The problem I had few times before and the problem I set out to fix today was: “What to do when you want to create multiple objects for your has_many association?” Now, this seems like a simple task for factory_girl callbacks. I tried many approaches, this is my final one and I am happy it works.

Lets say we have a model Bundle and it has_many BundleItems. Then a factory that creates a Bundle with exactly four BundleItems will look like this:

Factory.define :bundle do |f|
  f.bundle_items do |bundle|
    res = []
    4.times do
      res << Factory.build(:bundle_item, :bundle => bundle.result)
    end
    res
  end
end

The only thing I am quite unhappy about is that this calls Proxy.result sooner than it would originally happen, but I simply do not see a better way around this. Suggestions are welcome!

One particular AppEngine limitation is that you can only store one megabyte of data in any datastore entry. Basically any row in the database cannot be bigger and since the only storage you have is the database, you are kinda screwed (like this guy, who jumps first for most of related Google searches). This is particularly painful in case you want to store big files in the database.

You are screwed until you start thinking that is. The limitation is really not a limitation of the storage, more of the transfer layer, the storage can hold virtually any amount of data, so all you have to do is fragment it a little. And here comes Mr. Smartypants. I have created something called bigblobae (read big blobs for app engine). I am certain there are other maybe smarter implementation of this out there, but this is the way I like it, simple.

So if you want to store your large photos, pdfs or whatever in your AppEngine application, checkout the 0.1 release of bigblobae or you can just download the binary.

Related posts:

1. JavaFX Mobile 1.2 Developer Stack
2. JavaOne 2009 Wrap Up
3. Java ME SDK 3.0 finally available

Related posts:

1. JavaFX Mobile 1.2 Developer Stack
2. JavaOne 2009 Wrap Up

Links:

• JavaFX Blog

Related posts:

1. Develop JavaFX Mobile Apps on MacOS
2. Developer Stack Update
3. JavaOne 2009 Wrap Up

Mobile was all over the Keynotes! Just wow, really. So much exposure. The JavaME SDK (official blog) guys are very humble believe me and now very famous, I think they are buying new servers to make all those downloads possible and fast. And for JavaFX Mobile? I am almost loosing words when trying to express everything we have done in the past year.

We sold the Early Access version of JavaFX Mobile Developer Phone. It’s an HTC Diamond and even though the runtime on that device is not so awesome performance-wise I think it is still awesome that many JavaFX developers now have a chance to see their apps running on a real phone.

In our session me and Juraj were showing slides written in JavaFX and running on a hacked version of the Emulator (thanks Lubo!). It was amazing. The Emulator is great. Maybe to good, when compared to the device, but we are working on that too, trust me.

We have been also showing our Hardware acceleration bit. We have OpenVG back-end for JavaFX Mobile runtime since MWC, but it was more of a prototype then, now it is a first class citizen of our graphics framework. The most amazing was the Hardware Acceelerated JavaFX Mobile on HTC Diamond. That’s kick-ass stuff. It was made possible by the AmanithVG library from Mazatech (thanks, guys, looking to work with you more). And there are other ways being explored in the OpenGL area too.

I was just about ready to drop dead before this J1, quite a lot of stuff on my shoulders. But now a week after I feel recharged and filled with positive energy. There is some very interesting shifting here in the JavaFX team and beleive we are moving to something awesome (as always). And after some of those J1 meetings with HW vendors especially there are some many new toys to play with and made amazing stuff on that, well, I am very much looking forward to our next run.

Now back to prioritizing those JIRA Issues. And yes, if you find a bug, report it!

Related posts:

1. JavaFX Mobile 1.2 Developer Stack
2. Come to see us at JavaOne this year!

So it all started by Matt Aimonetti giving a presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. The presentation title is CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star and you can see the slides yourself on slideshare. Shortly after the conference, the organizers began to apologize for the allegedly offensive content of the presentation and others began to express their opinions (sorry, too lazy to dig up all the links) too. What struck me as quite a surprise was when even Martin Fowler, the guy we all love, also came up with his opinion. This brought this topic to quite a different light for me.

I think there are two parts of this story. Both equally interesting. The first is how this presentation reflects on women in the software industry. First, I don’t know how is Software (or IT for that matter) any different from any other business. Women have to fight their way up to the top. But this a true for any minority entering a space controlled by someone else. Sure, the fashion is a domain of women, but do they complain of having little man to work with? I wouldn’t know for sure. In the end this all comes down to discrimination issues, be it positive or negative. Now imagine, that you would do a search and replace in the presentation and replace the female pictures with male bodies. Would it be offensive to us men? Would that change the nature of the presentation? Would it change the message? Well not, for sure. Or at least the message about CouchDB. But it would definitely be much less enjoyable for me and most of the guys for sure. I like woman body and I am not ashamed of it, neither is Matt, I think. We are talking about programming concepts or patterns being sexy, but when someone chooses to declare the sexiness of a product by associating it with something what is generally perceived as sexy he gets marked sexist? Is the fact that a picture of a female body is generally more appealing to me making me sexist? I hope not. Simply this all trying to be politically correct is sometimes making me sick. Anything you do can lead to offending someone. Should you do your best not to offend, you probably will not attract either, heck you probably will end up doing nothing at all. Or nothing of any importance to anyone.

Which directly leads to the second issue in hand. The Rails community in all this. When characterizing a community people tend to take the opinion of its leaders as characteristic ones. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, it just may lead to wrong conclusions. From what I have read it seams (and I am with Martin on this one) that so far the Rails leadership has been not very active on the issue. As I already wrote, no matter how hard you try, you can always find people offended by your actions. The sexism is a very very watched front and Matt did not try very hard to avoid it, but heck why should he? How hard it is to say: “Sorry, no offense intended!” and move on? People who would be still offended afterwards are just offended because they want to be, because they misunderstood and are not willing to understand. From what I can tell from the slides is that there was nothing directed towards women in IT. And generally men are expressing their concerns about this matter. Do women have difficulties being successful in this business? Sure. But the only way to help them is to make them equal partners, not a privileged sub-community. Com’ on gals, the party’s open!

What I have been trying to say with the last paragraph is that Rails world is edgy. There are conflicts, but those are a requirement for things to move somewhere. And I am with Marin on this one again. Rails pushed the perception of how web frameworks should be like. Lets keep pushing guys and screw those old evils and anyone who comes trying to enforce them. There is nothing wrong with saying “This is how we do stuff and if you don’t like it, fork it! The beauty of open-source. I know it is not as easy as it sounds, but trying to make everyone happy either requires a lot of money to convince them that you can make them happy of a hell lot of effort that be used in better ways. I am for not trying to please everyone. I am for being truthful and honest. I am for not playing games of politics. This all looks like politics to me.

Also if you’re going to JavaOne this year do not miss the JavaME 3.0 session that Tomas is doing with our Sonny-Ericsson. I am sure those guys will be showing some neat features and also realy on-device debugging.

Related posts:

1. Develop JavaFX Mobile Apps on MacOS
2. Come to see us at JavaOne this year!

Make sure you do not miss Does Your Mobile Speak the JavaFX™ ? also known as  TS-4801 (had to hack the catalaog a little to get a direct link). Me and Juraj have some pretty amazing stuff planned for this session and I think it is going to be a hell of a show. We will be of course showing our latest experiments and progress with JavaFX on Mobile and beleive me there is stuff to look forward to.

My team from Prague will have even some very good BoF’s on JavaOne and I will bring those up as the conference is comming closer.

Related posts:

1. JavaOne 2009 Wrap Up
2. Java ME SDK 3.0 finally available

Now what can be expected here? Who knows. Release annoucements. Conference reports and maybe some background info around JavaFX and Sun in general. One thing is for sure, this blog is in English and I hope to make time for bragging about things here. Cheers!