Oracle SQL Developer - Change Java SDK

Oracle SQL Developer is a popular tool to connect to Oracle database and perform SQL queries (and not only). When you start SQL Developer for the first time it asks you where your Java SDK is.

You enter your JDK path and Oracle SQL Developer uses it for running in Java JVM. Now what if you want to change it? It is easy. Open [sqldeveloper_installation]\sqldeveloper\bin\sqldeveloper.conf (on my machine the path is C:\tools\sqldeveloper\sqldeveloper\bin\sqldeveloper.conf) and modify it as following:




That is, comment out or remove the old path to Java SDK and place the new path. Now restart Oracle SQL Developer and verify that it uses the new path by going "Help->About" and selecting "Properties" tab:

Grails 10 minutes application development presentation

Just gave a presentation to my colleagues in which I developed a full application with 2 domain classes with one-to-many relationships in 10 minutes.

Here are the slides: http://bit.ly/grails-quick-start

intellijidea vs eclipse in grails, android

I have been using Eclipse for ages. Now I tried to use it for Grails development. Sucks!! Even with Spring whatnot package - it always shows some syntax errors.

Tried intellij IDEA - good. Worked very well and smooth. I think I'll be developing my Grails apps in idea.

Android

Tried both also for Android development. It's about the same. Eclipse is good enough.

Widget for Internet Polyglot - Random Multilanguage Word Of The Day

We developed a widget for viral campaign for Internet Polyglot. You can see it on the sidebar of this blog. It was relatively easy. First develop a jsp page that finds a random word with all translations and then displays it and its image. Then use this page on Widgetbox or Clearspring, do some configuration and voila - the widget is ready!

So now it can be placed anywhere. Yes, practically anywhere: in your blog or a website, in you iGoogle, even on your Vista sidebar! So go ahead, click "Get & Share" and place this widget wherever you want!

Drupal vs. Joomla!

There is a huge number of articles that review Drupal and Joomla! - two the most popular CMS's (Content Management Systems). Most of them are very interesting, educating and entertaining. But until you try it yourself it's useless.

For a new site Mobile Polyglot I decided to try Joomla! first and spent about nightly 4 hours of trying to create a simple, not to say, primitive site. After 4 hours - there are still problems on how to do this, how to change that.

Drupal - 1.5 hours and everything is done! Very elegant and intuitive. Surely, my needs were very primitive and there are a lot of other tasks are waiting in the future. But for the starters - Drupal is the best!

And check out Mobile Polyglot!

Hibernate - reassociated object has dirty collection reference

There is a hard-to-understand hibernate error message happens sometimes:

org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateSystemException: reassociated object has dirty collection reference (or an array); nested exception is org.hibernate.HibernateException: reassociated object has dirty collection reference (or an array)

I've seen many forum topics discussing what's the problem but none of them somehow gave a good answer.

And the answer is:

Make sure that your object is persistent before you try to lock it. If you try to call hiberante lock on a transient object you'll get this error.

Flex widget

For Internet Polyglot we developed a widget that does the following: it connects to the server, gets the data in JSON format over http and then presents the data to the users. The widget is developed using Flex. The widget looks like the following:



The code for this widget was:
<br /><object><embed width='425' height='344' id='IPWidget' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://widget.internetpolyglot.com/widget.swf' flashVars='wordLanguage=English&translationLanguage=Russian'></embed></object><br />

but you can change the languages in this code. For example, if you want to show Spanish-French lessons then simply change wordLanguage and translationLanguage parameters in this code like this:

<br /><object><embed width='425' height='344' id='IPWidget' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://widget.internetpolyglot.com/widget.swf' flashVars='wordLanguage=Spanish&translationLanguage=French'></embed></object><br />

and the widget will start showing Spanish-French lessons like this: