Cromoteca

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

The news that Oracle sued Google brought me back to what I wrote more than year ago: I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source community. Unfortunately I was right.

I agree with the need of an open source Java alliance, but the need I feel now is to express my disappointment in some way that Oracle can hear. I recall an article that suggested to delete Facebook accounts due to their privacy issues, so I thought that deleting my Oracle account(s) could be a good way of being heard. For this to work, though, many people should do the same. So I ask you to consider this option.

But there is an issue with this: I tried, but I was not able to get it done. It appears that there is no way to be deleted. Furthermore, I have more than one account, since I registered on both Oracle and Sun in the past. I sent an email to the support team, but I received an automated response that explains how to unsubscribe from newsletters.

So my questions are: does anyone know…

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MeshCMS 4 is now serving this website, and the current code is published on SVN (in trunk). There's much work to do before making a release though:

• fix bugs
• add missing features
• write code comments
• write documentation

Due to the slow development pace, all this will require months, but at lease the MeshCMS 4 era has begun. I find it much more enjoyable than MeshCMS 3.x. For example, the file manager is much faster and creating and adding modules to pages is a pleasure now. And finally I can write this page and test it before making it visible to the public, a feature that MeshCMS has missed for years.

MeshCMS 3 is very stable and has good documentation. It won't be easy to match that level for MeshCMS 4, so any help is appreciated.

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GWT is primarily used in the Java world for obvious reasons: apart from being an excellent tool for creating RIAs (indeed it's my favorite one), it allows to develop both the server and the client part using a single language and a single IDE, and it even allows to share classes.

But GWT can be used with any server technology, and although those advantages do not apply anymore, it is an alternative that deserves serious consideration from developers of any server platform. I happen to be a GWT fan that works in a company that uses Microsoft products, so it seems obvious to me to try to combine both. After all, should we use Flex for example, we would still need to use two languages and two IDEs, so who cares. Same applies to all JavaScript toolkits and frameworks (please don't tell me that Visual Studio is a good JavaScript IDE: it even misses matching braces highlighting).

The main issue with an ASP.NET+GWT setup (as for any non-Java server part) is that one…

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Let me clarify: this is not a rant about GAE: I just want to write about my first approach with it. GAE is Free, is Java and is Hosting, so why this title? Because I've read some articles talking about GAE as a solution to host Java web applications for free. But it depends on how you think to use it: if you have written an application and are searching for a solution to host it, you must keep in mind that you will need to make heavy changes to your app.

In my case, I use MeshCMS, my own CMS, to experiment with new technologies. I knew that It would have been hard since MeshCMS uses the filesystem to store pages, and GAE does not allow to write to the filesystem. I decided to redirect filesystem writes to the datastore, just like GaeVFS does. I wrote the necessary code using both JDO and JPA, and at the end I chose JPA since it seemed to produce slightly cleaner code. In my opinion, it's easier to convert from filesystem to datastore than to convert from a traditional database…

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Google App Engine is one of the best things that Java developers have got in the last years because it means free Java hosting. When I read about it for the first time, I thought to try MeshCMS on it, but the first limitation I learned was a no go: Google App Engine forbids writing to the filesystem, so a file based CMS can't work on it.

Recently I thought that maybe I discarded that option too early and that GAE is too good to be ignored. I constantly keep an eye on Java hosting and there are some nice offers, but none of them can compete with cheap PHP hosting. Sure, you get lot of resources with Java plans, but if you just have to host a CMS, there's no reason to use MeshCMS and pay ten times more than, say, use CMS Made Simple on a €10/year web hosting.

That's why I decided to experiment with a filesystem wrapper that redirects all writes to the GAE Data Store. There is a library named GaeVFS that already does this. I tried it, but unfortunately it didn't work. Not…

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