It shouldn't be so hard to figure out Eclipse install dependencies

I just spent an absurd amount of time trying to install m2e in a non-Java Developer packaging of Eclipse Luna. A lot of people have put a lot of work into making this easier but it still is something that seems to require a lot of specialized knowledge and folklore about how the Eclipse tools and community works and, well, that's really not something someone who just wants to be an Eclipse IDE user should really have to immerse themselves in just to install one thing.

Anyway, it turns out that m2e 1.5 and up needs Guava, and in particular a bundling of it from something called the Orbit project.

The results of my explorations are here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31693823/m2e-extension-is-not-installing-in-eclipse-luna

I guess the silver lining here is my StackOverflow reputation more than doubled while I was putting this together.

Install Mercurial with the Git Extension on Windows 7

In the wondrous spirit of free software, this is a little more confusing than it should be, and there are many permutations possible that lead to roughly the same end result, so here's a quick recipe that worked for me circa Jan 2013 on Windows 7:

• Install Git for Windows if you don't already have it. You need this to get the Mercurial hggit extension working, even if you never intend to use git directly afterwards.
  
  • Go here: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+installer+official+git and get the latest stable-looking version. I used http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/detail?name=Git-1.8.0-preview20121022.exe&can=2&q=full+installer+official+git
  • Run the installer you just downloaded.
  • Start up a CMD shell
  • Set HOME to be where your home is going to be. On Windows 7, that's going to be C:\Users\yournamehere. I used this command, for example:
    
    • setx HOME C:\Users\sbarber
• Install TortoiseHG
  
  • On Windows 7 64 bit, I used http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/files/downloads/tortoisehg-2.6.2-hg-2.4.2-x64.msi
  • If you have installed TortoiseHG, you probably don't need to separately install the command line Mercurial client package because it's bundled with TortoiseHG
• Download the hggit extension to your machine. Here I put it in %HOME%/hg, but you can use another location so long as you're consistent:
  
  • cd %HOME%
  • mkdir hg
  • cd hg
  • git clone http://bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git/
• Make a Mercurial.ini file in your %USERPROFILE% dir that contains this text:, substituting your username for sbarber:

  [extensions]
  hgext.bookmarks =
  hggit = c:/Users/sbarber/hg/hg-git/hggit

  
  
• That's all you need for unsecured Git repositories. If I get around to accessing secured Git repositories with Mercurial, I'll update this post.

A handy post on this topic that I used as a guide to create this one is http://candidcode.com/2010/01/12/a-guide-to-converting-from-mercurial-hg-to-git-on-a-windows-client/. It's a little out of date but a bit broader in terms of handling some variations that occur on different Windows versions.

Twitter APIs for Java

I've been messing with Twitter APIs in Java lately. I've come across three open source projects so far, which oddly enough are not listed anywhere all in one place, so here's the list:

• java-twitter (http://code.google.com/p/java-twitter/) License: Apache 2.0
  
• JTwitter (http://www.winterwell.com/software/jtwitter.php) License: LGPL
  
• Twitter4J (http://yusuke.homeip.net/twitter4j/en/index.html) License: "BSD-style"
  

These are listed in the order I came across them.

I've used java-twitter to build a couple small things. The project is active and being updated regularly, and the code seems to work. It uses a lot of dependent libraries, one of which you need to build yourself (Google Prototype Buffers). The API has been recently updated to use a builder-style model which is a little complicated but still not hard to understand.

Haven't tried the other two yet. At first glance, JTwitter is the simplest; Twitter4J seems to have the most obvious usage model and clear Javadocs; it wants to be donation-ware.

java.net: Quick and Easy Object Persistence: pBeans Groovy Beans [May 19, 2004]

This looks interesting: java.net: Quick and Easy Object Persistence: pBeans Groovy Beans [May 19, 2004]

I haven't had great luck with making Java object persistence simple or elegant. The problem is that most real database applications that are maintained by database professionals require access to the DB to be done through a stored procedure interface. I haven't found a good way to make using an O/R mapping framework be any less work (over the long haul) than direct JDBC coding (the DAO pattern helps to encapsulate this, though).

There's been a lot of activity in the Open Source world over the last few years in this space; time to check them out again to see if there are any serious contenders for work on real systems that have to integrate with things other than Java apps in a "green field" project.

What is this?

In my career as a professional software developer, I'm always learning new things about software development, accumulating new war stories, evaluating new technologies, and trying to figure things out.

This weblog is really just a place to jot down these observations all in one place. Whether it ever gets to be useful, I don't know. Certainly it will be more useful to me than to others.

If anyone is reading this, please feel free to comment constructively, especially if I seem to be taking off in the wrong direction.