Code Trips & Tips

January 24, 2010

Writing a GWT Module

The available documentation from http://code.google.com/gwt and other blogs I’ve researched, is pretty scant on detail about creating and re-using your own GWT module, so I’ve decided to draft here a few guidelines, highlighting the most likely pitfalls along the path. The following assumes you already have a certain familiarity with GWT, the use of Eclipse […]

January 16, 2010

A visual diff for Mercurial

I have already mentioned in the past how much I like Mercurial as a distributed VCS, and how strongly I encourage anyone who is doing development (in team with others, or on your own) to seriously consider adopting it. However, one of the features I’ve been greatly missing is a quick way to check which […]

January 6, 2010

Simple script to add a file or directory to Mercurial’s .hgignore

If you use Mercurial as a Source Control Management (SCM) system (and if you don’t, then you should seriously ask yourself why) then you have probably grown used to the rather repetitive editing of the .hgignore file, to add files / folders that should not be under version control. The need is particularly acute if […]

November 20, 2009

More about GWT and Spring

The following was contributed by Yaakov Chaikin (one of the authors of Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages) following some conversations we had regarding an earlier post of mine.I am only too happy to post it here, with many thanks to Yaakov for taking the time for drafting it. Let me share one more thing with […]

November 9, 2009

rsync on an SSHFS mount point

Turns out that“If you plan [to] use rsync to sync files from your local machine to your ssh-server, you need “workaround=rename”Otherwise, you will not be able to update an older version of a file with a newer one. Without this option, you will be able to create files and folders and delete them, but you […]

November 1, 2009

Why hashCode() matters

If you have ever overridden the equals() method of Object in your class code (and who hasn’t?) you will obviously also re-implemented hashcode() too, following the (ominously scary) warning in the Javadoc of equals(): Note that it is generally necessary to override the hashCode method whenever this method is overridden, so as to maintain the […]

September 27, 2009

Mounting SSHFS drives in Ubuntu

If you have a remote file server that you usually access via SSH, it is extremely simple to mount a directory on your ‘local’ filesystem (many applications will not allow you to ‘browse’ to network drives when looking for files to open). You can simply add the following to /etc/fstab (remember to mkdir -p /path/to/dir […]

July 3, 2009

Using a decent blog editor

Let’s face it, Blooger’s editor for posts is, er, well.. “lacking” — ok, it sucks! There, I’ve said it…. There are so many shortcomings with it that there’s no point in listing them all here, but suffice to say that having a tiny editing window is not the most enticing UI for an editor that […]

June 11, 2009

A DiffSet generic collection

Working on a GWT project that requires fairly frequent RPC calls to the server to exchange data I was confronted with the following problem: the data set itself was likely to be of fairly large size — not massive (we are not talking tens of MBs) but not smaller either: to give a rough estimate, […]

May 28, 2009

An Add / Edit ListBox for GWT

Update — turns out that using Hyperlink is not the best solution: one is better off with Anchor widgets.The change to the code is really trivial: simply change the constructor of the two Hyperlink widgets to look like: Anchor addLnk = new Anchor(“add”); that’s it.—A relatively common ‘widget’ that one needs to use in several […]