Moritz Haarmann’s Blog

I’m like reading deutsche startups, a blog covering the first steps of upcoming german companies, everyday. And it’s like reading a newspaper in the morning: you just expect something exciting to happen. Nada. It’s just the regular suspects. I’m way to lazy to aggregate my readings into some stats, yet I estimate that at least 50% of all startups don’t have a very unique idea not yet seen on the german or european market. They just modify a little detail ( let’s say the pricing, the name, the color scheme, one tiny functionality ) and launch as the hot new shit.

And it’s sad, it’s really sad. There is nothing like real innovation. New ideas, experiments. Just boredom. And boredom isn’t what I’m looking for, so the german internet seems like a one-way-street in terms of technology. Still usable, well, with IE6.

What is this post about? Frustration, a load of it. Stop copying, start innovating, fellows.

As of yesterday, there is a Native Developer Kit for Android available. This came as a surprise for me, as there were not many rumors covering that topic, but regarding the broad coverage on the iphone 3gs lately, and most of all it’s amazing speed, Google certainly had to do something to keep Android in the game.

So this is, from my point of view, a very much strategic decision, placed just at the right time. Android’s finally deployed to a number of new devices, not only by HTC, but also Samsung and other vendors are now adopting it. So after this first hurdle being taken, Google realized that there is more to mobile devices than PIM functionality and a browser, plus some location based gimmicks. Games are a massively growing market inside the mobile universe. And they want to have a part of that cake, but without a Native Development Kit and the ability to interface graphics directly from real machine code, the speed impacts induced by using a Virtual Machine to execute code are still too high for big games. Can I prove it? Well, no need to, to cite google here:

In a future release we hope to support linking with OpenGL ES and audio libraries, which should enable high-performance games.

By releasing this kit, Google finally opens Android to all those people not willing to write Java Code that perfoms well ( which is not the way Java is handled anywhere else ) and let’s developers to the optimizing of raw code themselves. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the results.

My last posts haven’t been quite technical, and they haven’t been quite recent too- I’m sorry, yet I just don’t have time. As a brief follow-up: it has been overwhelming in San Francisco ( except for the 300$-dentist bill ), and I’m so looking forward to coming back.

And, tada, I’ve been spending the last few weeks just entering Rails ( a Ghetto? maybe ) a bit more than I did before. As always, there are cool things to tell. And not so cool things, too. Start with the good ones.

Rails has proven to work extremely well in pre-production mode. No framework-sourced flaws, bugs, whatever. Just nice, and with some caching-salt, speed hasn’t been an issue, in contrast, it has been amazing.

That’s the good part of it. The bad part is that Rails claims to be capable of working in a distributed environment, providing services ( they don’t call them Web Services anymore ) addressable via REST ( buzzzz ) over HTTP, of course. Well, that’s not quite true. If you stick with the example given in the docs, and are in fact happy with a remote object capable of experiencing an unauthenticated change of some first name, this is nothing but true. But when it comes to some other features, e.g. associations or caching, one question came up: are they serious?

Let’s do some demos. In case you want to include objects of a has-many relationship, the way of choice is ( according to the ActiveRecord::Serialization docs ) either to call to_xml with really ugly parameters ( such as @ship.to_xml :include=>[:passengers, :sailors ] ) in a non-dry manner or to override to_xml, both not being exactly Rails-like, ugly, hard to maintain and only loosely coupled with real-world requirements.

The other part, the consuming part where ActiveResource is indeed responsible for handling everything, has been consequently kept free of useful stuff. This could on the one hand be a pro for people hating Rails’ magic, but it’s just quite far away from being usable. And it has nothing in common with the way ActiveRecord behaves. Any options? Sure.

At the moment, I’m sticking with HyperactiveResource, the funniest named plugin ever. It extends ActiveResource to play a bit more nice, yet it’s not the ultimate answer, but a great extension, still. If you’re into some serious Rails stuff with some distributed thingies, you should give it a try.

So what’s missing? The feeling to work with something that has been designed by someone who actually uses it doing more than changing first names. I’m really disappointed by having to deal with the framework, something I wasn’t used to with Rails before in that intensity. And while Java EE may be a pain, for distributed stuff, it’s still a very good way if you need reliable and consistent, proven-to-work solutions.

In my next post, I’ll talk about my android experiences so far. Love it

after a long flight back and some sleep ( and some work ), I finally found the time to talk about the I/O and the handset the colorful guys gave to every developer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey! I’m currently located in session room 09 and learning on how to code thee for android. Back to the headline.

After being opened by Eric Schmidt, the whole Keynote thingy mainly concentrated on HTML5 features. These features are really impressive, be it a video-tag, the canvas element ( max ), background-worker processes and other related stuff that is quite handy and really capable of improving every developers live. It’s also nice to see that every major browser vendor, excluding Microsoft, seem to be well-prepared for the upcoming changes.

The clear development towards web-based everything not being distinguishable form “normal” locally-ran applications is also supported by new caching mechanisms and subsequent possibility of using e.g. gmail even with no connection, a  highly useful feature certainly leading to a broader acceptance of web-based applications.

Another thing remarkable is google’s view on android and it’s wide market adoption. In contrast to popular tech opinion, they seem to be quite satisfied, and predicting a strong year for android to come. An indicator may be that this session room I’m sitting in is overcrowded. Another is the wide range of apps presented, including gmote, a remote control application working on all platforms providing a simple to use remote control feature for your desktop, including touchscreen-to-mouse translation, remote media control and even the possibility to watch movies and pictures ( in fact, everything renderable ) stored on your computer on your handset. Nice.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this day, especially, tada, for my free htc magic. Stay tuned.

hey! it’s now about 5 hours until take-off, I’ve finished packing my stuff and now kind of lost in not knowing what to do. In fact, Im thinking about where to post videos if it’s not youtube and where to easily put pictures online. Twitpic seems to be a good choice for I/O liveblogging, yet I’m trying to do some other stuff ( visiting twitter, maybe, hope they agree ) as well. As I’m a poor student not able to rent a car or something, I hope my fellow student Jay will pick me and my friend up for a ride to silicon valley. I’ve definitely got some ideas to drop of there.

- Tell Google to put some up-to-date Java Reference on top of the search results. At the moment the first hit is 1.3.1.

That’s just one, of course. I hope the weather in SF isn’t that bad, warm, cold, foggy, whatever. And I’m looking forward to meeting lots of talented, enthusiastic, open and friendly guys to talk about everything technical, and anything else.

Just a bit excited: momo.

Our beloved model-view-controller pattern seems to act as an excuse for every damn web-framework out there. Yet there is one problem. From my point of view, no framework to date has ever managed to slice a web application in a useful way. Really. Why?

First of all, it should be clear that patterns just like MVC can’t be adapted without major changes from desktop environments to the web. Why? Well, desktops are a safe harbor compared to every browser. The Operating System provides resources, screen estate, some kind of event handling and the promise that once you build your app around a certain system, it will work there. Of course this is the major drawback of desktop applications.

Web Applications are not built for just one system, they are mostly built with the target of total platform-independence. Including that nothing can be taken for granted, just like screen estate, resolution, browser software etc.

And then there is this huge limiting factor called HTTP. HTTP is a simple, beautiful protocol that does a great job for what it was designed. That is, delivering web pages, stateless, happiness. Which introduces just a new detail that clearly seperates desktop from the web, the web just doesn’t know anything about state. Once a server delivered a page to you, he just doesn’t care. Really. We introduced sessions and stuff, yet, there is this design-based limitation, and for the time being, we’re just working around this limitation, whereas desktop applications are stateful: ever heard of RAM?

So the problem we are actually facing is that all the well-engineered patterns of the desktop world just can’t be adapted. Sorry. There maybe certain areas where the impression of adaptability may occur, yet these impressions vanished as AJAX appeared.

Why? The traditional web-application, let’s call it Web 1.0, was based on that well-known request-response-leavemyalone cycle. Maybe some session sugar enabled a stateful behaviour, whatever. And we had a way to adapt MVC: put everything that is persistent or part of the “business logic” in a Model-Class ( aka bean ). Go ahead and search for your embedded html. Try to put in a seperate file, and tell all your geek-friends that it’s the view. And finally, the glue was the controller. And yes, it worked out really well. That was then.

Since the unfortunate launch of GMail everything has changed. There is no longer anything like “impossible”, since someone clearly demonstrated that virtually no restrictions in terms of usability and functionality exist.

Again, from my point of view, Google just didn’t reinvent the wheel, they just used available techniques in a new way.

So, with all this “new” technology, web application creators were forced to adapt, which led to a wide variety of 1) AJAX-Frameworks like Prototype and JQuery 2) Smart helper functions for server-side components to hide away the fact that none of them is able to encapsulate that new technology beyond some well-designed layer of abstraction.

Welcome to my world. I’m doing web stuff daily. Someone even pays me for doing it. But I’m really, really frustrated. There is simply no single well-designed framework, enabling me to really focus on what I want to do, not on how.

Today, business logic isn’t the problem. There are some very good approaches making it a breeze to brew out even complex logic.

But there is still too much code here ( in my repositories, maybe I’m just doing wrong ) that’s just dealing with requests. But the amount wouldn’t be a big deal, since the average linecount already dropped massively over the years. The problem is that there is absolutely no beauty. Nada. No language can hide, not even Ruby, that it’s ugly to deal with requests on a per-request level.

I don’t have a solution, though I’m thinking about it a looottt. And that’s just my opinion, expressed in some kind of english. And I’d really appreciate any single comment.

It’s a crime to deny holocaust in Germany and some other countries. Even though it certainly restricts the freedom of speech. Imagine a german company running a global social network allowing ( or at least not banning ) such bullshit. Unbelievable, for good reasons. But it seems everything is just cool if some simple requirements are met:

• Pretend to be offended.
• Spread the word that the holocaust facts are something demanding to be discussed somewhere.
• Hide behind your policy. Avoid clear statements.

And, in case nothing of the above improved the way the world treats your social network, just read the following advice:

We won’t stop until somebody calls the cops

and even then we’ll start again and just pretend that

nothing ever happened

// Loose Lips, Kimya Dawson.

And in case you’re wondering: Still no way to delete your account.

My first and only rails plugin, superdumper, is now available at github, and can therefore be simply cloned by using

script/plugin install git://github.com/moritzh/superdumper.git

thanks for using!

Google has just today released the SDK for Android 1.5, the upcoming version. Not only is my beloved InputMethodService package finally included, but it seems that many cupcake-innovations found their way to the official SDK, which means that they are now open and free.

My planned tutorial on getting ADT for Eclipse working with cupcake is not necessary anymore, luckily, and I’m really looking forward on writing a tutorial about how to create a custom input service. Stay tuned, once again.