriptableMethod(functionName="helloWorld")
 String getHelloWorld(String name);
}

And to instantiate a simple call to a factory is needed:

PhpScriptableFactory.newInstance(HelloWorld.class);

Quercus GPL issue
We depended on Quercus to provide out-of-the-box PHP support. Quercus in under GPL, my plugin EPL. Although we had no code level access to the quercus.jar (discovering ScriptEngine is the J2SE’s work) we separated the two by packaging the GPL part of the libraries in a separate fragment. The fragments host plugin is this our plugin and we offer it on the same update site. This means when you install both of them you can run PHP code just after the install

I battled with different problems during this time and I’ll try to give an overview in the following blog posts. Some issues I had trouble with include:

• Generating proxies with ASM
• Generating interceptors with CGLIB
• Unit-testing Eclipse plugins
• Making an Eclipse Fragment

During this time I also managed to finish last in a Go tournament and get accepted to Tartu University to study CS at the masters level.

My military service ended on 1st of June. After 11months I can again plan my own time and spend it where and how I want to. I’ll be posting updates on the projects I’m involved in when I have something to post. Stay tuned.

I’m writing my bachelors thesis about packaging web software. One format i analyzed as prior work was Google Gadgets. As I’m still in the army and the situation here in Estonia is as it is I have lots of kinda free time with a really laggy WiFi internet connection.

Yesterday I thought I’ll give Google Gadgets a try from the developers point of view and started coding a small gadget. Google has great resources for this:

• Gadgets overview
• Developer guide
• Hello World
• Scratchpad – way to interactively develop and test
• Interactive configurator – get a link to your gadget to include in a webpage (as is in this blog post). Interactively choose colors and size.
  

The problems I did ran into was testing my module @ personalised homepage. The problem is that the module gets cached and you have to change the URL the retest it. So the development cycle looks like this:

• develop the webpage
• prepare the xml file
• copy webpage to xml CDATA
• test (rename and test again)

Maybe there is a solution to this but I just don’t know about it. Anyways here is the gadget (original idea from duke’s page) I developed:

I’ve had some misfortune lately. All started after new years. My so called non-programming December had just ended and i got a vacation from the army. I stacked too many books in to my laptop pack and one of straps broke and my machine got some damage. The motherboard physically broke. In other words my main machine during this time that I’m in the army has broken down. I have to consider my options and either buy a new one or try to fix it, i still have to go through my finances for that.

A week later when I got a leave from the batallion to sit an exam one of my harddrives of my main pc broke down. Luckily only the root drive was damaged and my home is safe. I did not have time to do a reinstall. In other words my computer no. 2 has broken down on me.

Now i’m sitting behind an old win machine that hangs after every 2 hours. I hope I’ll have some updates on pgnview soon but first I somehow have to get my hw problems fixed. I still have one exam to do and hopefully I’ll have my hw updated during that time.

PS. I’m a sergeant and a paramedic now