Few months have passed since my last post. Finally, the silence is broken! Now I’m going to tell you about some of the most interesting things that I experienced lately. Are you thrilled yet?! 
Read on…
Having recently installed new Ubuntu Linux 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, I was pleasantly surprised by it. Overall, it’s a very polished OS. Really, you shouldn’t wait any more if you haven’t tried it yet – go install it already, you will not be disappointed! It gives me a feeling that after another release or two Ubuntu will become the Holy Grail of OSes I mean, as close to perfection as you can possibly get! Currently, it seems that only Compiz Fusion (3D desktop with cute graphical effects) is not well polished yet, giving me some graphical glitches sometimes. But overall, Gutsy Gibbon is a pleasure to use, almost like Mac OS X Tiger, or even Leopard! (Haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet – Tiger satisfies me, and I decided to stay with it.. for a little while at least). And keep in mind that such a treasure is absolutely free! I love FOSS 
For quite a while now desktop Linux was chasing rainbows (struggling to get mainstream attention). You know – whenever you try to get closer to it, it always stays in the distance, unreachable. But hopefully, Linux will finally catch that rainbow soon
I love plenty of choices in the Linux world. One can customize this OS as he likes in a way that’s unmatched in other OSes which limit your choice. You’re a geeky UNIX hacker? No problem, try Fluxbox / XFCE / IceWM / WindowMaker. You’re accustomed to Windows / Mac OS X and want your OS’s desktop environment to be packed with features and to be similar in appearance (and bloat)? Get KDE or Gnome! Want something more original, stylish, beautiful and fast at the same time? Nah, it’s not possible! Or is it?! And here, my friend, we came to another highlight of this post – Enlightenment 17, or E17 in short. You can see a screenshot below (click for full-sized picture).
Enlightenment used to be a window manager, but in this version, which is still beta (mostly stable though), it pretends to be a full desktop shell. Heck, it even has a decent Control Panel! And everything is so elegant and fast at the same time! There’s no point in discussing in great detail here what makes Enlightenment so cool. Because one picture is worth a thousand words. But to fully appreciate it’s style and atmosphere (and speed!), you’ve got to try it yourself. It’s easy to install it in Ubuntu. Google for it It is not in the official Ubuntu repositories yet, because it’s still beta… I think Enlightenment deserves such a name, because after discovering it I truly felt enlightened Definitely worth checking out! And to make it even easier to try, there’s a Live-CD with E17 based on Debian Linux, called Elive. So… I’m awaiting the official release with anticipation!
So, what’s with that cup of Java in the title of this post, you ask? Well, at my day job as a programmer, I write programs in Microsoft’s C# language. Actually, it’s very similar to Sun’s Java, but I haven’t studied Java in detail yet, and never used it (even didn’t want to – I used Delphi before). Recently, I wanted to write some applications and games for myself, as a hobby, in my spare time. Initially, I thought of writing them in C# of course, since I know it better than anything else. But as I work in all 3 popular OSes now, I naturally want my apps to be easily portable, without a hassle. So, that essentially left me with a choice of Java and C#. And, surprising even myself, after thorough analysis of pros and cons, I came to the conclusion to use Java! Because it’s now opensource and fully supported across platforms. C# and .NET are really supported by MS only on Windows. Yes, you can say that there’s Mono for Linux and OSX, but I tried it, and to me, it just doesn’t feel right! But Java does feel quite right! Especially these days, since it became opensource and GPL’d. So, I changed my opinion on Java, and started learning it’s details. I have downloaded Eclipse IDE for Mac OS X and now I’m reading the excellent book by Bruce Eckel “Thinking in Java”. And watching the popularity ratings of programming languages, with Java being the leader there (C# is merely 8th!), I think so many people that choose Java (including myself from now on) just can’t be wrong!
Stay tuned for more posts from me! And I’ll try to post more frequently now. If anyone actually cares, that is
I installed Enlighten a couple of years ago. I new then that it had a future. I just didn’t realize it would be showing up in Wal-Mart. I was very impressed with it. I kept it on my computer until I upgraded to FC5 (I think). I’ll have to take another look at it, but it will take a lot to pry me away from KDE, especially since KDE4 will be coming out in January.
Enlightenment looks Oh-Sooo-Goooood! I like it. And it looks surprisingly familiar to me. You’d never know why though! I t reminds me . . . guess what? . . CDE! I tried it once and the control layout looked practically the same, although it wasn’t so eye-candy. All right, they are totally different, but I could imagine I could use both easily. Google OS use it by default, as it’s blog-rumored.
Playing with Java? Good shot – I play with python, and I’m very excited with its functional-programming capabilities. It’s aver some! And it’s threading seems easy for me – start() and run() – just like in java.
You know, there’s lot of hype around Groovy and Ruby nowadays, but I see that there’re lots of areas where python is simply second to none. I’m starting to love duck-type scripting. You are still type-secure but you can write a very concise and streamlined code with it, ex:
myArray.each {doAnithingWith it; andMore() }
5.times { }
Cool indeed. And it’s mostly cross-platform. I mean I works on custom VMs, as well as on .NET and Java if you got one. And who cares about OS? Me, I don’t!
As a platform Java is very descent but it loose to C# as a language. No delegates, no true properties, now true generics, now strucs, no /* insert anything else here */, but it got java.util.concurrent and sets (Damn the C# – it doesn’t!) and lots of other things. Anyway my vision about it is different now. It’s hard to find a reliable hosting for your java project, and I think of it as a server-side, but internal-corporate-sever-side. Pyth and RoR are different, as well as .NET – that’s the Internet is made of.
One more thing about it is third-party libs – to know JEE is simply not enough to know the tech. You have to gain a broader view. Rails community is more focused. They got only one framework, but it is THE one framework they need, and they work hard to make it better. Code generation makes you write much less code and makes you extremely productive. Java require lots of effort and knowledge be put on to achieve the same goal.
My two cents:
JRuby (on 2nd Rails) on Jetty is the way to go! Grails is a second option. Wicket+ActiveObjects – for nothing-but-java cowboy coders only. But the true power is Scala-Python-Erlang. Stay tuned.
PS: If you know Py, why to learn anything else?
Andrew, I personally think, that currently Python is not very consistent, and not scalable enough for large projects. But I’m awaiting Python 3000 release – as far as I’m concerned, it will make Python much better and more consistent. Until then, I decided to stick to Java. And I’m more interested in desktop applications, not web apps. So Ruby on Rails is really not for me…
Wait a second. I wonder if there’s a big difference between desktop and web applications. Anyway, never mind.
If you’re learning Jva by writing a command line apps it’s ok, but here’s my 2 cents: don’t waste your time for Java UI – it’s a crap. You’d better use some other technologies for UI, like WPF, or Silverlight, or Flex, or HTML and stuff. It’s easier and gives you a much prettier result (from eye-candy point of view), and if you do, when what’s the difference between this and web apps?