I reached a milestone this late night with The Gemli Project and decided to go ahead and release it. This release follows an earlier blog post describing some syntactical sugar that was added along with pagination and count support, here:

http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/10/05/GemliData-Pagination-and-Counts.aspx

Remember those tests I kept noting that I still need to add to test the deep loading and deep saving functionality? No? Well I remember them. I kept procrastinating them. And as it turned out, I’ve discovered that a lesson has been taught to me several times in the past, and again now while trying to implement a few basic tests, a lesson I never realized was being taught to me until finally just this late night. The lesson goes something like this:

If in your cocky self-confidence you procrastinate the tests of a complex system because it is complex and because you are confident, you are guaranteed to watch them fail when you finally add them.

Mind you, the “system” in context is not terribly complex, but I’ll confess there was tonight a rather ugly snippet of code to wade through, particularly while Jay Leno or some other show was playing in the background to keep me distracted. On that latter note, it wasn’t until I switched to ambient music that I was finally able to fix a bug that I’d spent hours staring at.

This milestone release represents 130 total unit tests since the lifetime of the project (about 10-20 or so new tests, not sure exactly how many), not nearly enough but enough to feel a lot better about what Gemli is shaping in itself. I still yet need to add a lot more tests, but what these tests exposed was a slew of buggy relationship inferences that needed to be taken care of. I felt the urgency to release now rather than continue to add tests first because the previous release was just not suitably functional on the relationships side.

I was sitting at my Mac Mini to remote into my Windows 7 machine and I had this MonoDevelop 2.0 icon sitting there (I had installed it a couple days ago just to see it install and run) and I thought I should give Gemli.Data a quick, simple test run.

(Click to view)

Notice the “Application output” window. It werkie!!

I was concerned that Mono hadn’t been flushed out well enough yet to be stable with Gemli.Data, I do a lot of reflection-heavy stuff with it to get it to infer things, not to mention System.Data dependency stuff. But it seems to work fine.

This isn’t by any means a real test, more of a quick and dirty mini smoke test. I was very happy to see that it works fine, and my confidence in Mono just went up a notch.

Not shown in the screen shot, I expanded it a little tiny bit to have multiple records, then I added sorting in the query. Apparently Gemli doesn't have sort support in the MemoryDataProvider yet so I used LINQ-to-Objects. Yes, LINQ syntax worked in Mono, too! Nifty!

I’ve just open-sourced my latest pet project. This project was started at around the turn of the year, and its scope has been evolving over the last several months. I started out planning on a framework for rapid development and management of a certain type of web app, but the first hurdle as with anything was picking a favorite DAL methodology. I tend to lean towards O/RMs as I hate manually managed DAL code, but I didn’t want to license anything (it’d mean sublicensing if I redistribute what I produce), I have some issues with LINQ-to-SQL and LINQ-to-Entities, I find nHibernate difficult to swallow, I have some reservations about SubSonic, and I just don’t have time nor interest to keep perusing the many others. Overall, my biggest complaint with all the O/RM offerings, including Microsoft’s, is that they’re too serious. I wanted something lightweight that I don’t have to think about much when building apps.

So as a project in itself I decided first to roll my own O/RM, in my own ideal flavor. Introducing Gemli.Data! It’s a lightweight O/RM that infers as much as possible using reflection, assumes the most basic database storage scenarios, and helps me keep things as simple as possible.

That’s hype-speak to say that this is NOT a “serious O/RM”, it’s intended more for from-scratch prototype projects for those of us who begin with C# classes and want to persist them, and don’t want to fuss with the database too much.

I got the code functioning well enough (currently 92 unit tests, all passing) that I felt it was worth it to go ahead and let other people start playing with it. Here it is!

Gemli Project Home: http://www.gemli-project.org/ 

Gemli Project Code: http://gemli.codeplex.com/

Gemli.Data is currently primarily a reflection-based mapping solution. Here’s a tidbit sample of functioning Gemli.Data code (this comes from the CodePlex home page for the project):

// attributes only used where the schema is not inferred
// inferred: [DataModelTableMapping(Schema = "dbo", Table = "SamplePoco")]
public class SamplePoco
{
    // inferred: [DataModelFieldMapping(ColumnName = "ID", IsPrimaryKey = true, IsIdentity = true, 
    //     IsNullable = false, DataType = DbType.Int32)] // note: DbType.Int32 is SQL type: int
    public int ID { get; set; }

    // inferred: [DataModelFieldMapping(ColumnName = "SampleStringValue", IsNullable = true, 
    //     DataType = DbType.String)] // note: DbType.String is SQL type: nvarchar
    public string SampleStringValue { get; set; }

    // inferred: [DataModelFieldMapping(ColumnName = "SampleDecimalValue", IsNullable = true, 
    //     DataType = DbType.Decimal)] // note: DbType.Decimal is SQL type: money
    public decimal? SampleDecimalValue { get; set; }
}

[TestMethod]
public void CreateAndDeleteEntityTest()
{
    var sqlFactory = System.Data.SqlClient.SqlClientFactory.Instance;
    var dbProvider = new DbDataProvider(sqlFactory, TestSqlConnectionString);

    // create my poco
    var poco = new SamplePoco { SampleStringValue = "abc" };

    // wrap and auto-inspect my poco
    var dew = new DataModel<SamplePoco>(poco); // data entity wrapper

    // save my poco
    dew.DataProvider = dbProvider;
    dew.Save(); // auto-synchronizes ID
    // or...
    //dbProvider.SaveModel(dew);
    //dew.SynchronizeFields(SyncTo.ClrMembers); // manually sync ID

    // now let's load it and validate that it was saved
    var mySampleQuery = DataModel<SamplePoco>.NewQuery()
        .WhereProperty["ID"].IsEqualTo(poco.ID); // poco.ID was inferred as IsIdentity so we auto-returned it on Save()
    var data = dbProvider.LoadModel(mySampleQuery);
    Assert.IsNotNull(data); // success!

    // by the way, you can go back to the POCO type, too
    SamplePoco poco2 = data.Entity; // no typecast nor "as" statement
    Assert.IsNotNull(poco2);
    Assert.IsTrue(poco2.ID > 0);
    Assert.IsTrue(poco2.SampleStringValue == "abc");

    // test passed, let's delete the test record
    data.MarkDeleted = true; 
    data.Save();

    // ... and make sure that it has been deleted
    data = dbProvider.LoadModel(mySampleQuery);
    Assert.IsNull(data);

}

Gemli.Data supports strongly typed collections and multiple records, too, of course.

var mySampleQuery = DataModel<SamplePoco>.NewQuery()
    .WhereMappedColumn["SampleStringValue"].IsLike("%bc");
var models = dbProvider.LoadModels(mySampleQuery);
SamplePoco theFirstSamplePocoEntity = models.Unwrap<SamplePoco>()[0];
// or.. SamplePoco theFirstSamplePocoEntity = models[0].Entity;

Anyway, go to the URLs above to look at more of this. It will be continually evolving.

I flew out to California on Friday night to visit my siblings, and when I arrived I rented a car and drove around in the middle of the night looking for a cheap place to sleep. After an hour of getting completely lost I finally found a Motel 6 (*shudder*), climbed into bed, and then realized that there’s no alarm clock in the room. Great.

So I threw together another alarm clock on my laptop. I went through the trouble of giving it a nice touch, so it took an hour or two rather than a minute or two, but it did the job and I was proud and still managed to sleep well.

And now I’m sharing it here online. This is freeware with source code included. (Uses free Developer Express controls.)

.. click ‘Go’ and ..

Download: http://www.jondavis.net/codeprojects/QuickieAlarm/QuickieAlarm.zip

It's official. jQuery has become the new de facto standard for the web development community. By rolling jQuery in with Visual Studio and the ASP.NET core tools pipeline, a whole new precedent has been set in the software industry.

jQuery was already supported in many major IDEs, including Aptana Studio (which is built on Eclipse), but usually only sharing with other frameworks like prototype. But there are two IDEs that have pretty much ruled the software industry for the last several years: Visual Studio and Eclipse. Neither one has chosen any particular "favorite" Javascript open source framework. You usually get a bundle of different frameworks being supported or nothing at all (import something yourself or roll your own).

But Microsoft's decision to adopt a third party software framework, bundle it, and make it a foundational component of its own, is an earth-shaking paradigm shift. This is something that will turn the software industry on its head. There is a whole industry carved out from the trenches that Microsoft dug. Giving a third party framework the honor of being placed into the middle of it all and running half the show, so to speak, is absolutely breathtaking, a moment to be awed. Right now everyone should take a moment and let their mouths gape because this is just short of bizzare.

And I mean that with no pretentions. I'm not saying that "this is unlike Microsoft", although it is, because there really is no precedent for this. The only precedents I can think of have been support for open standards--support for HTML (Internet Explorer), HTTP, FTP (bundled in Explorer), the TCP/IP stack, OpenGL, keyboard/mouse standardization, compact disc file system support, and standard driver support. But all of those things have traditionally always had, with very few exceptions, a proprietary implementation of software of Microsoft's own making or bought out. Most of the exceptions come from third parties such as Intel, who licensed technology, which is not the same as bundling open source code.

jQuery is licensed on the MIT license. Microsoft will be a "normal" participant with the jQuery community just like anyone else; they will introduce ideas, report bugs, and propose bug fixes, but they will go through a QA and approval process just like everyone else.

The closest thing I can think of that even remotely equates to Microsoft getting this involved with and supporting of outsiders in the web community was back in the late 90s, when Microsoft got very involved with the W3C and helped shape the directions of Dynamic HTML and the DOM, not to mention their extensive involvement with the XML and then SOAP initiatives and the insanely detailed UDDI [dis]proving that followed. But once again, those are standards / protocols, not code. So even though Microsoft has done amazing shifts in supporting the open source communities with CodePlex (bravo!), I'm curious if this really is the first time, ever, that Microsoft has done this on behalf of their proprietary development platforms (Visual Studio, ASP.NET).

On a final note, I must say that I absolutely adore jQuery and what it does for web development. jQuery working with Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC and C# 3.0 w/ LINQ are all a match made in heaven. Knowing that Microsoft is going to build on top of jQuery is almost like getting a wonderful new programming language akin to C#, but built for the web. So really, my day just went from being depressed from the last week to being literally overjoyed like I just got engaged to marry someone or something.

I have been using my new Mac Mini for less than 24 hours and it already looks like this:

In the screenshot I have VMWare Fusion with Unity enabled so that I have the Windows Vista Start menu (I can toggle off the Start menu's visibility from VMWare itself) and Internet Explorer 7. (I also have Visual Studio 2008 installed in that virtual machine). Next to Internet Explorer on the left is Finder which is showing a bunch of the apps I have installed, including most of the stuff at http://www.opensourcemac.org/. On the right I have MonoDevelop where I can write C# or VB.NET applications for the Mac, for Linux, or for Windows. And of course, down below I have the Dock popped up because that's where my arrow actually is.

I also, obviously, have an Ubuntu VM I can fire up any time I want if I want to test something in Linux. 

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes with native X11, not out of the box but with the installer CD, and it's the first OS X build to do so (previous versions used or required XFree86).

This point in time is a particularly intriguing milestone date for the alignment of the moons and stars for blissful cross-platform development using the Mac as a central hub of all things wonderful:

• X11 on Mac OS X 10.5
• MonoDevelop 1.0 is generally gold (released, it's very nice)
• System.Windows.Forms in Mono is API-complete
• VMWare Fusion's Unity feature delivers jaw-dropping, seamless windowing integration between Windows XP / Vista and Mac OS X. And to make things even more wonderful, VMWare Fusion 2, which comes with experimental DirectX 9 support, will be a free upgrade.
• For game developers, the Unity game engine is a really nice cross-platform game engine and development toolset. I have a couple buddies I'll be joining up with to help them make cross-platform games, something I always wanted to do. This as opposed to XNA, which doesn't seem to know entirely what it's doing and comes with a community framework that's chock full of vaporware. (But then, I still greatly admire XNA and hope to tackle XNA projects soon.)
• The hackable iPhone (which I also got this week, hacked, and SSH'd into with rediculous ease), which when supplemented with the BSD core, is an amazing piece of geek gadgetry that can enable anyone to write mobile applications using open-source tools (I'd like to see Mono running on it). The amount of quality software written for the hacked iPhone is staggering, about as impressive as the amount of open source software written for the Mac itself. Judging by the quantity of cool installable software, I had no idea how commonplace hacked iPhones were.
• Meanwhile, for legit game development, the Unity 3D game engine now supports the iPhone and iPod Touch (so that's where XNA got the Zune support idea!) and the iPhone SDK is no longer just a bunch of CSS hacks for Safari but actually binary compile tools.

I've been hearing a lot about WebKit being on the bleeding edge of staying up-to-date with performance and passing various tests like ACID 3. I was confused and concerned, though, because I had thought WebKit was only available to developers as a set of components (DLLs) and was not actually usable by end users.

I was sort of right, but mostly wrong. WebKit's nightly build, which is downloadable, runs on top of Safari (from a user perspective, that is .. technicaly, Safari sits on top of WebKit), replacing Safari's rendering engine with the latest "new and improved". After Safari 3.1 is fully installed, just download the latest nightly build of WebKit, run the batch file and go. (There were two batch files, I ran run-drosera.cmd and then I added a shortcut to run-nightly-webkit.cmd to my Quick Launch toolbar and changed the icon.)  WebKit does not kill off the official Safari renderer when Safari is launched in its normal fashion, it only overrides its renderer when launched from WebKit's .bat file.

Now I'm starting to think that Safari on the latest WebKit is the best browser. *gasp* Who'da thunk?

I stumbled across this over the weekend.

http://javascriptmvc.com/

I was actually very surprised by how closely it resembles what we've been working on at the office. Ours uses a controller to manage and control events and event propogation, track "view objects" (we call 'em "client controls" for drag-and-drop support in Visual Web Developer) and manage AJAX calls. And we've spec'd out to use RESTful URIs to manage data model retrieval and callbacks, and these are cacheable using Google Gears, Flash storage, or *shrug* cookies.

Theirs has a few additional features, though, some of which I think we can glean from, like:

• script librarian ("Include"), which we don't need but I think we could accomplish using something like JSLoader
• a complete ActiveRecord-like modeling pattern
• a complete ASP-like templating system that executes on the client
• "everything is a plug-in" philosophy

I like what I see, although our own framework goes further as it is built with ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, and Expression Web all in mind. With ours, we enable our web designer, who is not an engineer, to create a complete, non-Flash RIA web pages without coding. Using Expression Web or Visual Web Developer, he can click on one of our controls in the Toolbox, drag it out to the page, absolutely position it, stylize it, give it a data source URI, and have it subscribe to other controls' events (think Flash video player, responding to the events of media playback controls). The entire multi-page web site will support executing in the rich execution environment of a single-page RIA application with a seamless user experience. And since the framework is not done in Flash (although Flash "client controls" are supported), it will support continuous extensions using the wonderfully universal languages of HTML and Javascript, both at design-time (creating new controls, customizing existing controls) and at runtime (RESTful fetches of web content, dynamic execution of JSON models, etc).

In some ways, ours is looking like http://www.wavemaker.com/, except that WaveMaker is based on Java and dojo, and the designer experience is in-page (which is way too much support overhead--why reinvent the designer when Visual Studio / Expression Web can do the job on its own?).

But I'd certainly recommend Javascript MVC (JavascriptMVC.com) as a skeleton foundation framework for someone to roll their own framework. We were thinking about open-sourcing our client bits once we are done with our prototype, but I think Javascript MVC comes close enough that it would do just as well to recommend that one instead. Mind you, I have never used it, I'm only suggesting it based on what I'm seeing at their web site.

XHTMLJS has a new home on CodePlex!

http://www.codeplex.com/xhtmljs

Would be nice to get some community support (i.e. feedback, bug reports, code editors) going.

Microsoft released their beta source code for ASP.NET MVC.

http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet

What took me by surprise as I noticed the .zip file was just called "aspnet-###.zip" (where ### was a version), which made me wonder, what, is Microsoft going in the direction of moving ASP.NET itself to the open source community? I suppose to some extent that is already the case, although I wonder if WebForms' code will ever see the light of day.

Not that we want it or anything. (j/k.)