grack.com

We’ve been trying out Google’s Eclipse plugin for the last week and it’s made a huge difference to our GWT development experience.  The plugin is designed to enhance your Java AppEngine and GWT workflow.  We’re mainly using it for GWT development, so the biggest wins for us are the GWT features, including:

• Auto-completion and error checking for JSNI.  JSNI is a powerful, yet horribly complex beast to work with.  With the plugin, it becomes almost as simple as working with Java code.
• Automatic management of GWT jar references.  This is a big help for cross-platform development, as each platform needs its own, specific jar (gwt-dev-linux, gwt-dev-mac, gwt-dev-windows, etc.).
• Automatic provisioning of run targets with appropriate runtime classpath entries.  GWT requires you to ensure all your translatable Java source directories are available on the classpath.  Each of the run targets you create is pre-populated with this information from referenced projects, saving you the step of manually managing them (or hacking them into your project’s global classpath).
• Support for running a unit test as a “GWT unit test”.  This lets you launch a GWT-enhanced unit test in either hosted or web mode.
• Right-click/run for any module in your GWT project, replacing custom .launch files previously required for each module.
• Wizards to create common GWT components: modules, entry points and GWT-enhanced HTML files.

There’s some cool support for AppEngine in the plugin as well.  You can publish a hybrid GWT/AppEngine project to Google’s servers with a couple of clicks.  This makes the development/deploy cycle trivial, allowing you to quickly iterate using the same environment as your production applications.  With this new toolset, AppEngine is an easier platform to deploy to than servers you own and operate yourself, IMHO.

Aside: one interesting feature that slipped under the radar for this AppEngine release is support for cron-style jobs.  While this was possible using a cron job on a managed server hitting a URL on your application instance, implementing it in the platform itself makes life easier for web developers.  Note that this isn’t true cron, but rather a “hit this URL on this schedule” feature.  I actually prefer having cron jobs exposed as web endpoints - it saves you from having to duplicate your web framework’s infrastructure setup in a command-line application.

All-in-all, a very cool release.  Thanks to the GWT and AppEngine teams for making this a reality.

I’m having trouble getting Feedburner to update from my server, so feeds aren’t showing up in Google Reader.  It’s not pulling down the latest posts, just the ones from yesterday and before.  Any ideas?

UPDATE: It would help if I didn’t redirect FeedBurner to its own feed.

I read all I my feeds through Google Reader. Of all the RSS readers, it is the cleanest and most convenient to use. When I started reading feeds on a mobile device, I was happy to see that the Reader team had put some effort into creating a fantastic mobile experience as well.

There are a couple of minor issues with the product:

1. When reading feeds with a large number of unread items, you need to manually select an item to load the next batch of items. I prefer the infinite scrolling style of feed reading, where new items are automatically loaded as you scroll to the bottom. Since the additional items are appended to the list that has already loaded, why not just load these automatically?
2. There’s no way to mark a whole tag as read without viewing its stream of aggregated items. There is an option to add a new feed at the tag level, but this is something I do far less often than marking a category as read.
3. After I mark a feed (or a whole tag) as read, it would be great if it could bring me back up one level. I’m always going through the actions of “mark as read”, then hitting the back button– I’d love to save a tap here.

Overall, Reader mobile is a great product and I’m glad I have it. I can’t wait until DOM storage or Gears is available on mobile Safari so I can bring all my feeds with me without incurring mobile data use.

My Typo installation has been busted for a while–  I decided I’d bite the bullet and install WordPress.  It’s pretty much the defacto standard for self-hosted blogs and it’s flexible enough for my needs.

This is the fourth iteration of my personal blog.  My first was a hand-crafted news page of posts (using pico and an AIX shell, nonetheless) before blogs were called blogs.

The second was managed using FogCreek’s CityDesk.  CityDesk is a great program for managing simple sites, but its lack of scripting and advanced content management features made it a pain to use.  It also took forever to republish my whole site over FTP.  I couldn’t tell you if the program has improved since I last used it a few years ago.

My third, as mentioned earlier, used the RoR-based Typo blog engine.  It was by far the coolest blog engine at the time, but it ran like crap on my hosted 1&1 website.  Not really anyone’s fault, mind you - having to reload the Ruby VM for every page is not a great solution.

Anyways, welcome to my fourth iteration of the blog on grack.com.  I hope WordPress is a stable and fast platform.  I’ll be updating the theme to be less default-y over the next while, so bear with me.

I’ve been a fan of powerful handheld devices for a long time. I bought a Palm Pilot to help me keep track of my university classes in the 90’s and graduated up to a Treo earlier this decade. The iPhone is the first device out of all of them that makes mobile publishing a breeze (and fun too).

There were a few attempts at blog and twitter integration on the old Palm platform, but networking always felt like it was bolted onto the OS, rather than an integral part of the experience.

My only beef with Apple’s platform is the low end camera included on these phones (and the lack of video support). From what I’ve read, these two shortcomings may be addresses in the rumoured iPhone revision ramp coming in July.