Microlog Development $$$

I have often wondered how many hours I have spent on Microlog. It is countless hours of fun and sometimes frustration. But it is definitely worth it. I guess my wife beg to differ :) Anyway; there is a site called ohloh. This site collects data from the Internet about open source projects. It analyzes the code for a lot of things. For example it checks how well documented the code is. Another interesting metrics is the calculated development cost. Here is a list of the projects that I am involved in:

• Microlog - $ 435,348
• Microproperties - $ 2,955
• Microinstall - $ 12,018
• Voxtr - $ 29,963

Interesting reading. Please notice these figures are not only due to my work, but due to other peoples hard work as well. But is these values realistic or not? What do you think?

How I Created the Microsuite Website with Google Sites

I have been thinking about creating the Microsuite website for a long time. In fact it was several months ago that I registered the domain microsuite.org. The thing is that it does not amuse me very much to create websites. The latest couple of months has been filled with a lot of more interesting stuff. It has been very hard for me to prioritize between all the projects that I am involved in. There are still a lot of work with Microlog, there are many ideas that I want to try out for Microinstall, and I also want to be an active part of the Voxtr project. So on, and so fourth.

Just the other day I ran across Google Sites. It is a service that is built on top of a wiki software, formerly known as JotSpot. But you do not need to know any HTML at all :) At least that is what they claim on the Google site information pages. So this seemed like a perfect choice for me. I already knew what information I wanted to put on the site, so it was merely some hard work that was ahead of me. My experience it that computer related stuff does not always takes the time you wish it would do. Most of the time it takes much longer than expected, at least when you try something new. To my surprise this was an exception. I spent only one evening creating the first version. Rather nice!

For those of you that has not visited the Microsuite website, I can tell you a little bit about what it is. The Microsuite is a collection of the Micro projects that I am involved in. To this date they are; Microlog, Microinstall & Microproperties. Microlog is a logging tool for Java ME developers. Microinstall consists of some small classes that makes it easy to distribute your MIDlet(s). The Microproperties project has not yet delivered any code, but the intention is to create a good properties framework for Java ME. The plan is to create the code from scratch, with some inspiration from the properties classes found in Microlog. Please visit the Microsuite website to find out more about the different projects that are part of Microsuite.

Open Source Software Development; Microlog, Microinstall & Voxtr

A couple of years ago I started my first Open Source project; Microlog. This was an attempt to make something similar to Log4j. At that time I was new to Java ME programming. What I wanted was a really simple, but yet powerful logging tool. I started from scratch and within a couple of hours I did have something that I liked. For some reason it just felt right; I wanted to release it as Open Source. Said and done! I also showed it to some of my colleagues and got some feedback. My colleague Darius suggested that I would make the setup of Microlog very simple. Before I knew it, he had contributed with some code for the setup. After that he joined the project. Since I believe in "Release early, release often." I released a couple of small releases rather quickly.

During the years that have gone since then, I have from time to time taken a look at the Microlog project site. The statistics showed that there was a fair amount of downloads. But there was no activity in the forums. Nada, zero, null! :( Since I was not involved in any Java ME development project, there was no natural reason to use Microlog, nor updating the code.


But then there came an e-mail from a developer who wanted to contribute with some code. Wow! Somebody thinks that Microlog has some potential. A couple of days later another person wanted to contribute, and join the project. This was Karsten who now is our Maven specialist in the Microlog team. During the spring and the summer I and the rest of the team has been working very hard to get out the first "real release", i.e. V1.0. We also replaced our old static homepage with an autogenerated site by Maven. During this period we finally got some action in the forums :) Thank you all for the great feedback I have received, this is really motivating me to continue with Microlog.

I have heard many people complain about long URLs that you have to enter to download a MIDlet. Of course you can download the MIDlet to your computer, and then transfer it to your device. Both ways are rather tedious ways of doing the installation of a MIDlet. Therefore I started to think about different ways to distribute MIDlets. My experiments are now available for you to take a look at. Please visit the Microinstall project page site for more information.

I am the co-founder of the Voxtr project. This is a simple voice recorder MIDlet. Since I have a hard time to remember things, it is very practical for me to take "voice notes". No need to find a pen and paper or use that hard-to-use-notepad-application that is bundled on your mobile phone.

That is all for now folks!