Videos from Google I/O 2008

The folks at Google posted a few videos from Google I/O 2008 on YouTube. I'm not sure but it looks like they posted videos of all the sessions too, nice.

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

Google Analytics

Some time back I had considered moving to Wordpress.com. I had thought about doing so I could see statistics and such for the blog. Then I found that I could do it with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is ridiculously easy to setup. You sign in with your Google account, and tell it the domain you want to watch. Then you paste in a little snippet of javascript at the bottom of each page you want to track.

Using Blogger, this is simply done by choosing to 'customize' your template. You click on the 'edit html' link and scroll down to the bottom. Just before the last </body> tag you paste in the snippet. You're done, every page in your blog is merged with this template and will get tracked automatically.

Watch out though! This is where I ran into trouble...
If you switch templates at all you have to paste that code back in there, or you'll lose all tracking for 2 weeks like I did :(

Google Reader

If you haven't checked out Google Reader, you should give it a look. I don't personally have a wealth of experience using other feed readers out there, but I've tried a few. The Google reader is non-intrusive for the most part. Most of the operations you'd want are close at hand and obvious (mark all as read, for example). They use tagging rather than folder structures, though they display your tags as folders. If you tag something as java, you can still tag it as technology; it will show up in both.

If you use Firefox 2.0, and you should, you'll find that they play really nice together. When browsing the web with Firfox you'll see a little 'RSS' box come up in your address bar. That box means that there is a feed for the site your looking at and you can subscribe to it. If you click on that box, Firefox will take you to a page where you chose where to add that subscription. If you choose Google Reader, google will come up and ask you if you'd like to add it to your google homepage (cool in it's own right, but not a good feed reader), or Google Reader. Clicking on Google Reader will take you into Reader, and will show you the new subscription at the bottom of your subscription view on the left (putting new stuff at the top would be better in my opinion). Your new subscription will also be the current view in the reader pane. Up at the top you can choose to label (I was calling it tags earlier, sorry) the current subscription for categorization.

So, if you haven't checked it out before, give it a look, it's pretty nice. Hell, if you don't like it it's not like you have to uninstall it or something :)