A programmer's tale

Monday, February 12, 2007

Pain of IntelliJ IDEA upgrade: Why this way?

I have read many posts supporting IntelliJ IDEA and lots of it's good features. Inspired by these posts I've decided to work with IntelliJ IDEA. I have IntelliJ IDEA 6.0.1 installed. So far so good. But when I run my IDE, it has come up with the upgradation information that new version 6.0.4 is available. See the dialog:



When I click the Updates link, then another dialog will open :


This is all about the settings of upgrade option. That's good. I'm quite happy with that. But first of all, I don't find any express upgrade option. It's even ok. I will upgrade manually. I click "More Info..." button to upgrade manually and I expect only the upgrade not full download of the IDE. But clicking that button will open the JetBrain site to download the whole package.



I don't have any option to download only the upgrade. I have to download the whole 65.7 MB, again install it and provide the license. One thing I don't understand that why the upgrade process of such leading Java IDE is so tedious. As far as I know the versioning convention of any well established software is like XXX.YYY.ZZZ where XXX is the major version number, YYY is minor and ZZZ is Bug fix or some patches. So if we see this convention the upgrade option of IntelliJ IDEA is nothing but Big Fix or Patches. Why I go for the full installation or download for only the patches? Can anybody tell me the actual working or I'm wrong?

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Desperately Learning AJAX

I’ve mentioned earlier that AJAX is one of my admiring technologies in the current year. I started my voyage for AJAX; I’m learning it, thinking it, eating it and sleeping it for several days. The main book I’m consulting is AJAX In Action from Manning publication. It’s a fantastic book for learning AJAX; but it demands some good knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and DOM (Document Object Model). You are also expected to be acquainted with Design Pattern, my favorite weapon to fight against bad code. I’m really excited that most of the basic Design Patten and many more AJAX specific pattern can be implemented prudently in AJAX and you can build reusable, robust and manageable AJAX component by using that. I’m also having some, not fully taste of dynamic programming during AJAX coding. Dynamic programming like Ruby, JRuby(100% java implementation of Ruby) etc is coming in front now-a-days. Bye the way, I’m also consulting online resources of AJAX that is my "external force" for "accelerating" my AJAX learning. All these can be found here.
Hopefully within next 2 weeks I will finish up the book and acquire some professional AJAX skill. Then I will go further into deeper AJAX space like popular AJAX framework like dojo, prototype etc