Planet ActiveState

Trent Mick: ActiveState Code: lauched!

2008-07-25T03:45:36+00:00

We launched ActiveState Code today, and there was much rejoicing. Yaaaah!

ActiveState Code is a site for sharing code recipes. It is the replacement for the popular ASPN Cookbooks (especially the Python Cookbook, which was a collaboration with O’Reilly and Associates that resulted in two print cookbooks using recipes from the site). The new site adds things like tagging, the ability to add recipes in a number of other languages, and a fresher and hopefully more usable site.

Migration should be easy. All recipes from the Python, Tcl and PHP Cookbooks have been carried over. Redirects maintain all old aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbooks links. Recipe id and author ids have been maintained. The ASPN Cookbook categories have been translated into tags in the new system — full details here.

I welcome any feedback on the site.

Trent Mick: Switching from ASPN Cookbooks to ActiveState Code today

2008-07-24T16:30:30+00:00

We hope to be switching over from the ASPN Cookbooks to the new ActiveState Code site today. Please be patient if the site is down for a short while. We expect the process to take about an hour or two late this afternoon (PST).

I’ve had lots of good feedback from the Python community (Apologies if I haven’t gotten back to you yet. I will.) and have made a number of changes based on that feedback. I’ll post more details once the site has been switched over.

Jeff Griffiths: Places to go in Vancouver this weekend

2008-07-24T10:14:07+00:00

As promised while chatting to the MozDev guys at OSCON, here are some of my favorite places to go for food and drink in Vancouver:

Fish and Chips ( and Salmon Tacos! ): Go Fish
6 acres ( Good beer menu, near downtown )
Honjin Sushi : really really great sushi, order the Roundhouse, Yaletown, Rainbow and Caterpillar rolls. Not the cheapest, but amazing.
The Reef: two locations, on Commercial drive and Main Street. Both are great, especially for the 'Jerk Salmon Benny' at brunch.
Hapa Izakaya: two locations, either downtown or in Kitsilino. Japanese drinkin' food!
Cafe Artigiano: quite good coffee place, locations all over downtown. Almost as good as...
Continental Coffee: IMHO the best coffee in town, at 1989 prices! Located in the awesome Commercial Drive area.

In particular I highly recommend trekking out to the commercial drive area, which is a quick SkyTrain Ride / walk from downtown. Lots of restaurants, bars, a great variety of food and drink from Vegetarian Indian food to Tennessee BBQ to Ethiopian. And I'm not just saying that because it's my 'hood. =)

The ActiveState Blog: 10 Myths Debunked

2008-07-22T18:28:57+00:00

&lt;!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:&quot;&quot;; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --&gtRead our latest white paper, "10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business"<br /><br />When it comes to open source software, there are often two camps: open source zealots who insist that Windows never works (Linux is king!) and the naysayers who would sooner eat dirt than troubleshoot an Apache web server. In this paper we examine the myths associated with these arguments and provide solid reasoning for why open source software, combined with responsible checks and balances, will put your business development projects in good stead. Continue reading...Read our latest white paper, "10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business"<br /><br />When it comes to open source software, there are often two camps: open source zealots who insist that Windows never works (Linux is king!) and the naysayers who would sooner eat dirt than troubleshoot an Apache web server. In this paper we examine the myths associated with these arguments and provide solid reasoning for why open source software, combined with responsible checks and balances, will put your business development projects in good stead. Continue reading...

Read our latest white paper, "10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business"

When it comes to open source software, there are often two camps: open source zealots who insist that Windows never works (Linux is king!) and the naysayers who would sooner eat dirt than troubleshoot an Apache web server. In this paper we examine the myths associated with these arguments and provide solid reasoning for why open source software, combined with responsible checks and balances, will put your business development projects in good stead. Continue reading...

Jeff Griffiths: FossCoach

2008-07-21T13:14:01+00:00

I'm heading down to Portland this week for the 4th year in a row, but this year is going to be slightly different. The last three years I've been working the OSCON trade show representing ActiveState and demoing Komodo. This year ActiveState decided not to do a booth, but we are sponsoring something much more interesting, and I think much more in the spirit of open source.

If you're in or around Portland, please drop by FossCoach. This event is the brainchild of my friend Zak Greant, and is summed up as:

"The skills required to work collaboratively online are usually shared in an informal way - people learn by participating in an existing project. The FOSSCoach events are an attempt to share important skills more directly and effectively by bringing diverse groups of people together to share, discuss and explore."

( From the FossCoach wiki )

Shane Caraveo, Jeff Hobbes and I will be helping with this event all week, and so far the scheduled talks look really interesting, with talk titles like 'How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People' and 'Build your FOSS developer site with Drupal '.

The ActiveState Blog: Powerless

2008-07-16T15:44:35+00:00

Strange things are afoot at ActiveState. Server crashes have been plaguing us for the past few days, perhaps due to the manhole-cover-blowing fire underground, maybe because we want to extend our weekends (but unlikely the latter, as our systems folks have been up since the wee hours working on the issues).

We're going to have to revert to old technology for urgent matters, I'm afraid. Yes, it's true: you may have to call us! Don't worry, we're nice. And some find our Canadian accents charming.

The choice is yours: a little patience, or 1-866-541-3186. Operators are standing by....

Eric Promislow: Tabhunter - Find Firefox Tabs Easily

2008-07-15T16:51:49+00:00

I blogged about my Tabhunter Firefox extension a couple of weeks ago, and then on second thought decided to postpone the announcement until the AMO (addons.mozilla.org) accepted my submission. So here it is. The extension's at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7924 - the details follow.

I haven't blogged much lately, even with the recent release of Komodo 4.4, as readers of this blog know, and I use the term "readers" loosely, as there isn't much to read here. I've been busy at work, and like many of us, my work has become increasingly more web-based. And since I never was one to write URLs on post-it notes, and find the bookmarks manager too tedious to clean up, I developed a habit of using my pile of tabs as an ever-present todo list. It was convenient, but with 50 or 60 tabs spread over anywhere from 3 to 7 windows it was getting harder to find things.

So rather than streamline my work habits (and clean off my desk while I'm at it), I took the developer's usual way out, and wrote a Mozilla extension to make it easier to find a particular tab and move to it. I already knew what it was going to look like -- I use Davide Ficano's TabSwitcher extension in Komodo when I have more than a dozen files loaded, and I knew my way around XUL and the Mozilla XPCOM API, so it took a few evenings to build it, with one sunny weekend afternoon sacrificed chasing bugs, both in my code and the platform.

So now Ctrl-Alt-T (Cmd-Option-T on the Mac) launches the panel, where you type a substring (actually a case-insensitive JavaScript regex) to zoom in on the list of matching tabs -- matches are done against both the tab's title and its URL. Press Return or double-click to go to the tab. I found on Windows I prefer to keep the Tabhunter panel open, and bring it up from the Task Bar, but this makes less sense on Windows and the Mac, so I'll put in an option to close the panel after the hunt is done.

So now my workflow is to frequently bring up the panel, and I can easily multi-task among the various items I'm working on. In my case, this means typing "plow" (ActiveState's source code search engine), "mxr" (Mozilla's), "^att" to see the attachments I'm currently working on, and any other pages I'm working on. Finally I don't have to close any tab before its time has come.

Just like building freeways temporarily reduces congestion, only to see an increase in total vehicle usage, I now rarely drop below 120 loaded tabs, as opposed to the 50 or so I was struggling with a short month ago. You probably want to have a decent amount of RAM to really take advantage of this one. On the Windows box I'm on 121 tabs are occupying 400MB, with this instance of Firefox running for a couple of days - I suspect Firefox 2 wouldn't handle that many tabs as easily. I've also used Tabhunter with Flock, and it should work with other Mozilla-based browsers, once the install.rdf is updated.

Now I've got to figure out what to do about my real-world desk.

References:

AMO page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7924

Project home page: http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/ (MPL-licensed)

Bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/issues/list

Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/tabhunter

Jeff Griffiths: Let's get cookin'

2008-07-13T08:46:04+00:00

One of the cooler things ActiveState did very early on was create the Cookbooks section of our ASPN site. The formula was simple: users submitted, commented on and rated chunks of re-usable code. In particular the Python section formed the basis for O'Reilly's 'Python Cookbook' book. Unfortunately the other cookbooks never quite caught on the same way that the Python one did, and the web application powering the cookbooks ended up being fairly brittle and hard to maintain.

Trent recently re-developed the cookbooks from scratch, and the end result is now here:

http://code.activestate.com/

The end result is much more flexible, written in Django ( which we are using for all sorts of things internally these days ) and transparently supports the new single sign-on feature we've recently rolled out to our community and store sites. We're currently running it in 'beta' mode and all new cookbook recipes will get flushed in a couple of weeks. We'd love for people to kick the tires a bit and report bugs if you have some spare time.

Trent Mick: Translating Komodo on babelzilla.org

2008-07-11T22:34:30+00:00

At the prompting of dafi (one of Komodo’s more active users) and with goofy’s help I’ve uploaded a Komodo Language Pack with Komodo’s current en-US localization to BabelZilla.

We get requests for localizations of Komodo every so often, but lack the resources to do this ourselves. Given a number of good translations here, I can start providing language pack extensions to Komodo’s add-ons site.

This is a trial balloon that I really hope turns out well. I remember having a great chat with Michal Berman about Mozilla’s l10n infrastructure at FSSOS 2007 waaay back in October last year. I dropped that ball following up after that discussion. I’d also like to take a look at Launchpad Translations to see if that would work well.

If you are interested in helping out with translating Komodo to your language, please take a look at this forum thread and/or let me know (trentm at activestate dot com).

Trent Mick: ActiveState Code: the new ASPN Cookbooks

2008-07-08T22:32:39+00:00

ActiveState Code has been launched (in beta)! ActiveState Code is a new site that will be the eventual replacement of the venerable ASPN Cookbooks — in particular the popular Python Cookbook.

What this site offers over the ASPN Cookbooks:

a complete visual refresh (long overdue)
full tagging support of recipes
support for many many more languages (the ASPN Cookbooks were restricted to Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT recipes)

In addition, the new site provides a sound foundation for other improvements — so tell us what you think!. What is missing? What doesn’t work? What would make the site more useful for you? for your community?

While the site is in beta, new recipes, comments and votes are not saved — instead the site’s data will be sync’d from the ASPN Cookbooks most nights. The plan is to fully move to this new site in two weeks, shutting down the old ASPN Cookbooks (redirects will preserve all old links).

Shane Caraveo: Mozilla file icon magic

2008-07-04T22:03:38+00:00

Every now and then I find some piece of code in the Mozilla code base that makes me go WTF? Today, I found out about the moz-icon scheme. Try this URL in Firefox:

moz-icon://.js?size=128

Of course it's no secret, other than not being documented, but I found an interesting use via css. Sometimes I'm the last one to know about something.

The ActiveState Blog: ActiveState Dev Hero Contest: Not Spam!

2008-07-02T20:24:43+00:00

Yikes! I tried to contact the grand prize winner of the ActiveState Dev Hero Contest and my email got booted back by their server. Seems no one sends legitimate emails about contest winnings anymore: no more "Congratulations!" nor "You Won a Prize!" Probably not even "contest" or "claim your prize."

So if you entered the contest, please watch your junk mail. I'll be sending all the winners a kinda cryptic, non-spammy email (avoiding every possible spam trigger) in the next 24-48 hours, asking them to add me to their whitelist and confirm with a reply email (or give me a call).

You may already be a winner....

(Don't worry, if you're a winner, I'll find a way to get you your prize!)

The ActiveState Blog: Happy 141st Birthday, eh!

2008-07-01T17:01:39+00:00

What better day than today to raise a glass of beer and yell "Cheers!" with the closest Canadian. Need some good tunes for the patio? Why not tune into CBC Radio 3 - some great independent Canadian music to liven up your July 1st.

Hope you are having a wonderful Canada Day!

Jeff Griffiths: Komodo 4.4 released!

2008-06-26T16:55:19+00:00

Yesterday we released Komodo 4.4, which is the final minor release of Komodo before we hit the big 5-oh. You can read all the usual stuff here or here, or heck just got watch the screencast.

My personal list of favourite / awesome features in this release:

Extensible Test Suite framework - now I can finally get around to writing Simpletest support for Komodo!
HookHandler support in code intelligence - this is some cool plumbing work Todd and Trent implemented to allow extension developers to add bits of magic into the code intelligence system. The example we shipped in 4.4 is the Zend Framework extension, which ( amongst other things ) supports autocompletion for the Zend_View helper class in view files. Implicit imports are a common feature in web frameworks these days, and now we have an api in place for us ( and others ) to provide better support in these cases.
The section list! Our version of the Awesome bar, I guess. I'm addicted to it!
Last but not least, some decent column selection / editing, as documented here

So what's next? We're already pooling bugs for Komodo 4.4.1, of course, but the next big thing is Komodo 5. Things are still pretty fluid in terms of a feature set but we DO know we will be building Komodo 5 on the Firefox 3 / Gecko 1.9 codebase, in fact the bulk of the build work has been done here and is now in trunk. Hopefully we'll have builds out soon so people can kick the tires a bit before more invasive 5.0 work gets under way.

The ActiveState Blog: PPM build servers are dead -- long live PPM!

2008-06-25T16:52:00+00:00

Our PPM build server infrastructure has been very maintenance intensive; it needed some manual tweaking and fixing on a weekly basis. We finally couldn't stand doing it any longer and turned them off a couple of weeks ago. The PPM repositories are still there, but they're not being updated anymore.

But fear not! We took the time saved from having to do all the build monitoring and fixing and started writing a new simplified build system that avoids many of the problems the old one runs into.

More details can be found here.

Shane Caraveo: Komodo 4.4 and a Kitchen Sink

2008-06-24T16:47:12+00:00

Komodo 4.4 is out today! Komodo does amazing things, practically a kitchen sink of tools, but hopefully a whole lot more portable. There's a number of improvements, but my favorite is the new SCC commit dialog and the Change list panel. We did a recent survey and found that 65% of visitors to ActiveState.com feel that having a single tool they can do most of their work in is either critical (20%) or very important (45%). I used to switch to a shell to handle multi file commits, now I can do it in Komodo, nice! I guess I fit somewhere in that 45%.

In other news, I'll be participating in FOSSCoach at OSCON, very likely at the Utah Open Source Conference, and then AjaxWorld in San Jose. That reminds me I need to submit a talk for FSOSS. I recently returned from eLiberatica in Romania, possibly one of the better conferences I've been to in a while (not only because it was in Romania), but FSOSS is still a bit above (certainly less travel time). eLiberatica focused much more on the business side of Open Source, probably why I found it so interesting, I certainly learned some new things from a European perspective. And yes, we did visit Dracula's castle.

The ActiveState Blog: A Star is Born

2008-06-24T13:27:50+00:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, allow me to introduce Komodo IDE 4.4!

Spend more time coding and less time searching, updating, organizing, testing....

New Sections List feature added as per popular request! Users demanded a function list, and Komodo IDE 4.4 takes it further by including CSS entries, XML nodes, and more "Awesome Bar"-style goodness, so navigating documents is quicker than ever.
Improved Source Code Control functionality simplifies team development and project management with multi-file commits and a new Change List tab to track and group documents that have been edited.
Added Extensibility for Unit Test Integration enables you to use your preferred unit testing framework, as support for frameworks can now be added via extensions. PHPUnit, Ruby rake test (as used by Ruby on Rails), Perl TAP-based test, PyUnit, and Nose are already integrated.
Plus Zend framework support, column editing functionality, user interface improvements, and bug fixes.

<riotous applause>

Get the details on these new features in the Komodo IDE 4.4 release notes, or better yet, check out the Komodo IDE 4.4 screencast and see the new features in action!

This is a free update for Komodo IDE 4.x license holders, including current ActivePerl Pro Studio and ActiveTcl Pro Studio subscribers. Install your free update to 4.4 using the auto-update feature in Komodo IDE 4.3 or from the "My Downloads" section of your account.

The ActiveState Blog: What's Robust and Worry-Free?

2008-06-20T17:45:08+00:00

ActivePerl for the Enterprise, of course!

Find out how Finisar was able to focus on their own products and let ActiveState worry about maintaining the Perl scripts running critical administration functions.

Tara Gibbs: Goosh! [4]

2008-06-19T17:45:04+00:00

If you’re a command line junkie and haven’t visited Goosh, you’re missing out.

Tara Gibbs: Firefox 3 - Quick Impressions [3]

2008-06-17T23:45:09+00:00

It was a little slow to load, but page load time seems faster.
I switched to the small icon set. The big forward/back buttons were way too big for my tastes.
The page text feels crisper.
Lots of my favorite extensions, including Firebug, haven’t been updated to work with FF3 yet, which makes me a sad panda.
Love, love, love the new “remember this password” and bookmarking UIs.
I think I like the Awesome bar…but it’s just so…so…different. It’ll take some time to really be sure.

Haven’t got Firefox 3 yet? The servers have re-grouped after the massive traffic attack from this morning at release time, so go get Firefox 3 now!

The ActiveState Blog: Aren't we friendly!

2008-06-16T21:58:04+00:00

ActiveState has become a "Friend" of the Open Source Census www.osscensus.org

The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in enterprise.

Read the official release here.

The ActiveState Blog: Winning Komodo Prizes Better than Being Stuck on Desert Island with a Komodo

2008-06-16T16:26:26+00:00

Komodo IDE: Award-winning development software that has a killer contest with great prizes for filling out a survey.

Komodo Dragon: 365 pounds of drooling beast that you need to scare away by screaming and pelting it with rocks and sticks, if you happen to be stranded on a desert island.

Your call. But in either case, you'd better act fast (the contest closes in one week)!

The ActiveState Blog: Tune in for a live webinar - June 24th

2008-06-09T21:48:55+00:00

Interested in learning more about dynamic languages in the enterprise?

Then join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, June 24 at 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST)
Topic: Open Source Myths and Essential Truths for Protecting Your Business

By attending this live webinar, you will:
* Uncover the truths about open source dynamic languages
* Learn the best open source business practices to minimize risk
* Make smarter use of your in-house resources

Register now!

The ActiveState Blog: Be My Dev Hero!

2008-06-09T16:07:30+00:00

Take the ActiveState Dev Hero Survey and enter to win the Grand Prize, a Nintendo Wii and Guitar Hero III bundle plus an ActiveState Software license of your choice!

Take the survey!

There are about 30 multiple choice questions, which should take less than 10 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey, enter your email address and voila!, you're entered into the ActiveState Dev Hero Contest.

The ActiveState Dev Hero Contest has over $2000 in prizes to be won! We're just looking to get some info from developers like you so we can improve our products and services. But to reward you for your time, we're offering loads of prizes, including ThinkGeek and iTunes gift certificates, Komodo IDE, PDK, and TDK licenses, t-shirts, and whatever we can find on the boss's desk to give away!

The contest is open to all developers and no purchase is necessary. There's contest legalese here. Oh but hurry, because we're only keeping the survey and contest open for two weeks.

Thank you, and good luck!

The ActiveState Blog: Komodo 4.4 Beta Released

2008-06-03T21:27:55+00:00

Calling all keeners! We're cooking up some sweet new flavours* for Komodo IDE and Komodo Edit 4.4 so you can spend more time coding and less time searching, updating, organizing, testing. Komodo 4.4 Beta has just been released, and we'd love your expertise in testing new functionality, identifying bugs, and enhancing the quality of the upcoming release.

Here's how:

Download the beta
Subscribe to the Komodo Beta Mailing List
Share your thoughts on the Komodo Beta Discussion Forum
Accept our eternal gratitude (and that of Komodo users too)

(The beta program is only available to licensed users of Komodo IDE 4.3, ActivePerl Pro Studio, or ActiveTcl Pro Studio. Of course, you can buy Komodo IDE 4.3 today and get your free update to 4.4 when it's released too....)

* Yup, we're using Canadian flavours. Like maple syrup sweetness, Coffee Crisp crispiness and Triple-O sauciness. Thanks and you're welcome.

The ActiveState Blog: ActiveState an SD Times Top 100

2008-06-03T15:51:50+00:00

Did you hear the news? We made the SD Times Top 100 as one of most innovative companies and organizations in the software industry.

Calling 2007 "a great year for development environments," The SD Times noted that "even the scripting languages got the royal treatment, as new IDEs from ActiveState and CodeGear brought innovative development tools to theses new languages."

ActiveState made three major developments in the 2007, including the release of Komodo IDE 4.0, the introduction of Komodo Edit, and the announcement of the Open Komodo project. Nice to get recognition for all that hard work!

Uh, so I've got to get back to work so we can make next year's list too. No more browsing irrelevant sites.

The ActiveState Blog: Dragons and Snakes, Oh My!

2008-05-29T17:50:11+00:00

Wow! Who knew people liked t-shirts so much? In case you're not one of the many people who have already bought Komodo and claimed their shirt, there's a wee bit of time left and just enough of our limited edition t-shirts to go around. Go get your Komodo IDE t-shirt!

Hurry, because all the Python developer folks flocking to our site might scoop up the last Komodo IDE t-shirts. Now that Google has opened the floodgates—erm, invitation—to the 150,000 people on the waiting list to build software for Google's App Engine, even more people are going to want ActivePython and Komodo IDE's killer dev tools. Go get ActivePython!

It's a regular super highway of dragons and snakes around here.

The ActiveState Blog: Numara Software Success Story

2008-05-28T17:24:07+00:00

"The code is solid and the quality is extremely high. We're a very happy ActiveState customer."
- Mark Krieger, VP of Product Development, Numara Software

The Challenge
- Time and effort needed to rebuild the Perl installation in-house
- Shorten development cycle, and increase efficiency
- Guarantee that Perl licensing requirements are taken care of

The Solution
- Deploy an industry-standard Perl language distribution

The Result
- Shortcut to cost-effective redistribution rights for the fully tested Perl distribution
- Customers see two to three times the performance speed
- Mitigates common open source concerns

Read the full success story.

The ActiveState Blog: Get your Komodo IDE! Get your t-shirt!

2008-05-26T22:57:34+00:00

Yesterday I was driving along Main & Broadway in Vancouver when I saw a pedestrian wearing a Komodo IDE t-shirt. I thought that was kinda cool. I usually only see co-workers, conference-goers and people I know wearing our swag, not random people in the hip 'n trendy 'hood.

Clearly it's time to spread the t-shirt love! So here's the deal: buy Komodo IDE before May 31, 2008, I'll send you a limited edition Komodo IDE t-shirt!

To get your t-shirt, just send me an email with your Komodo IDE license number and your preferred t-shirt size. It's a limited edition t-shirt, so sizes and quantities are limit. We won't be dishing out the swag at OSCON this year, so this is your chance to grab the goods before they're gone.

Already got your Komodo IDE license? Watch your email for a contest announcement soon and maybe you'll score yourself some swag!

(If that was you on Main & Broadway in a Komodo t-shirt on Saturday, drop me a line and identify yourself and I'll hook you up with the new edition t-shirt!)

Shane Caraveo: Onwards to Romania

2008-05-26T16:41:40+00:00

Soon I'll be flying away to Romania and eLiberatica to introduce Romanians to another creature with teeth, Komodo! It looks to be a very interesting conference, focusing on the benefits and business models behind open source software. I'll be talking a short bit about why ActiveState open sourced Komodo, what we've learned in the process and more. Should be fun!

Ok, so perhaps Dracula has a bit more class than a drooling Komodo...

Shane Caraveo: jssh replacement? SD Connector

2008-05-25T20:05:29+00:00

Quite a long time ago I made much ado about Snapdragon, a project to integrate Firefox development tools (e.g.Firebug) with Komodo (or other editors/IDEs). Unfortunately sometimes you bite off more than you can chew (the day is only 24 hours), but in the long term I still want to accomplish some integration. There are a lot of cool dev tools and capabilities that area available for Firefox, I'd like to be able to use them through my favorite development environment.

One of the primary elements in this kind of integration is the ability to communicate between processes in a simple way. Back in April, we had a little get together of developers that work on various Mozilla applications and projects, and I mentioned working on a json-rpc implementation that could allow Mozilla applications to do just this. Well, a couple weeks ago I got some working code together in our Open Komodo repository.

One of the eventual goals I'd like to get around to is adding a DBGP layer into Firebug, as well as adding other integration points. So I started out working on a generic socket server layer that I could build services on top of. My first service was a simple echo server.

While digging around for examples, I re-discovered jssh. I noticed a number of blog entries where people were having issues getting or building jssh (since there is no pre built extension). SD Connector is entirely in JavaScript, no compiling necessary. I thought a jssh replacement would be a good test case as well, so I added a JavaScript shell service. It works much like jssh, though it is incomplete from the perspective that it doesn't implement the global functions that are special to jssh. I think this service would be a good replacement for use with projects like FireWaitr.

The other service I got implemented is a socket based, full duplex, json-rpc service. I've only done the most bare-bone testing on this, but it seems to do the job. A simple macro script in Komodo can popup an alert in Firefox, or do other more tasty things. The nice thing about using json-rpc for the protocol, you can integrate non-Mozilla applications as well.

SD Connector is still early in development, there is plenty I'd like to do with it (e.g. make the server an xpcom service, sandboxing json calls, making the config UI better), but I think it's at a place where people can play with it, or even contribute! You can grab SD Connector out of our repository if you want to take it for a spin.

Jeff Griffiths: The spring road trip!

2008-05-20T15:31:56+00:00

This week is a busy one, I'm currently in Chicago for PHP|Tek 2008. I'm giving a talk on Thursday, then zipping over to Toronto early Friday morning to drop in on Drupal Camp.

The ActiveState Blog: ActivePerl 5.10.0.1003 and a Trick Question

2008-05-16T20:47:23+00:00

Q: What's better than May Long Weekend?
A: Nothing, eh!

Well, I suppose the new release of ActivePerl comes pretty darn close.

That's right! We've just released ActivePerl 5.10.0.1003 and it's yours for the taking.

In addition to adding the DBD::Oracle module, ActivePerl 5.10.0.1003 includes new modules for encrypting web connections using https, creating color graphs and charts, and automating interaction with websites.

NOTE: OS X builds will now require a minimum version of 10.4

The ActiveState Blog: Number of ActivePython downloads EXPLODED!

2008-05-12T19:48:31+00:00

Exploded in a good way (thankfully).

Our ActivePython downloads tripled last month, which is pretty awesome! We are obviously providing some useful stuff for Python developers out there and that feels pretty good.

Don't know? Jump on the bandwagon here and find out for yourself.

The ActiveState Blog: How Many Geeks Does it Take To Screw in a Lightbulb?

2008-05-10T04:28:56+00:00

More than we've got, apparently, as we're looking for some more geeks to share our office space. C'mon, get outta your basement or garage or wherever your soon-to-be-fabled start-up is hanging out, and bring your crew to our digs at Hastings and Granville. Hard to write this without it sounding like a bizarre clash between a personals ad and a dodgy craigslist pyramid marketing company, but here's the scoop:

The space would hold the same number of people as the average elevator; so a team of 12 or less, depending on your personal space requirements. Except it's larger than an elevator, thankfully. About 1,200 sq ft.
We're on the 16th floor, with great views. Except developers like the blinds closed and the lights off. But you could leave the blinds in your area open, we'll just squint if we come over and visit.
It's open plan, but we prefer our taste in music to yours, so we'll probably keep our headphones on and be pretty quiet.
We're only mildly antisocial, except around the Wii at beer-o-clock.
We have a lot of meetings. I don't know why that might be relevant to you, but I needed to vent. Oh, cause I was going to mention that there's a boardroom you can use. Please, book it now and book it often.
We'll set you up with fancy schmancy phones, but won't pay for your 1-900 calls.
You can have those security cards. You probably have a lanyard from OSCON that you can use for it, no?
Rackspace in the server room. Something about 2 U's. Isn't that a W?
There's a kitchen you can use with 3 different coffee makers to choose from. And 3 cafes within crawling distance. Caffeine, guaranteed.
BYOC. This is a bring your own computer party.
You're on the hook for your own chairs, desks, or yoga mats or maybe magic carpets if you're into cloud computing or something.

Well, I've probably made nonsense of the whole prospect, but if you are interested, drop me a line and I'll hook you up with the serious guy that's actually handling all this.

The ActiveState Blog: ActiveState Bombarding Your RSS Feeds!

2008-05-08T22:08:15+00:00

Something to do with updating the RSS feed to 2.0 instead of 0.91, which didn't contain publish dates. Does this mean we're web 2.0-enabled? Always wondered what that meant. Just when web 3.0 and cloud computing are taking over the memespace....

Our apologies. You can now go back to reading your favourite blog in peace. We'll be good now, promise. (You can sign up again at http://planet.activestate.com/)

ActiveState Press Releases: Komodo IDE 4.3 Boasts Best Find & Replace System

2008-05-06T00:45:16+00:00

Latest release throws down the gauntlet with significant new features and performance improvements

ActiveState Press Releases: Komodo Edit Now Open Source

2008-05-06T00:45:16+00:00

ActiveState's popular and free multi-language editor is open sourced

ActiveState Press Releases: ActiveState Announces Eat-A-Rama Restaurant Discovery Application on Facebook® Platform

2008-05-06T00:45:16+00:00

New tool helps friends find great restaurants and $10,000 donation helps food banks nourish those in need

ActiveState Press Releases: ActiveState Announces Release of Faster, Smarter and More Powerful ActiveTcl 8.5

2008-05-06T00:45:16+00:00

ActiveState Press Releases: ActiveState Announces Support for Oracle® Enterprise Linux

2008-05-06T00:45:16+00:00

ActiveState Joins Oracle PartnerNetwork

The ActiveState Blog: Loco at the Co-Lo (ActiveState webservices downtime)

2008-05-05T23:07:06+00:00

Time to move those lovely servers that keep us ticking, so we'll be off the grid for a bit while you enjoy margaritas for Cinco de Mayo.

It's a new co-location site, only about four blocks away (wave to our web kids hauling servers down the streets of Vancouver tonight). It'll make for happier sites for ActiveState.com (accounts, downloads, and purchases will be affected), ASPN, the Open Komodo website, and the Community Site. Don't click those links I just mentioned in the next few hours though, or you'll probably get our little "no one is here to take your call" message or somesuch tech-roadblock nicety.

It'll be less than two hours—assuming no one from our team orders pitchers of umbrella drinks from the local cantina (that's a big assumption, btw). ¡Salud!

Jeff Griffiths: Drupal Camp this weekend

2008-05-05T16:09:44+00:00

Drupal Camp Vancouver is taking place this Friday and Saturday; the schedule is here if you want to check it out:

http://drupalcampvancouver.org/sessions

I will be a giving a quick talk on Saturday afternoon that is a case study of how I implemented basic Mozilla extension hosting in Drupal so that Komodo users can upload and host extensions on our community site for Komodo. In particular the talk will focus on how the design and business principles we had before we started meshed well with Drupal's capabilities to allow us to get up and running without having to write a lot of custom code.

Shane Caraveo: Success is...

2008-05-02T21:12:20+00:00

So often in life, defining success is difficult. Is it 10 times ROI? Is it a shiny new bank account after an acquisition or IPO? (No, ActiveState is not at that stage, I'm just dreaming of my own Central American island.) Well, those are nice when they happen, but not as personally fulfilling as seeing users excited enough about the software you write that they make the effort to tell others, or contribute something to it. We've always had some level of that happening around Komodo, but in the last year it has really begun to take off. There are more and more people making those contributions, and that is awesome. Here's a blog entry where the user has gone to the extent to do a lengthy screencast introducing the features of Komodo Edit, and one of our contributors just released a side-by-side diff extension. I find I like thinking of success as having lots of interested and engaged users.

Eric Promislow: Article Alert: Adding Test Harnesses to Komodo

2008-05-02T01:10:29+00:00

Once again, I'm dealing with the too-many-blogs problem by writing once, and pointing many
times.

I've published an article at the ActiveState community site on writing new test plan harnesses
to plug into Komodo 4.4, now in alpha. You can get it here:

http://community.activestate.com/writing-unittest-harnesses-komodo-4-4-introduction

Shane Caraveo: Another day, another baby dragon born

2008-05-01T22:39:05+00:00

I'm always happy to announce the birth of a new version of Komodo! 4.4 Alpha 1 is up on our download servers. You can find out the details on our community site and see my announcement in the forums. There are some really nice enhancements for IDE, and we're focusing now on lots of smaller enhancements and fixes for both Edit and IDE.

The ActiveState Blog: We support Oracle® Enterprise Linux

2008-05-01T19:05:42+00:00

We are happy to announce that ActiveState now supports Oracle® Enterprise Linux - yup, all ActiveState products have been tested for compatibility. Oracle customers can leverage the our dev expertise and get full support for developing and deploying applications running on Oracle Enterprise Linux-based systems. Along with this announcement we have also become part of the Oracle Partner Network.

Read the official news release here.

Jeff Griffiths: Cash for Komodo code =)

2008-04-30T00:22:36+00:00

Today a community site member posted an in interesting request:

I'm looking for somebody who could develop a nice little addon for Komodo.

( http://community.activestate.com/forum-topic/looking-developer )

I think that's completely awesome, that someone would value Komodo enough to pay someone else to extend it. If you think you've got the chops, see the original post for contact details.

Jeff Griffiths: JavaScript 're.findall' workalike

2008-04-28T22:48:27+00:00

Having done a lot of low-complexity JavaScript and a lot of regex work in back-end languages like PHP and Python, I found myself stumped again trying to do something that is bread and butter in PHP and Python, but somewhat obfuscated in JS.

I also had the tingly feeling of deja vu, that I'd run into this particular brainfart before, but this time in order to prevent future memory failures and maybe even enrich the lives of other idiots like me searching google, I decided to blog about it.

Problem: there is no simple equivalent to 're.findall' in JS. re.findall goes like this:

from re import findall
textvar = getsometext()
list_of_matches = findall('^foo\.([\S])+?', textvar)

The convenient part is that this is a very common operation to want to make, and there is a nice function that directly handles this requirement and returns the results. PHP is slightly less direct:

$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/^foo\.([\S])+?/', $textvar, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

Slightly more obtuse; I tend to wrap this in a function called 'findAll()' in a base class somewhere.

JavaScript is a bit more work again ( as suggested by the Rhino book ):

var rx = new RegExp("^foo\.([\S])+?", "g");
var matches = new Array();
while((match = rx.exec(textvar)) !== null){
    matches.push(match);
}

You could do this in a slightly different way off of the String object:

var matches = textVar.match(/^foo\.([\S])+?/g);

...but you only get the outer match, no the sub-matches from the parentheses. =/

Eric Promislow: LinuxFest 2008 Wrap-Up

2008-04-28T19:43:06+00:00

This year's LinuxFest looked to be a good 20% bigger than last year's -- the exhibits spilled into a second room, there were 12 parallel tracks over the previous 10, maybe that many more people milling around the room. Plenty of fun -- I wish I had given myself more time to enjoy the festivities, but between the two talks I gave, table-top time, and the two hours I shared at the border with my fellow Canadians, I didn't have much of a chance to slow down until at that evening's party at the radio museum.

Somewhere along the way Bellingham picked up the tag "City of Subdued Excitement", and you could characterize the 'fest that way as well. Everyone's having a good time, with a mix of professional open-source people, teenagers, skatepunks, and plenty of people from the real world who are looking for solutions, without the hype that a mega-sized convention hall practically demands. Sunday's a lower key day; next year I'll try to hang around for it.

As for my talks, they were both fun to give. The JavaScript/Google-Maps talk is definitely aimed at working web developers, who were in shorter supply at LinuxFest compared to the Open Web conference earlier this year. The Greasemonkey talk went over better, and was more like 30% seminar, 70% lecture, a fine formula. I had scheduled a 60-minute talk, and at noon found I had 30 minutes more in my slot. So the group came up with a project -- replace the images in an HTML file with buttons. When you click the button, the image is then downloaded and displayed. Kind of like the adblock extension, but this could be far more configurable. It was motivated by someone trying to deal with ads clogging his low-bandwidth wireless connection, by the way.

Anyway, the session ended up as a group programming exercise. I sketched out a plan of how to solve the problem with a Greasemonkey script, and then using the JavaScript shell to try out ideas and find methods interactively, we managed to get something working before the bell rang. It's up at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25610 but definitely not finished.

Here are the PDFs for my talks:

Download speed-up-javascript.pdf

Download greasemonkey.pdf

Shane Caraveo: Open Komodo at LinuxFest

2008-04-26T19:09:31+00:00

This morning I gave a talk on Open Komodo at LinuxFest in Bellingham, WA. I'll be around LinuxFest all day, either at our table or in room Haskel-219 where Ericn Promislow is giving a couple talks also. If you're visting LinuxFest, drop by and say hello! My slides are attached below.

Download linuxfest2008.pdf

The ActiveState Blog: ... and don't miss out LinuxFest Northwest and eLiberatica.

2008-04-22T17:41:26+00:00

Your plan for this coming weekend? Don't miss out the LinuxFest Northwest on April 26-27 in Bellingham, WA. It's a huge grassroots event that showcases Linux and open source software. Not only are we sponsoring the event, but our Shane Caraveo will be there with his presentation "Open Komodo development environment." Open Komodo is a high quality, open source development environment based on Mozilla technology. Not familiar with Open Komodo? Have questions on how to utilize its features and functionality to meet your needs? Be sure to drop by the presentation to voice your questions.

Eric Promislow will also present his talk "Scaling up With JavaScript Without Annoying Users" at the conference. Learn techniques on writing responsive applications that are user-friendly and don't take forever to load. As a heavy user of web-based apps, that's a feature I'd love to see!

Later in May, in Bucharest, Romania, Shane is going to speak at eLiberatica (May 30-31), a conference to foster discussions on open and free technologies and bring together community and business leaders from around the world to share best practices. His presentation "Why we chose to make our product open source" will explain why ActiveState open-sourced our proprietary product, Komodo Edit, and share with you the successes and challenges we've encountered. If you ever thought of building value-added commercial software based on open source languages or open sourcing your products, definitely join Shane's discussion.

Shane Caraveo: Komodo does it all: Google App Engine

2008-04-21T23:59:26+00:00

So many API's, so little time. From early on, one of our major goals with Komodo was to make it easily extensible from a variety of methods. We started with the toolbox, and added lots of little gadgets to allow our users as much flexibility as possible. This includes macro's (in JavaScript or Python) with full access to our code, templates, run commands and more. We eventually expanded into using the extension mechanism that is in Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications. The premise was, and still is, we cannot be a "do all, be all" organization. People want to do things we never thought of, don't have time to do, or that may take us some time to get around to. That brings me to Google App Engine. Over the past couple weeks, I've had several people tell me we should be doing something around App Engine support. Komodo is ideally suited towards technology stacks like this. Komodo is flexible enough that somebody else got around to doing it without us (see update below). That's great! Yes, we want to do more, but there is always more to do than we can get to, so we focus on giving you the power to get things done.

Update: it seems the original blog post is down, but I found another similar posting.