Yet Another IT-related Blog

Substitutefor.com was presented the other day as a side-effect of the shocking news that the Ra-Ajax people was being sued, precautionary removing all of its files from download sections.

But that wasn’t an appropriate presentation and neither is going to be this one :-). I’ll leave that for the pt. III, you know what they say: third time lucky.

So what’s this post about? Let’s present the not-really-five-but-four objectives of this pet project.

1. Make money: Err… not really. Would have gone this way in that case.
2. Have something to blog about: Yeah, that’s important. Synergistic approach, discretia.org and substitutefor.com will benefit from each other.
3. Give a try to some web technologies I haven’t played with as a developer: I’m not a web developer, designer or whatever position related to the web but in *every* project or job that I’ve been involved I’ve had to deal with web technologies. So I guess it’s a good point.
4. Have a place to try new things, where things are either ideas, or bad ideas, or even good ideas!
5. Measure the time to market of this kind of ideas.

Some months ago I had an idea –ey that’s a great start for a post! Let’s better say that I thought one of my ideas was worth trying to make it real.

I thought about a community –what else, these days– of questions and answers around the best substitute for something. The idea was to organize them into categories and let people vote for the answers and popularity of the questions.

The idea isn’t extremely innovative, in fact it gets things from forums, ask.com, digg, stackoverflow and many more. But I started to see a lot of funny categories and uses.

In my case, it all started from the need of a substitute for a cooking util in a recipe I was trying to prepare :-). But it would be also very interesting to know who people thing would be the best substitute for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, or confirming the most popular substitute for sex is chocolate!

It wasn’t until February that I started working on it, since it’s only a project I can devote my spare time at home. But it’s ok, the main idea was not to have a great success but to demonstrate that it was possible to create something from an idea in the shortest period of time. I gave it my free time for three weeks and then let it apart until now, 3 months later. But this is another post, what I wanted to comment now is something that really shocked me today.

The people from Ra-Ajax, which obviously is the framework I intend to use in this project, have been sued. Apparently Thomas Hansen, one of the authors, worked beforehand for Gaiaware and they are suing him. I won’t go deeper there since I don’t have the details, but their framework has been removed from its website as precautionary measure.

Good news is, apparently I can use its Stacked platform as the base for my project with the LGPLv3 license, since I downloaded it before the measure. Phew!

By the way, this is my new project, substitutefor.com. A lot of changes are expected, but I decided to go public early as a motivational measure, after months of doing nothing related to it. Now I have an excuse also to publish a lot of interesting things here.

In my previous post about remote development I complained that Eclipse RSE wasn’t ready to be considered a tool for remote development of mid-sized projects.
Well, is it? The more I try to find out about this DSDP project, the more I like it. But it’s all a bit blurry, no simple howto or real experience gives a point about what you can/can’t do with RSE/TM.

The guys at the DSDP seem to be doing a great work, there are many presentations explaining their work, some members have a blog, but from the end user perspective: messy. What can I expect from the project?

Perhaps I overlooked some of its features, I just started to use it for small-projects, college assignments and web development. Useful experiences will be posted.

I found this other blog RSE World, which seems end user oriented (just not actively updated), one case of use in it.

During this Easter holidays I was hoping to get some time to work on my project, just a little… no abuse. Therefore I made a copy of my files from my workstation to my laptop. But then I started working in my not-so-bleeding-edge-but-adorable powerbook G4 12″ and it felt sooo slow…

Compiling such a big C++ project is not a friendly task, specially while Eclipse is eating almost all of your main memory. Once the compilation is done, I need to do some testing, but even for small runs, my laptop isn’t powerful enough for an execution-driven computer architecture simulator. That was obvious, I already planned to connect via ssh to my workstation to do the testing and to a cluster of computers to do some more serious testing.

What if I could do all these things in a much more simple way. I had an idea rounding my head, which someone must already have implemented: I work locally in my powerbook, changes are updated to my workstation and then compilation/testing is done via ssh: tada!

The little sysadmin in my brain told me a couple of rsync scripts should make the deal. But given there are so many big brains in the eclipse development team I was hoping there was a solution already integrated into the IDE. My search began with this old document which represents *exactly* what I want: Eclipse Remote Development

This is only a recommendations and guidelines document btw, but it’s old… There must be some work done. And it does: RSE and TM are their names. TM and RSE FAQ

RSE allows you to access some *remote* resources from your workbench, as well as managing ssh sessions. You can even create a remote project. But let’s have something clear: remote=slow, local=fast. And I want fast! I want a local project synchronised with a remote one to compile and execute remotely.

Besides, the RSE approach disables C++ indexing and the outline because there is no local project. Not what I wanted. As far as I understood TM is aimed to deploy on embedded systems and there are some incompatibilities with CDT right now… but I got it a bit blurry. So you better look somewhere else for more information. I think RSE/TM is close to what I need but since compilation is made locally you still need a cross-compiler. That’s what I understood from an IBM presentation about RSE.

Conclusion

RSE is a cute piece of software. It’s nice to edit some remote perl scripts, web development and the like, but it’s not a solution for general remote development paradigm with replicated resources. The TM project members in Eclipse (IBM project, I think) are actively working in something promising, everything seems very professional in their development documents, plans, etc. but it’s a bit messy for the end user right now.