Barry Hawkins (Posts about foss)

Mark Ramm, friend and exemplar

Barry Hawkins — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:22:41 GMT

My post about a Python web frameworks OpenSpace convened at CodeMash drew a bit of attention, and looking over it again, I can see how it can send messages I did not intend. In order to break my trend of sitting on posts for weeks and months, I pushed myself to get this one out even though I wanted to finesse it more. The main person who could have taken this the wrong way would be Mark Ramm, who convened the talk and is also currently heading up my favorite Python web framework.

Instead of launching some missive or flaming the comments of my post, Mark took the time to further explain the situation for TurboGears both past and future. He even apologized if he may have unintentionally spoken ill of the JVM (which he did not). Mind you, I am no defender of the JVM, but I can see how I might seem like it from that post. Mark also sent an email which explained some of the discussion items and after hearing that, I was far less concerned about where things are heading with that project.

I have known Mark for about a year now. We have had dinner together and shared many funny stories (he has many, should you ever have occasion to hear them). I consider him a friend, and his reaction to that post is an example of what I have come to enjoy about the Python community. After reading Zed Shaw's "Rails is a Ghetto" tonight, I am even more thankful for it. Man, even if you filter through the bile and profanity, it still sounds like this dude received some rough treatment for trying to do the right thing at times. And if some of it is true, then I need to rethink some of the folks whose work I endorse.

Time & Money migrated to Subversion

Barry Hawkins — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:34:04 GMT

Over the weekend I managed to get the Time & Money project repository migrated over to Subversion. It was a fun one because the modules needed to be rearranged into the directory structure that the team had worked out. I kept a log of my steps with the goal of turning that into a how-to that may be of help to other Sourceforge projects that have yet to migrate from CVS. I just need the time to make it more of a cogent how to and less of a stream-of-consciousness ramble.

Spring as an enabling technology for applied Domain-Driven Design

Barry Hawkins — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:10:21 GMT

I wrote earlier about the apparent embrace of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) within the Interface21 team, the group behind the excellent Spring framework for Java applications. I have been thinking about why it is that Spring in particular would lend itself to the application of DDD.

I first expressed this during the review of the DDD track last Wednesday for the start of the conference. The escape from the productivity hit we all took with Java EE when Spring first began to be known was a big deal. The ability to have an layered, n-tier application that was testable out of the application container, with the ability to wire up a bean container's contents via a straightforward XML syntax breathed new life into many a tired J2EE web application. Lines and lines of tiresome boilerplate code for DAOs were replaced with clean, small implementations that extended the appropriate Spring template. The effectiveness of our domain models were about the furthest thing from our minds. Why didn't we immediately address domain modeling as soon as we had our sea legs with Spring?

I would say it's analogous to not being that concerned about what clothes you are wearing when you are starving to death. Remember Maslow's hierarchy of need from basic psychology in college? Few people whose physiological and safety need are not being met care that much about self-actualization. There are enough shops using Spring for there to have been two consecutive conferences dedicated to the technology. Spring is ubiquitious; that was the thrust of Rod Johnson's keynote today. It has proven itself as a productive, viable foundation of enterprise Java applications the world over. Given that foundation, there exists the capacity to ask, "how can we now move to the next level of applying Spring in the best manner possible?" Domain-driven design answers that question.

Domain-Driven Design is not easy, and many, if not most, technologies actually impede the application of DDD. This is where Spring stands out among the raft of framework options. It has always had the intent of staying out of one's way rather than attempt to infuse all of your code with its own prescriptive dogma (insert JSR of choice here). Spring stays out of your way, enabling the necessary insulation of your domain model. Since it is also Open Source software, there's no need to bolster a revenue model by implementing any such ugliness in an attempt to ensure vendor lock-in. The Interface21 group is freed of that burden throughy their choice of Open Source, they are freed to pursue excellence in the code unfettered by a need to drive sales of the software. Since they depend on revenues through services, they are driven to make the best framework possible that will be of sufficient utility for more people to need training and consultation they provide. The model seems quite sustainable, and I wish them the best.

The missing ingredient in commercial desktop OS options; a package management system

Barry Hawkins — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:03:09 GMT

Having spent the better part of two days provisioning my new MacBook Pro's OS X, Debian, and Windows XP instances, I am keenly aware of how much the Debian distribution's package management system and its volume of packages have spoiled me. In that two days, the amount of time required to provision Debian was negligible, even though it is configured to completely match my Lifebook's Debian Sid instance. In fact, the sum total of time to set up Debian, including every application I use, was about 45 minutes of my involvement. Those who know Debian (and Ubuntu, Linspire, Xandros, Mepis, or any other Debian derivative) are coolly nodding their heads, while others are probably thinking I am a lying, biased Linux zealot.

It's no lie; here are the steps I had to take:

Run the Debian Installer business card image and perform a stock Sid installation, choosing Desktop and Standard System options in the task selection step. If you weren't wanting to run Sid, the netinstall image would be fine as well.
Generate a package list on the current Debian installation via # dpkg --get-selections > dpkg-selections.txt
Copy the package list file to the new installation; I have copied it to my home directory in this example.
Set the package selections for the new installation via # dpkg --set-selections < ~/dpkg-selections.txt
Run aptitude or synaptic and choose the install action, then go do something else. Thousands, literally thousands of software packages are being installed for you. Everything from your email client to your office suite to your software development tools are being pulled down from package mirrors. In my case, this was over 850MB of compressed package files.
After the package download, answer any configuration questions aptitude (or synaptic) poses.
Copy your /home directory contents to the new installation.

Compare that to what it takes with either Mac OS X or Windows XP to get all of your applications installed and configured. Even if you don't know a thing about Linux or even the more technical side of those operating systems, you can tell from the brevity of that set of steps that the Debian setup is remarkably simple.

Now, some will already be keying in their comment posts with exclamations of "Hey! There's DarwinPorts/Fink/Cygwin!" Yeah, each of those is a nice start; however, they pale in comparison. Fink at least has the robust apt/dpkg foundation, but even it has a relatively meager package selection. I am sure I'll be writing more on life with Fink and DarwinPorts in the near future.

I still don't have half the stuff installed on XP that I plan to use. I get tired just thinking about the installs. 8^)

The long-overdue release of java-package 0.28

Barry Hawkins — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 06:46:20 GMT

An updated java-package will hit unstable in the next mirror pulse. Apologies to all for the delay; my discretionary time and that of my sponsors has been rather sparse for some time now. There are at least 9 bug reports addressed in the release. All users who have a JRE or JDK packaged by a previous version of java-package are encouraged to first remove their existing packages and then install an updated one generated by 0.28. Again, sorry for my low level of productivity for Debian, but paying my bills and being a new dad has been quite taxing (albeit rewarding) the past nine months.

Bruce's Artima writeup on the Web Frameworks Jam and TurboGears

Barry Hawkins — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 04:24:10 GMT

Bruce Eckel's writeup posted to Artima tonight. He did a good job of capturing the blow-by-blow on our progression through TurboGears.

Web Frameworks Jam, Day 3

Barry Hawkins — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 04:43:21 GMT

By the end of today, I feel quite confident that TurboGears holds great potential as a productive web application framework. We went through all of the 20-Minute Wiki and TurboTunes tutorials. It would take a full-blown article to cover the stuff I've seen, but for now, I will just highlight some of the features that surprised me.

Despite the youth of the TurboGears project, they seem to have already realized the important of a useful toolset. With a simple command-line tg-admin toolbox from the root of my TurboTunes tutorial workspace, I found an impressive little bundle of tools there at my disposal.

What's CatWalk? A web application to browse my domain model? No way, you must be kidding! Nope:

Lo and behold, my domain model, with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, browsable and editable right there. Wow. I had also noticed a Model Designer, and set my expectations to what I thought was an appropriate "lowness". Not necessary!

That is the sample model for the domain I had manually created, represented in diagram form. I have yet to see any tools like this for Rails, though they may exist. The "pythonic" nature of the MVC components of a TurboGears application has an aesthetic that totally appeals to me. I also noticed that unit testing code is stubbed out and ready to be run using Nose. Looking forward to learning more about that.

Web Frameworks Jam, Day 2

Barry Hawkins — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 06:42:32 GMT

The second day of the WFJ for me was the second half of my journey up the learning curve on installing TurboGears (TG) on Debian with Python 2.3 and 2.4 installed. The predicament seems to have been that 2.3 is still the default Python version, even in sid, and the python-turbogears package is targeted for 2.4. The package does not pull in at least one of its dependencies, so I was finally relegated to trying a manual installation. Once I figured out that easy_install-2.4 allowed me to install the necessary Python eggs into my /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory, I was all set to go with TurboGears 0.9a6.

Once TG was installed, the rate at which we were able to progress into the tutorial was impressive. I think if we'd been more familiar with how Python libraries are handled, we would have been much farther along. This, of course, is a great motivation for me to give attention to the Debian package so that at least one Linux distro can have a great out-of-the-box TG experience.

Web Frameworks Jam, Day 1

Barry Hawkins — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 05:29:23 GMT

We kicked off the Web Frameworks Jam today, and so far it looks like another great event. We ended up sorting into three groups, one for TurboGears, one for Spring/Hibernate, and one for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Bruce, Dianne, and I are the TurboGears group. I was on the fence between Ruby on Rails and TurboGears, but since I would have been the only person looking at Rails, that I would've forfeited the benefit of the group.

I didn't make much progress today; it seems I am a victim of Debian's Python 2.3 to 2.4 transition and a rather nascent python-turbogears package in Debian. I am learning about Python package management and parallel installs of multiple Python versions, which is something I have been meaning to learn anyway. Hoping for a more productive day tomorrow; in the meantime I was able to file 5 bugs against the Debian TurboGears package along with some patches. We hiked around Lake Erwin in the middle of the day, which was a welcome pause from my installation and setup frustrations.

Man, it's good to be back in Crested Butte. I rode the Lower Loop Trail yesterday afternoon with my brother. What a beautiful trail for mountain biking. The Americanos at Camp 4 Coffee were something I've been missing as well.

Debian Graphical Installer -- excellent work, guys

Barry Hawkins — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 06:26:37 GMT

I recently had to provision a laptop at my client's site for my use. Certain third-party applications that are key to managing the technology practice there are Windows-only, but I (am fortunately allowed to) refuse to have a Windows-only machine. They are cool enough to let me shrink the corporate WIndows XP image and set up a Debian sid instance for dual-booting. I took my trusty CD of a recent daily snapshot (the fact that I have been able to use daily snapshots of the Debian Installer ISO for several years with little to no trouble is in itself a huge testimony to the quality of that project's work) and popped it into the media drive of this rather battered Dell Latitude D600. I had heard at DebConf that the graphical installer was now fully part of the daily snapshots, so on a whim I invoked it with the 'expertgui' directive at the boot prompt.

Wow.

If you haven't seen this, go and burn an ISO of the daily snapshot for your architecture and boot into it. (I won't even elaborate on the fact that being able to choose from 11 different architectures is massively impressive.) What a beautiful interface, and how amazingly tasteful as far as look-and-feel. It's very professional-looking, yet not corporate. There's a button to capture snapshots of the install screens right there on each screen. It may take a minute or two to adjust to having the right line in the display highlighted before clicking the button to continue in more-complex screens, but the annoyance is neglible. I was thoroughly impressed, so much so that I wiped my backup laptop, a ThinkPad T42, and did a reinstall using the graphical interface. You can still pop over to the other virtual terminals just like in the character-based installer; the graphical interface seems to use the fifth virtual terminal. I just popped out of it to the second via Ctrl + Alt + 2 and was able to mount a USB drive with some firmware I needed.

I wiped the T42 so I could run the IBM recovery and get XP back on a small partition. Hey, how else am I going to play Warcraft III? (Seriously, though, if anyone has managed to get Warcraft III to run via an emulator, let's talk.) I found it a study in contrasts, installing XP and then installing Debian immediately after. The first thing I noticed with XP is how little visibility I have into the install process compared to the Debian installer. I suppose I shouldn't have to since all these vendors have supposedly ensured (stifling audible laughter here) a smooth installation process for me. However, when something does go wrong, I am pretty much out of luck. Second, I have come to take for granted how quickly you can fully provision an OS instance with Debian's rich package-management system. The benefits of an awesome package management system are painfully obvious as soon as you have to reinstall Windows or OS X, especially if you are a software developer with a whole litany of tools necessary for your work.

A graphical installer was the last major impediment to me recommending Debian to my friends and relatives who are too befuddled by a character-based application or installer. This closes a significant gap in the Debian offering, and I wish to sincerely thank those who have poured so much time into the installer project as a whole and have gone the extra distance to create an interface that reaches out to the less-technically-oriented crowd.