Puakma: Under the hood

The old blog is getting a little neglected at the moment due to a large number of things both work and personal getting in the way. These include:

• Getting Tornado ready for the next release
• Moving Tornado server development to Eclipse
  
• Using evaluating and bug identification in Vortex 1.1 ready for the next release
• Selling our house
• Looking for a new one
• Getting the "Special Soccer" program ready for next season
• Oooodles of work
• More work...
• Moving my mail client to Thunderbird/IMAP instead of Notes - the spam was killing me!
• Thinking about not using a Domino server for email
• Rebuilding servers (puakma.net to Fedora Core 6, internal file/print/app/vmware to SuSE 10.1)
• Looking at lease options for the office as the current lease expires in a couple of months
  

I'm now officially over the Eclipse immediate IDE learning curve. Two nights ago I moved the Puakma project over to the Eclipse development platform. I knew there would be issues, but 118 source files and 3+ changes per file later we have a source tree with no compiler warnings. The most common warnings were unused variables/methods and imports that were never used. The changes were simple albeit very, very tedious. The good news is we're done :-)

I ran the javadoc creator and have discovered (a fact I was blatantly ignoring!) 265 javadoc errors/warnings. Now I need to set some quality time aside and work my way through updating the source file documentation. Should be fun. Not. Programmer l-o-v-e documentation.

The good news is all these pain in the @ss problems for me mean better, smaller, faster code for you. Can't be a bad thing.

I have also switched across to the latest version of the Vortex IDE (1.1 which is also based on Eclipse 3.2, hmmm what a coincidence...), which addresses a number of issues in Vortex 1.0. For me moving to 1.1 for my daily customer facing development is a huge step. It means it works well enough that I can get some serious customer work done. Of course, 1.1 is not perfect, but it is another step along the way to my idea of perfect, and each step builds on the last.

Enough talking about it. Now it's done. Today I have officially moved Puakma development on to Eclipse 3.2.1. A few days ago Martin released a stable enough version of Vortex 1.1 (based on Eclipse 3.2) which we have now switched to for development of web apps. Netbeans 3.6 is hell old and I have been waiting and waiting for a good version of eclipse before I made the leap. As expected it has taken me about 5 hours to port all the netbeans project setup across to Eclipse. The good news is Eclipse helps you write better code (eg by telling you what variables you've declared but never used), so I've been through all the source tree and tweaked the source to remove (almost) all the warnings (about 3 to go).

Strangest thing so far is setting up a jar archive. I like to have my source for editing, then click an icon in the project to generate a puakma.jar. Eclipse has a strange way of setting this up. It almost makes sense now but was difficult to initially work out. 

Tornado is across, now just ESSO and the Ltpa API to go, then it's bye-bye Netbeans 3.6.

Has anyone else noticed a surge in spam over the last couple of weeks. I have got now >300 spams in the last 2 days! Not happy. I am guessing I now spend about 30 minutes per day cleaning the crap from my mailbox. 

I am busy trying to get kspam working on Linux without too much success :-( 

I now see these sneaky bastards are purposely sending mail to a non-existent address on my server with a from address of who they really want the mail to go to. Now it appears we are all acting as unwitting transfer agents. I have just turned off sending delivery failures - now they stay in the mail.box.

This is all such a HUGE waste of time.  

The next version of Tornado is nearing completion. We're just waiting a little to get 1.1 of Vortex a little more rounded out before the release so we can release both simultaneously. The next Tornado release has hugely updated system databases for better administration and web design through the browser. There are 101 internal tweaks fixes and updates too.

Vortex IDE 1.1 will be based on Eclipse 3.2 and have a ton of new internal functionality including a GUI database designer, included help system and better build control.

We currently have no firm release date, I'll keep annoying Martin until Vortex is ready ;-)