La Tortue Cynique / The Cynical Turtle

I don't understand JSP supporters

I've started to work on web sites some years ago, and as of today, I work with two environments: JSP/Servlet and PHP. Working with them, on different scales for different applications, I've to say that JSP is a kludge, and it's bewildering it has so much momentum. (Got to see some friends, more on this later)(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/28 05:57) lien permanent

IBM error message of the day

[17/04/03 18:48:35:057 CEST] 19cad4cb TraceNLS u No message text associated with key InconsistentLocalTranException in bundle com.ibm.ejs.resources.seriousMessages(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/17 12:53) lien permanent

Comments on "Pocket PC vs. Palm: Which is Really Easier?"

You can find the article here. Not a bad piece of text at all, but there are half-truth all the way.

This article is based on a comparison of my M100 series Palm and my iPAQ 3900.

An entry-level Palm with a not really entry level Compaq. It wouldn't be significative IF the evaluation wasn't systematically oriented toward the little plus that money gives you.

The bottom line: existing Palms make you do character input one way—their way. Pocket PC's give you more options.

Regarding the ease of use of a system, too many options is not always an advantage. Especially with the magnificient "Transcriber" mode, where you can be stuck without being able to act on any control present on the screen. It's NOT easy to use when you have 200 blue points on the screen because of the software deciding that you have not finished to write a word.

Moving around on the screen: The Palm requires you to tap on fields to move around.

False. Read the manual.

The Pocket PC has more data fields for each contact, including room for three different addresses, a variety of additional telephone numbers, multiple e-mail addresses, Web pages, assistant's name, birthday, and more.

That's perhaps why the entry form fills up several screens and you can't even notice where you have to click in order to confirm the contact creation?

Another thing you can do with a Pocket PC is associate a voice note with a contact.

IF it has a microphone, which is not a standard feature.

Yes, the Palm has custom fields that you can use to store a variety of information. But the Pocket PC has a far greater variety of data fields to begin with. You end up putting a lot more miscellaneous information in Palm's Note field.

I've absolutely no note field use for any of my contacts. If one is going to use its address book for "contact market mining", I don't think he/she is going to fell under the scope of "easy to use" for average users.

Both devices allow you to beam contacts to your peers and it's just about as easy to do it on either device.

Except that you must have a recent Pocket PC to be able to share your contacts with other PDAs (Psion, PalmOS, ...), since they are OBEX compliant only since Pocket PC 2002.

Just open the note, hold down the record button on the side of your Pocket PC, and speak into it. And if you're in the middle of something else, you don't even have to open Notes—just hold down the record button and speak. It's a great way to quickly note down a phone number, commitment, idea, etc. Later, you can review the voice memos on your Pocket PC, or sync them with the Notes section in your desktop PC's Outlook.

Again, the microphone is not standard on Pocket PC. And sincerely, who likes to use the Notes section in Outlook? Has anybody seen something crappier?

A while ago I was at Starbucks, using my Pocket PC to catch up on e-mail via Starbucks' Wi-Fi connection. From home, my wife used MSN Messenger to ping me, requesting the e-mail address of a friend (Screen 12). I pressed Chat to respond, opened Contacts and found the e-mail address I needed, copied it to the clipboard, switched back to Chat, pasted it in, and sent it.

I thougt the article was about the ease of use... So, here we have the use of a non standard extension, to go with the virus catcher MSN, launch 3 or 4 applications and? I guess the next step is to invoke the 3 steps magical incantation which brings you to the "running programs" panel in order to kill the sucker which makes your Pocket PC with a 400MHz processor to feel like a Psion 3 and its 7.68 Mhz processor. This is what I find great with WindowsCE multitasking. No matter what you do, it will end up sucking all the resources, and either you are a power user (out of the scope of this article) and you can kill the faulty program while praying for not losing data, either you reboot (aka "The Micro$oft way").

And when you get into more sophisticated operations, such as e-mailing documents, creating spreadsheets, playing music, storing information on a memory storage card, synchronizing files, connecting to your LAN, etc., it is clear which device is really easier to use.

Notebook anyone? I sincerily have sorrow for the poor guy who has only a Pocket PC for doing all its productive tasks. Editing a spreadsheet on a poor 240x320 screen cluttered with toolbars (and don't even start to try to hide them, you won't be able to access any useful function quickly) is really a curse. I guess it's time for him to find a better job. Or perhaps I'm wrong and I should tell my girlfriend that she MUST create a spreadsheet on a memory card in order to have a file to synchronize with something else... Ease of use? What are the requirement? I mean, where is the need to have a Pocket PC? With the size of an iPAQ 3900, which is too big to be manipulated with one hand, the requirements are: a plane surface, an external source of energy when you are connected to a LAN, a keyboard in order to do this contact mining...

Which brings us back to where this whole thing started: the statement that "Consumers (are) better served by Palm OS-based devices, which are easier to operate and less expensive."
Hogwash!

Less expensive: still true. "Easier to operate": the only conclusions brought by this article are that you can turn your Pocket PC in a bad subnotebook. One thing is sure, I will never have a daily use of an iPAQ 3900: try to read the news on it with one hand, the other one clutched to a pole in the subway. Not possible.(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/16 20:54) lien permanent

WSAD error of the day

While validating an .ear:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.ibm.etools.application.presentation.UtilityJARsSection.validateModuleCollision(UtilityJARsSection.java:481)
at com.ibm.etools.application.presentation.UtilityJARsSection$2.modifyText(UtilityJARsSection.java:361)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(TypedListener.java:181)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(EventTable.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text.wmCommandChild(Text.java:1779)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control.WM_COMMAND(Control.java:2828)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control.windowProc(Control.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.windowProc(Display.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.win32.OS.CallWindowProcW(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text.callWindowProc(Text.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text.callWindowProc(Text.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control.windowProc(Control.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.windowProc(Display.java(Compiled Code))
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.win32.OS.SetWindowTextW(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.win32.OS.SetWindowText(OS.java(Compiled Code))

(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/08 05:31) lien permanent

J2EE twist

Let's take an EAR developped solely in Websphere Application Studio Developper (WSAD) with no external plugin.

Deployment on JBoss 3: OK

Deployment on Websphere AS 5 (WAS):

[04/04/03 11:46:48:297 CEST] 666d11fd WebContainer  A SRVE0169I: Chargement du module Web : MYAPP.
[04/04/03 11:46:48:537 CEST] 666d11fd ComponentName > populateJavaNameSpace for web app
[04/04/03 11:46:48:537 CEST] 666d11fd ComponentName > populateJavaNameSpace
                                 javax.naming.InitialContext@5f1611e9
[04/04/03 11:46:48:598 CEST] 666d11fd WebApp        E SRVE0015E: Echec de l'initialisation de l'application Web MYAPP
[04/04/03 11:46:48:698 CEST] 666d11fd TraceNLS      u No message text associated with key 
Error.Loading.Session.Context.and.Web.Application.{0} in bundle com.ibm.ejs.resources.seriousMessages
[04/04/03 11:46:48:698 CEST] 666d11fd WebGroup      E Error.Loading.Session.Context.and.Web Application
 java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.ibm.ws.util.ComponentNameSpaceHelper.populateJavaNameSpace(ComponentNameSpaceHelper.java:587)
	at com.ibm.ws.util.ComponentNameSpaceHelper.populateJavaNameSpace(ComponentNameSpaceHelper.java:276)
	at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.populateJavaNameSpace(WebApp.java:1154)
	at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.init(WebApp.java:243)
	at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.srt.WebGroup.loadWebApp(WebGroup.java:317)
	at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.srt.WebGroup.init(WebGroup.java:194)
	at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.WebContainer.addWebApplication(WebContainer.java:950)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.WebContainerImpl.install(WebContainerImpl.java:133)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.WebContainerImpl.start(WebContainerImpl.java:360)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationMgrImpl.start(ApplicationMgrImpl.java:401)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.DeployedApplicationImpl.fireDeployedObjectStart(DeployedApplicationImpl.java:743)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.DeployedModuleImpl.start(DeployedModuleImpl.java:337)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.DeployedApplicationImpl.start(DeployedApplicationImpl.java:531)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationMgrImpl.startApplication(ApplicationMgrImpl.java:254)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationMgrImpl.start(ApplicationMgrImpl.java:232)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.startComponents(ContainerImpl.java:343)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.start(ContainerImpl.java:234)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationServerImpl.start(ApplicationServerImpl.java:117)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.startComponents(ContainerImpl.java:343)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.start(ContainerImpl.java:234)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ServerImpl.start(ServerImpl.java:182)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.WsServer.start(WsServer.java:135)
	at com.ibm.ws.runtime.WsServer.main(WsServer.java:232)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
	at com.ibm.ws.bootstrap.WSLauncher.main(WSLauncher.java:94)
	at com.ibm.etools.websphere.tools.runner.api.ServerRunnerV5$1.run(ServerRunnerV5.java:105)

[04/04/03 11:46:48:778 CEST] 666d11fd DeployedAppli W WSVR0206E: Le module MYAPP.war de l'application
MYAPPEAR.ear/deployments/MYAPPEAR n'est pas parvenu à démarrer.
[04/04/03 11:46:48:788 CEST] 666d11fd ApplicationMg W WSVR0101W: Erreur lors du démarrage, MYAPPEAR
[04/04/03 11:46:48:798 CEST] 666d11fd ApplicationMg A WSVR0217I: Arrêt de l'application MYAPPEAR
[04/04/03 11:46:48:928 CEST] 666d11fd ApplicationMg A WSVR0220I: L'application est arrêtée : MYAPPEAR

And what would happend if I try this on an IBM OS? WAS won't even start?(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/07 17:09) lien permanent

Commentaires ici et ailleurs :

Hi I am facing a similar kind of problem if anyone has got the solution then kindly mail it at aman.gargi@nucleussoftware.com...thanks

Posté par aman, le jeudi 8 juillet 2004 à 06:05 #

For the sake of not updating the post, let me give some advice here. Most of the times when I encounter this specific problem, it indeed comes for corrupted .xmi files. Those files are WAS specific and in the normal case WSAD build them for you. But WAS is not good at reporting errors in them, so the easiest thing to do is to store somewhere all your WAS specific configuration (text, screenshot or whatever), and erase those files in order to let WSA D to rebuild them from scratch.

Posté par Damien B, le lundi 12 juillet 2004 à 02:59 #

WSAD, WAS: lessons learned

• WSAD can mess up your deployment descriptor when you are refactoring, especially the proprietary ones (.xmi)
• WAS is very poor at reporting low level exceptions: UnsatisfiedLinkError when a driver needs a shared library, errors when a .xmi is wrong, etc.
• deleting all the .xmi when something wierd happens and let WSAD rebuild them is A Good Idea
• WAS doesn't seem to like when you provide to others components classes and jars in a same jar. But, it seems to accept several jars inside a jar. The way to do this in WSAD is to create a Java project without sources files, import all the jar in it, and say that they are all exported. Keep your files that need compilation in another project.
• A good way to test if you have an IBM specific problem (well, it works most of the time), is to drop your EAR in the deploy directory of the default server config of JBoss 3.

(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/07 10:12) lien permanent

Commentaires ici et ailleurs :

Thanks!
This post just ended three days of head scratching.
-Avery

Posté par Avery Regier, le lundi 22 septembre 2003 à 13:27 #

Sans titre

Definitely, IBM tools are very sensitive about the used JDK. In WSAD, you can't generate an EJB deployment code if you run it on SUN JDK 1.4, but it works with IBM JDK 1.3. I don't find it's a normal behaviour, their products, especially developement tools, should be more JDK agnostic.(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/04 07:39) lien permanent

WSAD: IBM humour

From Developing and Testing Message-driven Bean Applications with the MQ Simulator for Java Developers in WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5.0:

New to Application Developer Version 5.0 is a very productive and lightweight environment that enables quick testing and debugging of MDBs and other JMS applications in a unit test environment.

So far I think it's the first time I see the adjective 'lightweight' applied to WSAD. And productive... when you are able to code and stop to fiddle with the embedded server configuration, it's perhaps true.(Cyberpunk, 2003/04/01 09:25) lien permanent