Andres Almiray is the lead developer of Griffon, a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy, and a committer on the Groovy programming language. I consider him to be one of the most influential programmers in the world. I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his blog and follow him on Twitter.
Andres was kind enough to answer questions that I think are relevant to all of you readers. I hope you learn from them as much as I have. Without further ado…
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With the announcement of the closure of kenai.com, I’ve decided to move my open-source projects to GitHub.
It’s with a sad heart that we have to announce that the Kenai.com domain will be shutdown as part of the consolidation of project hosting sites now that Sun is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle.
This is sad because I thought Kenai had some really killer features like excellent JIRA and NetBeans integration. Nevertheless, it’s not up to me to decide.
Software is only as good as it’s community
A great project cannot thrive without people to improve and maintain it. The reason I am choosing GitHub is the number of people (especially friends) already on it. The is it’s main advantage over something like bitbucket. Git, in my opinion, has great momentum in the OSS community and is roughly equivalent to mercurial in functionality (with a few differences, obviously). Both DVCS are far superior to their non-distributed counterparts. To sum up the biggest benefit in a phrase: “Local commits FTW!”
Moving to GitHub has already paid off because my recent javascript-stacktrace project already has over 50 watchers and a couple forks.
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I started a Javascript Stacktrace project back in August 2008. The idea was to give additional debugging power to browsers where you don’t have good tools to work with. I’d like to give you an update on where the project is today.
Lately, I’ve been working on updating my old script. Since it was written, we’ve seen lots of major browser releases and the introduction of the V8 Javascript engine used by Google Chrome.
Updated browser compatibility
Browsers that are fully-supported and well-tested:
- Firefox (and Iceweasel) 0.9+
- Safari 3+
- IE 5.5+
- Konqueror 3.5+
- K-Meleon 1.5.3+
- Epiphany 2.28.0+
Browsers that are supported in almost all cases but not as well-tested:
- Chrome 1+ – One bug (feature?) that may be in Chrome reporting functions as anonymous when they aren’t. HOWEVER, Chrome’s stack gives us line numbers AND column numbers, so we can see exactly where our problem is – even in minified Javascript! Sweet!
- Opera 9+ – Opera is dead to me now. Opera 10+ has removed the error.stack info we needed and introduced error.stacktrace, but it seems very unstable.
More info about compatibility can be shown with the BrowserShots of the test suite.
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