Firefox 3

I, like many others, downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. It was an attempt for a Guinness World Record titled Spread Firefox. The result was more than 8 million downloads in a single day. Quite impressive!

I did not have time to install it yesterday as I was on a holiday, busy attending Google Developer Day 2008. See my photos on Flickr. I met there with few fellow developers, like Dmitry Baranovskiy, who you can see speaking at Web Directions South soon and Carlos Mari, Director of Carlos Labs.

So I installed Firefox 3 today. I must say that I am quite impressed with the browser itself and with the ease of upgrading. I expected few hiccups on the way but it was all smooth.

Out of my 31 add-ons installed on Firefox 2 only six do not work. The six that no longer work are:

• AutoCopy
• ColorZilla
• EROnline (Exit Reality)
• Firebug
• Google Browser Sync
• Link Alert

I am going to miss AutoCopy and ColorZilla dearly. I am sure that Exit Reality will release a new plug-in real soon.

And for Google Browser Sync - it's a real shame that this is discontinued. But I knew this in advance, therefore I backed up my bookmarks and returned back to my favorite Foxmarks

In case you wondered what add-ons I use and currently have installed, here is a list:

• Download Statusbar
• Dummy Lipsum
• Dictionary English (AU)
• Dictionary English (US)
• FlashGot
• Forecastfox
• Google Earth
• Google Gears
• Google Notebook
• Greasemonkey
• Html Validator
• IE Tab
• Live HTTP Headers
• MeasureIt
• meebo
• Mouse Gestures
• Operator
• PDF Download
• Personas for Firefox
• Quick Locale Switcher
• Redirect Remover
• Total Validator
• User Agent Switcher
• Web Developer
• YSlow

Happy browsing, everyone!

PS: I also installed Skype 4.0 and it is very sleek!

Java Puzzlers, Episode 6

I am a big fan of Java Puzzlers.

Another part of the Java Puzzler series appeared on Google Video couple days ago. This is one named Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: Java Puzzlers, Episode VI and is a repeat of a talk given at Google in May and at JavaOne 2007.

Josh Bloch and special guest star Bill Pugh present yet another installment in the continuing saga of Java Puzzlers, consisting of eight more programming puzzles for your entertainment and enlightenment.

I really enjoyed watching it and also learnt a thing or two.

Funny thing was when Bill Pugh said in the conclusion:

Use FindBugs: it finds all 8 bugs in this talk!

I use FindBugs everyday and I have to tell you, our codebase (JIRA) is quite clean and FindBugs helps us to keep it that way.

Alright! Enough said. Go on! Watch it!

Related posts: Java Puzzlers

Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney

I attended Google Developer Day in Sydney this week. The main page describes the content of the sessions in Sydney. It also links to related video records that can be viewed at YouTube.

The event was well organized. Originally, this was meant to be a 100 people event. However due to its popularity, the event was fully booked within 20 minutes after the registration opened. Later Google decided to change the venue to Australia Technology Park and were able to accommodate all people from the waiting list.

One of the biggest announcements was Google Gears (BETA). It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Google Gears is an open source technology for creating offline web applications. As published in Sydney Morning Herald:

The Gears technology promises to give Google a better platform from which to go after Microsoft's very lucrative Office franchise.

Here is a blog post that will get you started with Gears.

Another announcement of the day was Google's purchase of Panoramio, a website that links millions of photos with the exact location where they were taken.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) got an upgrade as well. GTW 1.4 Release Candidate is a major upgrade to the Google’s open-source framework for writing AJAX web applications in the Java programming language. Read more about its features at ZDNet blog post by Ed Burnette: Google Web Toolkit 1.4: "Have to see it to believe it".

Google Web Toolkit had brought Google's AJAX development out of the dark ages and into the 21st century.

said Lars Rasmussen in his AJAX is painful, painful, painful talk.

Also announced was Google Mashup Editor - experimental product, online application to create mashups. It is currently in beta and access is limited to small number of developers during this testing period.

A great combination of Google's APIs are Google Mapplets. They are mini-applications that you can embed within the Google Maps site. Then they can manipulate the map using Javascript calls that are derived from the Google Maps API. The preview maps site also has Street View, which is very cool and was enabled just few days before Google Dev Day.

When we arrived we received a "speedgeeking" card, which listed six URLs of Google mashups. These six sites were presented live on big screens in the lunch area where everybody had a chance to see the products, talk to the authors and cast one's vote. At the end of the day, Property Guru took the prize home.

And if it was not Google, there would be no search. I was strongly reminded that Google is the company behind the most popular search engine when I saw this card on the tables.

So there you go Google! I blogged and published my photos with GDD07 tag. Go and find me!

How we built Flickr workshop and Web Directions North conference

I just came home after a two-day Web Directions South 2006 conference. This conference was a huge success. I will blog about it more later. What is next? Well, there is going to be a Web Directions North conference in Vancouver in 6-10 February next year. And if you look at the schedule, there is some skiing and boarding planned as well... just get your boss to pay for it :-)

This is a link to the upcoming one-day workshop presented by Cal Henderson on Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr organized by webworkshops.

It is scheduled as following:
Brisbane 13 November 2006
Sydney 14 November 2006
Canberra 16 November 2006
Melbourne 17 November 2006

Hope to see you there!

Sun Developer Days in Sydney

I went to Sun Developer Days here in Sydney last week. The two days were packed with sessions running in two halls. I was curious about what was new in Java space. I attended sessions from both tracks. Most of them were showcases of new Sun products such as NetBeans 5.0 and 5.5 Preview and Java Studio Creator.

Some of the sessions I'd like to highlight were:

• Java SE: Tiger, Mustang and Dolphin
  • This session was a nice summary of Java language evolution, its current features and features of Java SE to look forward to in the future releases;


• Persistence for Java SE and Java EE Applications using the Java Persistence API
  • This session gave me a new perspective onto the persistence beyond EJBs and ORM such as Hibernate. It's a whole new API that can be used if you don't want to do EJBs;


• Effective Database Strategies for Developers & Deployers
  
  • This one was given by Tom Daly, an Aussie originally from Adelaide living in California;
  • It was a very good session focused on embeddable databases.
    

Some other session didn't match their titles and were rather confusing in a sense that I went there to get something and I got something else. Some of those session were:

• Building great games for the mobile world
  • This one covered APIs for building mobile games, but failed to deliver anything that I would consider cool or great - it was just an ordinary mobile games development guide;


• Optimizing Performance for Java SE and Java EE applications
  • I expected something else here, but it was a nice coverage of JVM internals in terms of memory management, similar session I saw 3 years ago at Sun Developer Day in Melbourne;
  • Oh yeah! Did you know that when you start JVM by calling java on the command line there are around 350 parameters you can set?

The excellent sessions I want to talk about were given by Angela Caicedo on Java ME and NetBeans Mobility Pack. Angela's easy to absorb approach was well met with the audience. You could see that she loves NetBeans and Java ME. She was very keen to explain everything. I give her 5 stars even when one of her demos did not work. I highly recommend to see her presentations even if you are not into ME yet, like myself. Now I am converted. I came home, installed mobility pack on top of NetBeans 5.5 Preview and started developing and deploying to my latest mobile phone. It's fun, and it's much easier than two years ago when I tried it first.

Overall, my impressions from Sun Developer Days in Sydney were very positive. Sun is making a big push for Java ME, Java 6 and community around Java. They also offer some good Java dev tools for free. As Bob Brewin, engineer and architect for Sun Developer Tools said, if you are using IDE other than Eclipse or NetBeans and you are paying for it, you are making a mistake.