Happy pi day!

My friend, Alex Wolfe, gets the credit for hitting me with this first.

But happy pi day! (3.14), get it? Unfortunately he didn't contact me at 1:59 though...

Google Guice 1.0 Released

Guice 1.0 has been released. Guice, as you'll see all over the internet at this point, is a Dependency Injection framework from the folks at Google.

That being said, there are plenty of lemmings out there who'll go running off the cliff for this; because it's from Google. So, guess what, I'm going to jump to, but I'm bringing a parachute.

I started trying to port over some simple code I have on my laptop from Spring to Guice this morning. The very first thing I noticed; is that there is no feasible way to inject an existing Pojo class (that is annotation-free) without writing a Provider class for every Pojo. So if you're using Spring framework classes (without the XML), such as JmsTemplate, HibernateTemplate, and JdbcTemplate, you better get used to writing Provider classes.
Read more here...

There is an alternative approach that involves building a Spring ApplicationContext from XML, and then bringing it into Guice using there SpringIntegration code. But once you've done that, what's the point?

I'm betting someone will come up with a good solution for this. It really is a nice framework, but the Pojo thing is very limiting.

Here's some links for more information...
crazybob.org: Guice 1.0
Guice at googlecode
My googlegroups post on the pojos

Ernest Gallo

Ernest Gallo past away today at age 97, at his home in Modesto California. Even if you don't know wine, you recognize the name E&J Gallo. Ernest Gallo is the father of the American wine industry.
Learn more...
http://www.gallo.com/ErnestGallo/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gallo/

IDEs for Ruby

A nice comparison sheet of the various Ruby posted over at O'Reilly Ruby.
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/03/ides_for_ruby.html

This sheet is actually from another blog: "The Nameless One"

It is funny, to me at least, is that the O'Reilly post is written by Curt Hibbs. Curt is one of the principle developers on the FreeRIDE Ruby IDE; he mentions that in his post. The interesting part is that the comparison did not include FreeRIDE. This is for a good reason. FreeRIDE is a joke. FreeRIDE really stands to make Ruby look bad to people being introduced to it for the first time. FreeRIDE is unstable at best, bordering on unusable.

A first timer on a Windows box is probably going to download the one-click installer to install Ruby. This installer comes with FreeRIDE and will put shortcuts out for it. The afore mentioned first-timer will launch it and try to play with it. It will be slow, clunky and featureless; then it will crash. With an immediate "wow, well screw that" from the newbie.

It sort of reminds me of much of the worlds view of Java due to all the shitty Applets and Swing/Awt apps out there.

If you're looking for a good 'free' rails IDE check out RadRails, if you're a Java guy with IntelliJ installed, definitely check out the Rails plugin.