The Mercurial project has just released its version 1.0!

Congratulations to the team behind this project for bringing what I personally consider as the very best distributed source configuration management tool to date (yes, I have already played with Bazaar and Git)

Mercurial is (much like Bazaar) written in Python. It is cross-platform, extremely efficient, extensible with plugins and last but not least, Mercurial is such a stupid tool to use! The interface and general workflow are no-brainers if you have already played with SCM before. You’ll get started in just a few minutes with it. I know that lots of geeks prefer playing with Git… but how can anyone understand the Git interface?

If you are currently considering a distributed SCM model, then I strongly suggest that you look at it, just like Mozilla and Sun did. Oh and if you happen to work with Windows boxes, there is still TortoiseHG for a seamless integration with the Windows explorer!

I have been very busy lately as I am still writing my PhD thesis… many apologies to my readers, I promise to become more active as soon as I can

Here is a collection of (not that) random thoughts I have collected over the week.

• Guilder is a promising build management project that wants to fix the Maven shortcomings. It is based on Groovy to make a nice internal domain-specific language. Oh and it uses IzPack
• PicoContainer is still alive! The developers have upgraded it to Java 5 and made a few nice improvements. If you are looking for an IoC container then I strongly suggest that you have a look at it. I know that Google Guice is highly hyped these days, but quite frankly PicoContainer is a very solid alternative: lighter, simple containers model, works with 3rd-party libraries out of the box, simple lifecycle facilities, … Trying both is the best way to make a choice, but my personal preference is set on PicoContainer over Guice.
• Groovy is an amazing productivity booster… I’ve been writing research prototypes using it and all I can say is that it really made my code nicer in much less time. I’ve had to rewrite something I had done in Java before, and the code is now smaller, more readable and I didn’t notice any runtime performance hit although the algorithms have been written in the most naive fashion. It works seamlessly with existing Java code, and it looks like normal Java to Java code. I should be able to let you know more about this in the next few weeks
• I had a very quick look at Grails a few months back. For sure it was similar to Rails, but I couldn’t see a strong reason why I would choose Grails over Rails. I have had another look recently and I’ve been quite impressed by the thing…
  The Grails documentation is very good. The framework is a well-built layer on top of existing Java technologies. The scafolding generates good looking pages that you could nearly reuse as-is. I think that choosing Grails instead of Rails really makes sense if you are in a JavaEE environment. But again, try both, see what works best in your context, and stay away from flamewars

If you enjoy house music mixes, here is a bonus… let me know if you liked it

… par accident

(je suis une tête sur la droite, juste devant le point de départ de la F1)

A l’occasion de cette démonstration de Renault F1 dans les rues de Clermont-Ferrand, j’avais pris quelques photos :

RenaultF1 Roadshow Clermont-Ferrand

I am currently in the most critical stages of my phd thesis writing (this is why my blogging activity is not so high), but from times to times I “relax” by devoting a bit of time to IzPack

The next major release will be 4.0.0. There will never be any 3.11.1 as it was meant as an interim release. We are on a short (3 months) release cycle for 4.0.0 and it is expected to be delivered on may 12th.

You can easily follow the roadmap using JIRA. At the moment, here is what we have in the queue (some issues are still open, and new ones will get into!).

Release Notes - IzPack - Version 4.0.0

Bug

• [IZPACK-13] - It appears that the "parsexml" resource attribute support does not read the resource that is to be parsed
• [IZPACK-14] - Language XML file contains "rdid" (not "txt")
• [IZPACK-15] - The <xinclude> directive does not work when trying include relative resources where the compile is not run from the same directory as the installation file.
• [IZPACK-16] - Some panels are displayed although suitable conditions are not met
• [IZPACK-19] - The launched installer hangs even if the jar installation would succeed
• [IZPACK-20] - The launcher will never prompt you to install a JRE if there is no JRE on the system

Improvement

• [IZPACK-11] - Option for writing installation information
• [IZPACK-12] - Target Java 5 instead of Java 1.4
• [IZPACK-22] - Update of the Hungarian translation

New Feature

• [IZPACK-10] - Single Instance

Task

• [IZPACK-17] - Finnish translation is not updated.
• [IZPACK-21] - Bundle the native launcher in the IzPack installer ‘utilities’ pack.
• [IZPACK-23] - Update the project URL references in files

Wish

• [IZPACK-18] - Should there be component for translations?

This list is a simple copy and paste from JIRA. This will be our first real release from Codehaus, and also our first one using JIRA.

I must say that I am really impressed by the tool! As a project manager, it makes my life really easier. And as a developer, it doesn’t get into my way, but helps me make tidy work. I highly recommend it, but if money is an issue, Trac is also very good.