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!

ExitReality goes to Beta

ExitReality finally flicked the switch this week and went to Beta.

ExitReality is an exciting new social media platform that aims to improve your online experience with an enhanced 3D, multi-user, immersive messaging environment.

Duncan Riley reported on TechCrunch in ExitReality Turns Social Network Profiles Into 3D Spaces that ExitReality promises to transform the social networking experience by offering virtual versions of every social network site profile.

ExitReality works with leading global social media sites Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Bebo and is launching soon.

As published in JDJ: Carl's Jr. and Hardee's Web Sites Among First to Go 3D

For the initial launch, each MySpace member gets a 3D apartment that automatically includes their music, friends, comments and videos, and can be decorated in limitless ways. Using 3D avatars, a user can don a logoed jacket, meet friends at the Carl's Jr. or Hardee's virtual restaurant or invite friends over to the burger-themed social-network living room. There, they can ride a mechanical bull, like the one in the famous Western Bacon Cheeseburger ad, play the entertaining Burger Slayer game, as well as pick up 3D widgets such as TVs, arcade game machines, furniture, and even 3D living room or restaurant layouts to decorate their own pages.

This was also noted in Duncan Rileys' ExitReality Launches With Carl’s Jr Deal

Another interesting aspect is the way the platform works; unlike Second Life that relies on centralized servers, the ExitReality plugin renders the page based on the details of the page, so it doesn’t need to rely on centralized servers (the only aspect that would be lost in the case of downtime would be chat). Further as users interact on and around each page, those visitors are counted in local logs, so a website owner doesn’t lose traffic; in effect this is a visual layer the browser sees but with the original content at the original page.

Have a look at Carl's Jr. or Hardee's.

I have already signed up. Have you?

JIRA Issues Google Gadget

It's been a while since my last post. You may have been wondering what I've been up to. Well, I was busy spending my free time developing my first Google Gadget.

I must say that the Google Gadgets documentation, especially the Developer Guide are well written and easy to follow. Development itself was a smooth ride. The only hiccup I had on the way was at the beginning when I realized that my gadget was being cached and I had to figure out hot to switch caching off.

Have I read the docs from the beginning, I would have discovered the Developer Gadget (developer.xml) that let's you control gadget caching.

I work with JIRA on a daily basis. I work with it in order to keep track of issues: bugs / tasks / new features. I also work on it - meaning the source code of JIRA as I am one of the developers on JIRA team at Atlassian.

Last week on Thursday and Friday we had out traditional Fedex days. We were let loose to develop anything we wanted. There were no boundaries for creativity. For the results (useful and/or cool stuff) see our developer blog.

I decided to create a gadget that would display limited number of JIRA issues. So I finally got to finish JIRA Issues Gadget 1.0 as well as develop the Add To Google JIRA plugin that would allow integration as painless as possible. I already blogged about it at Atlassian Developer blog.

Google Gadgets can take user preferences and persist them. My idea was to pass these in the "Add To Google" link in order to allow JIRA users to place JIRA Issues gadget on Google Homepage pre-set with current search filter in JIRA.

But them I hit the wall. Passing user preferences in the "Add To Google" link was not implemented yet.

Anyway, I managed to ease the pain a bit. With Add To Google (JIRA plugin) you won't be able to add Google Gadget with one-click operation, but you will have the URL you can copy and paste into the user preferences of the gadget.

At 4pm on Friday all Atlassian developers presented their hot creations to each other.

For more information read JIRA Issues Gadget page. Add To Google plugin source code can be found at Atlassian's public SVN.

BTW: If you want to work on JIRA or other Atlassian products, let us know. We are hiring.

Google Reader just got better

I use Google Reader for reading blogs. It has become my daily chore as I need to keep track on things happening around our office (we blog internally and externally) as well as other things of my interest.

It was brought to my attention that Jon Hicks created new skin for Google Reader. I thought I would have a look.

I had to install Stylish extension for Firefox first. Then I added a new style that I downloaded from Jon's website. And the result?

Before:

After:

I absolutely love it!

It has made reading blogs so much better. Why don't you give it a try?

Codegeist II

I wanted to drop a quick, work-related note about Codegeist II, the second annual Atlassian plugin competition. We've put up $20k in cash prizes and the contest is now accepting entries.

The same rules as last year apply -- teams of one to three people, enter as often as you like, all submissions must be BSD-licensed. All entries will become part of the open-source plugin libraries, free for anyone to use. The contest concludes May 13th.

You'll find all the details on the Codegeist space on confluence.atlassian.com. And stay tuned to the Atlassian Developer Blog for updates.

If you're a developer, or you know any developers, this is a great opportunity to win some great prizes. We had some great entries last year, and it was fun handing out the prizes to some smart and deserving teams. I'm looking forward to seeing what we get this year.

Microformats - hCard

What is new on my blog today? I added my contact information into the template. Since I learnt more about microformats at the Web Directions conference, I used hCard microformat. No, you cannot see it as the style on that DIV is set to display: none and that means it's there but not visible.

If you have Tails or Tails Export extensions for Firefox or Flock browsers, you should be able to see these normally grey icons get some colors .

When you click on Tails you get

When you click on Tails Export you get

All I added was this:

<div class="vcard" style="display: none;">
 <a class="url fn" href="http://hanuska.blogspot.com/">Dushan Hanuska</a>
 <div class="adr">
  <span class="locality">Sydney</span>
  <span class="region">NSW</span>
  <span class="postal-code">2000</span>
  <span class="country-name">Australia</span>
 </div>
 <span class="geo">
  <span class="latitude">-33.879176</span>,
  <span class="longitude">151.212044</span>
 </span>
</div>

If you want to add your hCard onto your page, you can create one using hCard Creator. It's quite simple and gives only the basic options, but it's a good place to start.

GWT Studio Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

Alex Tkachman of Jetbrains announced on Friday that he had developed a plugin that adds support for Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to IntelliJ IDEA.

More information and a watchable demo

Free Code Coverage Tools

What is code coverage? When the query "define:code coverage" is run in Google, you will find the following definitions:

• An analysis method that determines which parts of the software have been executed (covered) by the test case suite and which parts have not been executed and therefore may require additional attention.
  www.testingstandards.co.uk/living_glossary.htm
  


• Code coverage is a measure used in software testing. It describes the degree to which the source code of a program has been tested. It is distinct from black box testing methods because it looks at the code directly, rather than other measures such as software functions or object interfaces.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage
  

There are some great tools that will help you to measure the coverage of your code. Some are commercial, some are free. I used to use Clover that was great. I used point beta versions (0.9x) prior Clover went commercial with the release 1.0. My company did not see much value purchasing anything like that as unit testing and XP was not well know at that time. So I was using the last "free" Clover and I was happy as I got all I needed to keep track the code coverage of my unit tests.

With the explosion of open source projects on the web I was hoping that there would be a good free alternative to Clover after all those years. And there is. As a matter of fact there are many. Lets have a look at the free ones.

Good starting point for hunting for free stuff is at java-source.net. For code coverage tools follow this link. That is the one that I used and will cover in more details.

EMMA

EMMA is an open-source toolkit for measuring and reporting Java code coverage. EMMA's main features are:

• either offline (before they are loaded) or on the fly (using an instrumenting application classloader) instrumentation,


• coverage types: class, method, line, basic block,


• stats are aggregated at method, class, package, and "all classes" levels,


• output report types: plain text, HTML, XML. All report types support drill-down, to a user-controlled detail depth. The HTML report supports source code linking,


• output reports can highlight items with coverage levels below user-provided thresholds,


• EMMA is 100% pure Java, has no external library dependencies, and works in any Java 2 JVM (even 1.2.x).

For few sample reports generated by Emma have a look at http://emma.sourceforge.net/samples.html.

Most of my past projects used Ant for builds. Emma offers several components that expose its functionality as an ANT task and a command line tool, which is very convenient. The documentation is very well written and covers all questions that you might have.

There is also a NetBeans plug-in for Emma. Read some doco about it here.

Unfortunately, if you are looking for an Emma plug-in for Eclipse, there isn't one. Well I could not find any easily. If you do find some, please let me know. If you need a plug-in for Eclipse that will give you a code coverage, use Coverclipse .

Happy testing and getting your code coverage reports!

On May 01, 2006 Jeroen van Wilgenburg said:

You should take a look at Cobertura: When Clover went commercial the project was forked into the commercial Clover and open source Cobertura. It works with Ant, Maven2 and commandline. I think the reports of Cobertura are a bit better than Emma's

There is also an into on Getting started with Cobertura written by him.

On September 26, 2006 Marc said:

You may check out this free EMMA integration for Eclipse: EclEmma

Java Decompiler for Eclipse

I never really used Java decompilators, but recently I needed one. My peer developers used DJ Decompiler. So I got a copy installed on my laptop and there I was - happily decompiling everything I could possibly need to peek at. It's was cool for a while, but more and more I realized I needed something in Eclipse that would do the same job but better. Switching between Eclipse and DJ Decompiler became very tiring so I did a quick search for Java decompiler that integrates with Eclipse.

There is a Java decompiler that I found and which integrates with Eclipse (as a plug-in) very nicely. It basically decompiles the class butycode and shows you the source as java file (quite handy feature). Ladies and gentlemen let me introduce

JADCLIPSE
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jadclipse/

JadClipse is based on JAD decompiler (which is not included in JadClipse). You can obtain JAD from http://www.varaneckas.com/jad.

INSTALLATION

• Unzip the jadnt158.zip file, no installation is necessary (to e.g. C:\jadnt158)
• Add JAD_HOME to your env. variables (e.g. JAD_HOME=C:\jadnt158)
• Add JAD_HOME to your PATH env. variable (e.g. %SystemRoot%\system32;...;C:\apache-ant-1.6.5\bin;%JAD_HOME%)
• Unzip jadclipse_xx.zip into "plugins" subdirectory of the directory where you installed Eclipse.
• Restart or start Eclipse.
• Open any .class file which you don't have source for, it should be automatically decompiled.
• Eclipse config - You can change path to Jad's executable (with the steps above simple "jad" will do) and temporary directory as needed (Follow Window -> Preferences -> Java -> JadClipse)

CONFIGURATION:

Most of the Jad's configuration options are available from:

Window -> Preferences -> Java -> JadClipse

Refer to Jad documentation for details on those options in case you need more information.

Happy decompiling!

:Dushan