Öredev 2010 - Some Thoughts

Öredev 2010 is over and it is time for me write some words about the conference. What I like about the conference is that has an interesting mix of tracks; Java, .NET, Agile, Web Development etc. It is always nice to broaden your views. New this year was the Xtra(ck). The Xtra(ck) contained sessions that had nothing to with software development, or at least very far from it. For example there was a session called "Understand Hypnosis". These session was definitely a way to broaden your mind. I liked the "Photographic Composition and Creativity" and the photo walk both with Amy Archer. Thanks for the tips during the photo walk!

Also new for this year was the Öredev puzzle application. The application was designed around the concept of being social. Each participant got a puzzle code within the application. By sharing your code you got a piece of the puzzle. As a bonus you got the contact information for the person whose code you entered. Each person to finish the puzzle got an Öredev t-shirt and was participating to win some great prizes. The application was available for Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone 7 and iPhone. The application also contained the schedule and speaker bios. A real nice application. Next year I hope to see an improved version. For example, integrating your own schedule would be great.

And here are some photos from the conference. Enjoy!

Öredev 2010 - Get Real

Speaker Dinner at Malmö City Hall

Developers Competing

Hard to Choose the Righr Track?

Even Doll showing of Some Nice Xcode Tricks

Coffe Lounge

Jack Nutting about Making Money in Appstore

John Seddon

Marcus Zarra on Core Graphics

The Audience

Library by Night

And that is the wrap. See you next year!

My World is Changing; Android & iPhone Development

I have been working with Android development for quite a while now. So I decided to do something quite different; iPhone development.

It is like groping in the dark. After many years with Java and garbage collection, it feels a little awkward to manage your memory by yourself. The first encounter with garbage collection in Java was really awesome. After a couple of years as a Java developer, you realized that the garbage collector is not the answer to all of your memory problems. But still, you are not forced to think about memory management on a daily basis. All of a sudden you need to think about memory management on a more regular basis.

Eclipse has been the main tool in my Java toolbox for many years now. One might argue that IntelliJ or NetBeans is a better tool, but I have used Eclipse. Switching from Eclipse to Xcode is not easy. I miss the fabulous re-factoring support in Eclipse. There are many other small issues, but I am slowly and constantly learning new keyboard shortcuts in Xcode. I guess that I could be a better Xcoder in a while. The interface builder in Xcode is an invaluable tool. It is very easy to get nice looking iPhone UIs. It is very nice not having to worry about getting your XML files right. Making a good looking UI on Android can be frustrating and cumbersome. Of course you can get nice UIs on Android, but I find it easier to create one on iPhone.

Last but not least, the markets are a little bit different. Android market is open. Appstore is a little bit more closed. There is no quality control when submitting to Android market. As a consequence there is a lot of really bad Android applications. It is hard to find what you are searching for on Android market. The search seems to be case sensitive. Not good. Usually I install applications that is recommended somewhere. In most cases, there is a QR code available that I scan with the Android barcode reader. Really nifty application that makes installation on Android simple. The applications in Appstore is controlled by Apple and it seems that they are of better quality than Android applications. It must be pointed out that there are many high quality Android applications, but they are harder to find. As a developer in Sweden it is not possible to get paid for your Android applications, but you can get paid for your iPhone apps. When will this problem be solved?

Another thing that seems to be missing in the iPhone world is open source projects. The Java and Android world is full of open source. However there seems to be good hope for the iPhone world. I found this this list of open source applications for iPhone.

Of course there are many more differences. These are the most apparent differences from my perspective. At the end of the day I am a mobile software developer. Switching to iPhone gives me a new perspective of my world. I think that is a good thing.

Back at Home :)

I am finally back from my vacation. Last week I was in Egypt with my family. They had an Internet café in the reception of the hotel, but it did only work one time when I was there. But I guess it was a good thing to be offline for some time. At least my family appreciated it. Prior to that I was in Istanbul. Turkey. This was a trip together with my colleges. I learned a lot of new things about the Android platform. The most interesting thing was to try out Robotium, a testing framework for Android. It is built around the existing testing framework found in Android, but it is much simpler. If you want to know more, please read this excellent article.

That is all for now. Nice to be back at home with a working Internet connection.

Starting the 3.0 development of Microlog?

What should it take to upgrade Microlog to 3.0? A while ago I release V2.3.4 of Microlog. There was only one "small" change, the Microlog instrument and instrument example modules were activated once more. They had not been part of any previous 2.X release. But was it a good decision to make only a patch release for such change? I must admit that I think this was an incorrect decision. The change was big enough to make a minor release or even a major release. What should I do to solve the situation right now?

I think the best solution would be to make a major release, that is that I should make a Microlog V3.0. This makes it possible to make some other changes that I wants to do. The changes that first comes to mind are these:

• Add the logging level NONE.
• Remove the Android module
• Remove the Amozon S3 module
• Cleanup the PropertyConfigurator
• ?

Some explanation might be in place. Adding the Level NONE gives the possibility to stop the logging without removing the logging from the code. This is sometimes used for production builds, with the possibility to enable logging after distribution. The feature has been asked for many times. To be honest I do not remember why this has not been implemented before.

Removing the Android module is for obvious reasons, since we have forked the Android parts this is no longer necessary to keep in the Microlog project. But is might not be obvious why to remove the Amazon S3 module. For me this was an experiment, but not something that turned out well. It is big and clumsy. A 3rd party library is used for the SOAP communication which also adds to the size. Fortunately it is kept in a separate jar. Thus only developers using the Amazon S3 modules are affected by this. Another drawback is that we need to maintain this module. I feel that I rather spend time on maintaining the core and other modules that are more important. But this is something that certainly is worth discussing. What do you think?

Cleaning up the PropertyConfigurator is something that I have wanted for a while now. When adding the hierarchical logging support in V2, I kept the original configuration possibilities. This is not wrong. However there are parts in the code that could be shared between the Microlog classic configuration and the new configuration. The parsing of attributes could be replaced by a separate StringTokenizer. All in all I think that the size of the configuration classes could be slimlined.

I guess that there are some more parts that could be improved and/or added to the list for Microlog V3. This was all that I could think of right now. Do you have any suggestions?

R.I.P. Kenai - Microlog4Android has been Moved

I admit it. I was wrong. It is not business as usual for microlog4android. Yesterday I got an e-mail explaining that Kenai will be shutdown. But fortunately there are other hosting options. I wanted to move the project as fast as possible and have a simple solution. I was recommended by my esteemed colleague Hugo about using Google Code together with GitHub. Google Code allows a project to use other service, such as GitHub, when Google Code  is not sufficient enough. Moving the source code was rather simple. The part that took time was to generate a new SSH key for my new computer. The nice thing with git is that all the history is preserved.

To move the source code from the Kenai git repository I did the following:

git pull git://kenai.com/microlog4android~source-code-repository

git remote add git@github.com:johanlkarlsson/microlog4android.git

git push origin master


It was as simple as that. The first line was needed to pull the source code out from Kenai, since I had no backup copy on my new computer. So for a user with the code on his computer, it would be even simpler.

Right now it is time for me to relax a little. I know I have a lot of things to do tomorrow at work. Please stay tuned for more updates about microlog4android.

The project:
http://code.google.com/p/microlog4android/

The source code:
http://github.com/johanlkarlsson/microlog4android

The Future of Kenai?

As I wrote in an earlier article, the Android part of Microlog has been forked into a new project. The project is hosted on Project Kenai beta. This is Suns offering for open source project. With Oracles acquisition of Sun this project seems to be endangered.  But I am not sure how it will be affected. If it is going to be changed, I sure hope that the projects will get support for the migration if any. For more information, read the article about the subject on Kenai's blog.

I guess we have to continue with business as usual for microlog4android.

The Beauty and the Beast - Apple MacBook and Dell XPS M1710

A couple of years ago I bought a Dell XPS M1710. At the time this was one of the fastest laptop computers around. It is primarily designed as a gaming/multimedia laptop. The design is made to appeal gamers (see picture). As a developer I need a high performance computer. So this was a perfect choice for me, at least this was what I thought. As it turned out it, it has not been as good as one could imagine. There have been many problems with it during the years. The biggest problem are the fans. When running Windows Vista they are quiet at first. The first time you use Maven, or similar, the fans are up to full speed within seconds. I have tried several fan control applications but these did not solve the problem. The problem only manifested itself in other ways. I also tried to use Linux. With Linux things are much better. Linux does not seem to strain the CPU so much as Windows Vista. Fortunately Dell support gave me two new fans. Another problem is the battery. At full capacity they last for about 2 hours during normal work. after about 18 months a needed to buy a new one. This is not really acceptable. Speaking of power; I had to replace the power supply as well. As with the fans this was replaced by Dell. Thank God I had paid extra to get full support. Or I should thank my colleague Darius who convinced me to pay some extra bucks to get the full support.

Before Christmas it was time to buy a new laptop. I was a little tired of the bad quality of my Dell computers, so I decided to try something new. I decided to buy me an Apple MacBook Pro instead.  By selecting a 15” screen I was able to fit in a Solid State Drive (SSD) within budget. Although not so big, it is only 128 Gb. But since I use an external hard-disk for data, this is not so much a problem.

Now here I am sitting by my brand new MacBook and writing this article. I have about 7-8 hours battery capacity. According to the specification I have only 7 hours capacity, but I think the SSD gives me some extra time. The SSD is supposed to use less power than a normal drive. Of course this would degrade over time, but it is in par with my Asus netbook computer. So for I am very satisfied with my new computer. It was not so hard to get used to as I initially anticipated. Many people have told me about their frustration when switching to an Apple computer. I am familiar with Unix and Linux and many things could be achieved in a bash shell. In my daily work I use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu Linux. My fear was that the performance would be to bad and get annoyingly slow. But so far I am not frustrated by slow speed. In fact I was surprised. I have been using VirtualBox on my old XPS, but it was to slow to be really joyful. What more is there there to say? The MacBook works like a charm and is really fun to use. It is fun to compute! ;-)

The Beauty

 

The Beast

The Beauty and the beast

Some Thoughts about Android

As a embedded developer working with mobile phones, there is a new interesting kid on the block; the Android platform. If you are a mobile developer you most certainly had heard of it.

The interesting thing from a Java developer point of view is that all the APIs are in fact in standard Java APIs. But the developers of the Android platform has selected a subset of the Java SE APIs. Thus the implementation is not a fully compliant Java implementation. Further on the code is not executed as bytecode. The source code is first compiled to bytecode. In the second step the bytecode is converted to Dalvik bytecode. The Dalvik bytecode is then executed on a Dalvik Virtual Machine. The Dalvik is optimized for devices with limited power. According to the people behind the Dalvik VM, it should consume less power than a normal JVM.

I have bought a HTC Hero to have the opportunity to use an Android phone and to develop applications for the Android platform. It is possible to execute a Android application on an emulator, but still I think there is a need to be able to execute on a real device. The emulator is real good and I think that it is very close to the reality. My experience tells me that in the end it is always better to run on an actual device.

As of now I have not developed an real Android application from scratch, although I have attended an Android course. I am really looking forward to making an Android application. If its gets good it would be interesting to put it on Android Market, aka Google Market.

But what will happen to Java ME? I think that Java ME will live long and prosperous, although some programmers that are tired of Java ME will move to Android. The devices that are out on the market today are primarily high end phones. Java ME is found on many low end and mid end phones. What do you think? Will Java ME survive now that Android has arrived?

Öredev Reflections

I have just finished 3 intense day at the Öredev conference here in Malmö. As always I have a lot of thoughts, ideas and inspiration after attending a conference. These are my reflections from the conference:

• I was missing a sessions about Android. Everybody is talking about the Android platform, but I wonder how many developers are actually developing for Android. It would be interesting to hear about some real Android projects. But maybe next year we will have some Android sessions?
  
• I was surprised by the session "Design to Development- Collaborating and Communicating Interaction Design". I have never heard of Theresa Neil before. She has some really good ideas. It was about communication between developers and interaction designers. This is something that I could relate to.
  
• My friend and colleague Davor had an interesting presentation called "Snow white and the seven dwarfs". It is a true about Davor (Snow White) and his team of developers (the dwarfs). He introduces the concept of Developers Exploratory Testing (DET), which is a way to do continuous testing in an agile project. The James Bach really liked the way how Davor has taken some ideas by James Bach and evolved them even further. Note: I am one of the dwarfs.
  
• Maven 3.x has some genuinely interesting news. The thing that I would like to try out the most is the new Maven console. I hope that it will help me to do faster builds.
  
• The keynote by Scott Hanselman was interesting. He gave some nice hands on tip for improving your efficiency as a developer.
  
• I have been registered as a Twitter user for some time now. Never used it much for anything other than Microlog news. During the conference I twittered a lot. I used the "I Tweet" Android client. Now it feels like I am hooked on Twitter. The Tweets was displayed on large screens all over the place, so it became very popular for many attendees. In fact tweets about #oredev was on the top list for Scandinavia.
• I attended a session by Neil Ford that was interesting. He is the author of "The Productive Programmer", a book that I recently read. As the name implies it is all about productivity for programmers.
  
• Some interesting stuff going around with the Java app store. I have always wondered why Java desktop applications are so underrated. I hope that Java desktop apps will get more popular.
  
• Ze Frank is very funny. He has a lot of very interesting social experiments going on and some unusual games.
  
• I liked the sauna and dinner on Monday. Did meet some interesting people there like Marc Lesser and Chris Hughes. The Swedish pickled herring on a toast was superb. The main course was Swedish fish, not candy kind, but a codfish.
• In general a very good conference. Of course I am a little bit biased since my company is one of the founders of Öredev.
  

That is all that I could remember right now. I guess that I have missed something out. Here are some pictures from the conference:


Marc Lesser about "Doing Less"

Terrence Barr about Java and Open Source


Theresa Neil about Interaction Designers and their interaction with software developers and vice versa.


Davor speaking about "Snow white and the seven dwarfs".


The Öredev Twitter feed. Notice the comments about Davor's presentation.

The No SQL presentation. To the left Emil Eifrem, Adam Skogman to the right. Notice their new definition of NO SQL.

The multi talented Ze Frank was very funny.

An air safety instruction. Notice the wizard to the right.

Chris Hughes about the secrets of the iPhone. Chris is a very cool geek, just the way a geek should be according to me.
Looking for some bugs?


Scott Hanselman and his keynote.

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?

Using Your Own Stuff Is Good

Using your own stuff is good! Nothing remarkable about that, almost every developer would agree on that. In fact this is how Microlog once was created. It was created out of a real need and I used it extensively from the beginning. As years has gone by, a lot of contributions has been made. The philosophy behind Microlog is that there should many different logging destinations, each suitable in its on special situations. Which logging destination you choose is a matter of taste and the technical circumstances. As a consequence I tend to use a small portion of Microlog, beside the core classes.

The project I am currently involved in has been running for several months before I joined. The initial team has been wise enough to choose Microlog. When I joined the project, Microlog V1.1.1 was used. Yesterday I was given the assignment of logging some low level details, that potentially could create a lot of logging output. To be able to control the logging with fine granularity, I needed the newest and hottest version of Microlog. Its support for hierarchical loggers, makes it possible to set different logging levels on different classes. In my case I wanted to use TRACE for one class, but DEBUG for the rest of the classes. In my own projects, I usually only import the classes that I really need and leave the rest out. In some cases I have used the binary version of Microlog and ProGuard to keep the packaged Microlog classes to a minimum. The current project is different, Maven is used for building. As such it uses a repository for its jar files.

I added Maven code to use the latest version of Microlog snapshot. When I used it on my own computer this worked like a charm, but one of my colleagues complained that he could not perform a build. It was missing a jar file from the Microlog repository. As it turned out, this jar was missing. It was available for Microlog V1.1.1, but not for the latest snapshot build. It was very easy to solve, just copy a directory and the repository was working the way it should.

Other problems emerged when configuring Microlog. The original idea was that the new PropertyConfigurator should be backward compatible, in order to make it easy to upgrade from Microlog 1.x.x to Microlog V2.0. I found one bug; a property name had changed. This was also easy to fix. Another deploy and the repository contained the fix. The other problem is that I have re-structured the packages, which means that all the appenders and formatters properties have changed. The re-structuring is very important, so I plan to keep the new package names. Although they break the backward compatibility. But since I have changed the major version number, I am not obliged to be 100% backward compatible. When writing this, a new idea has popped up in my head. Maybe I should implement a converter that converts from the old property format to the new property format. Is this a good idea? What do you think?

"What is Soo Special About Microlog?"

"What is So Special About Microlog?", this was the first question I got this morning when arriving to work. This was asked by one of the Java Enterprise specialists at my work. Hmmm... let me think. I was a bit paralyzed by the question, although I should not be. This is not the first time I get this question, I get this question a lot (from people not working with Java ME).

My first answer was "size!". The Log4j jar is 389kB, but Microlog is about 110 kB. But the actual jar size is not what is interesting, but the overhead that Microlog add to the jar. In normal cases it is somewhere between 30-40 kB, depending on what you decide to use. I consider this to be little overhead considering that you get two appenders with two formatters and the configuration framework with the ability to configure via properties files and/or JAD settings files. Plus you get the ability to setup your loggers in a logging hierarchy. All in all, the small size of Microlog is one of its benefits.

My second answer was "remote logging". Log4j contains some remote logging destinations, like syslog daemons and JDBC. Microlog has also support for logging to syslog daemons. This is one of my personal favorites. It is easy to setup a syslog daemon and you get the logs on the server directly. I choose not to implement JDBC support in Microlog. First of all, it makes me sick to think about setting up a JDBC server. Secondly there is not many JDBC drivers available for Java ME with CLDC. Instead I implemented support for logging to Amazon S3. It is easy to setup and you have access to very much storage for a cheap price. Right now you can upload 1 GB for $0.03. Compare this to the price of setting up a JDBC server. You cannot work for many seconds before you have used up your $0.03! It is also very pratical to log to Amazon S3. For example you log to a file, when the file gets to big or when you log above a certain level, the file is copied to the server. As far as I know this is a unique feature, this is not implemented in Log4j and I do no know any other logging library which has suport for Amazon S3. And that is not all; Microlog has support for sending an SMS/MMS or e-mail as well. Log4j has support for e-mail which is based on a simple SMTP client. Micrologs implementation is a little bit smaller and smarter. It uses the Wireless Messaging API (JSR-205) to send an e-mail. The actual assembling of the e-mail and the sending code is less than 30 lines of code. Quite impressive if you ask me, but I am a little bit biased. What do you think? These are the most important remote loggers, but there are more. Please take a look at the Microlog documentation to find out more.

The second question was "how do people do logging if they do not have Microlog?". My answer was "I am not sure, but I guess that they log to the record store or to a file". But if you choose to log to the record store, they also need to implement some kind of log viewer. The data is stored as a byte[] in the record store, which is hard to read right away.

After some further discussion with my collegue, he ask me "...then people must be very happy when the find out about Microlog?". Yes in fact they they are. At least the people that I have spooken to. Of course, sometimes people have some issues with Microlog that they do not like or like to improve. But I always try to listen to the feedback I get and improve Microlog accordingly. In fact most of the important changes are based on feedback. So please continue giving me more feedback about Microlog.

Android, Android, Android and Some More Android

Android is getting a lot of attention right now, both from me and a lot of other people. Recently I attended a breakfast seminar about business opportunities with Android. The author of the book "The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development", Mark Murphy, gave an interesting presentation on the subject. After a brief technical introduction, Mark spoke about the business opportunities. As I gathered, he mostly used the classical open source business opportunities, more or less. Nevertheless the presentation was good. The most interesting part of the breakfast seminar was actually the fact that it was really crowded. I would guess that there was around 200-300 people there, which is very much for a breakfast seminar i Malmö. I meet a lot of old colleagues and all was very positive about Android.

I have just attended the "Advanced Android" course by WayEducation. It was really good and gave insight into the inner workings of the Android platform. I am looking forward to start programming Android for real, in a real project. But that is just around the corner, since it is part of our product backlog.



Last but not least I have ported some parts of Microlog to work on Android. The core is the same for Java ME and Android, but opening a file or a network connection is different. On the other hand writing the actual data is done the same way, e.g. to an OutputStream. This shows that even though Android not officially is Java, we could re-use Java code.

It will be interesting to follow what happens with Android, the platform, the community and the phones. Only time will tell.

What are you opinions/experiences with Android?