The final curtain

Before this year is gone, I'd like to give some sign of life to all the guys out there (in Brazil, Mexiko and even Germany...) who know me. I did not forget you, however there is nothing to tell here at the moment. I hope you had a merry Christmas out there in the world and did not get too frustrated about being far away from home.

The university is at a shutdown at the moment, no one works or is allowed to enter it until Monday morning. This got me partly nervous, because I could have spent the last two days working for my diploma thesis. But the good point in it is, I got two more days of relaxation and can continue to work next week.

See you in 2006. (And remember that there is a leap second between 00:00:59 and 00:01:00 on New Year's Day!)

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden vs. Energie Cottbus

I remembered lately, that I seem to have forgotten to post an entry about Dynamo's last home match. This would not have been that sad, if the opponent team was just anyone. But last Monday, the enemy came from just 100 km away - Energie Cottbus. For the third time in a row Dynamo was making the first goal. But for the first time since September, they did not lose!

I could say a lot about the game itself: in comparison to the last games, the kickers played a new way of soccer that could easily be described as a revelation. Fast and dedicated forward play. No more fear of making mistakes. Great, exciting, wonderful. We definitely had fun. (And I wonder, why I am so happy about a draw at home - but hey it was the first score point since I don't know when...)

There were also bad things happening, as it is probably often the case in high-aggressive derby games. More than 2000 fans of Cottbus' team had taken the journey to Dresden and it was great for some moments to see them, because 2000 are much more interesting than the 30 guys from Unterhaching two weeks ago.

What I did not like about the game was the potential of aggression, violence and hate. Cottbus fans showed an evil anti-Semitic transparent early in the game. Later on, they were firing signal projectiles to the field and tried to burn down their own fan block.

Good people are always last...

I've been driving through Dresden's early morning heavy traffic lately. Coming from a back road, I was waiting 5 minutes to turn left onto my main route. You probably know this: first there are 30 cars coming from the right and if these have passed, there are another 30 cars from the left and then again 50 cars from the right and so on.

Sometimes there are nice motorists who stop for you and let you pass the road. This also happened to me after 4 or 5 waves of cars from each side: a nice woman stopped to let me drive on. Unfortunately this woman was the last one in a series of cars and if she had not stopped for me, I had been able to cross the road anyway.

As this was not the first time I experienced this, I suppose: Good people are always last. What do you think?

[.NET] Setting up nUnit

As I am somehow addicted to information technology, I'd rather have this blog being a technical one with some soccer-related posts than the other way round. Therefore I am going to start a series about my experiences with unit testing in Microsoft's .NET framework.

This is not going to be a full-flavored introduction to unit testing and agile (extreme) software development at all. For complete information on these topics, Wikipedia's article about unit testing and the eXtreme Programming Homepage are good starting points which I'd like to point you to.

Besides programming mostly in C during my studies (which in fact is a great language!), my favorite programming languages for hobby projects are Python and C#. For a hobby project which is in its early steps at the moment (and which I will link at most if there is something to view on its SourceForge homepage), I am searching for a unit testing environment for .NET languages.

With google as one of your best friends you will soon stumble upon nUnit - the .NET version of the xUnit unit testing framework. Unfortunately it was not able to cope with the newest beta releases of the .NET framework 2.0. I spent a lot of time trying to compile the sources which are available from the project's website, but it really did not make me happy.

Lucky me, today I found out, that they have released nUnit version 2.2.3 which is finally able to run with the latest .NET versions. Therefore setting up nUnit is now quite easy - download the 2.2.3 msi from the nUnit homepage and run the installer. Worked pretty fine for me.

There are express editions of the new Visual Studio languages available and they are free for download until November 2006. Unlike the full-fledged VS2005, these editions however do not contain any unit testing support. This is bad. Even worse: Unlike the real VS, the express editions can not be extended by plugins. An nUnit addin is available for the studio and would have been a great help in developing with Visual C# Express and nUnit.

So the next step to do is setting up nUnit and Visual C# Express another way. Assume you have a production project opened in VC# Express and you want to add unit testing to this project.

1. Add a new project to your solution. This should be a dynamically linked library and will contain our test functions.
2. In the solution explorer right-click the DLL's references and chose "add reference".
3. From the dialog opening, chose "nUnit.Framework" from the ".NET" tab and the project you want to test from the "Projects" tab.
4. The real Visual studio seems to enable users to add a startup action to a project so that you can run nUnit every time you hit F5 / Run. Visual C# Express will not let me run a DLL project so I chose to add a post-build event for my test library.
   To do so, right-click the project and chose "Properties". In the "Build events" tab add a post-build event
   C:\Programme\Nunit\bin\nunit-gui.exe $(TargetFileName) /run
   (where C:\Programme\Nunit is the directory you installed nUnit to) and check that the post-build event is run whenever the build process succeeds.
   This postbuild event will run nUnit every time you rebuild your test library (e.g., by calling "Build solution") and tell nUnit's graphical console to run the tests in your test library.
5. Now that we are done, it is possible to run nUnit from VC# Express by hitting one key.

One thing I noticed regarding post-build events: When nUnit is installed in a directory whose name contains whitespaces, place the directory name into quotation marks, otherwise the postbuild event will fail with an error code 9009 (which probably means "file not found").

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden - SpVgg Unterhaching

It was the final game. Dynamo's chair man had issued an ultimatum telling coach Christoph Franke that he was to leave when losing against Unterhaching. The players agreed that they needed to act against this and against their losing series with only 2 points from the last 8 matches. What hadn't they promised before yesterday's match? - Concentration, fight, the magic of football.

With this in mind friends and me went to the stadium once again to see Dynamo win eventually. Every series needs to be ended and hey - they could not really lose against Unterhaching, could they? 2 hours later we knew they could.

Terribly raining, the air at a temperature of about 3°C - yesterday evening was not everyone's favorite weather for a football match. That's probably the reason why only 12.213 visitors attended the match that could have been the last one in an epoch. The game they saw started like all the others during the last 3 months: the players appeared to play soccer but Unterhaching scored an early goal. But this time everything looked better. Only 5 minutes after the 1-0, Dynamo attacked and the ball crossing into the penalty area hit Unterhaching's Omodiagbe which then scored a wonderful goal of the week - into his own goal. 1-1.

Now that this happened, the players seemed to realize that this was their home game and the fans supported them as if this was the last day on earth. With this backing, another 7 minutes later Joshua Kennedy scored the 2-1 and Dynamo seemed to win this game. After this they however grew a bit tired or too self-confident. This was punished by Unterhaching's equalization right before the break. With a 2-2 after 45 minutes everyone agreed that this was not the end and we could win this match.

All the fight from the first half was unfortunately over right from the beginning of the second one. We suddenly saw the same team as ever: no one deared to stand against the opponents, no one wanted to play the ball, no one wanted to duel the others. It looked as if they just wanted this to go over and maybe score another goal with some luck.

Those who don't fight will not win. That's how an old saying goes and it became true in minute 65. All our players were in Unterhaching's half when a counterattack started and the ball flew onto Ignjac Kresic, our keeper. He ran out of his goal to kick the ball away, ran 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters in front of it. This time however, he did not manage to hit the ball right - Unterhaching's forwarder was there and kicked the ball into our empty goal. 2-3. This also was the final score.

There is something people call the "third half" of the game. Normally this is the moment where all the nice people should be at home quick, because it is when the hooligans start to vandalize and fight the police men and women around the stadium. Nothing to be proud of, but not a problem of Dresden only. This time the third half consisted of one or two thousand fans not leaving the stadium, but celebrating their coach again and again. In my last post I supposed, that the fans were undecided about whether they liked him yet or not. Yesterday I saw that most people were in favor of him. The fans blame the players for losing the last games, not the coach.

When I got home I read in an online-magazine, that Frantisek Straka would probably become the new coach of Dynamo. Frantisek who? But then I remembered: he is a nice Czech guy who coached LR Ahlen until last October. This is the one who dismissed himself in Ahlen because he did not mentally reach the players. What the f*** could this man do here? If he really comes here, he will not have any beginner's advance. The people will want him to beat Cottbus and Rostock in the last home matches of the year. If this does not succeed, he will be the last man standing on a lonely position.

However, when I opened the newspaper this morning, Straka was not the only option anymore. Impressed by the fan's clear vote in favor of Franke, the Dynamo management might also decide to keep him at least until Christmas. This would give him another 4 opportunities to get the team back to business. I wish this to happen. Let's see...

[Sports] Fight and win!

Three days left until Judgement day! After being defeated by Erzgebirge Aue three weeks ago, Dynamo's manager told the coach that he was to leave if they did not fight with honor in Karlsruhe and if they did not win against Unterhaching afterwards. The fight was there in Karlsruhe: Dynamo lost 1-2 against a strong opponent, but the real good thing: for the first time in 8 games they were leading 1-0 --- although for 5 minutes, only. :)

Next Sunday we will see the home match against Unterhaching, another direct competitor. They are currently on rank 15, Dynamo is on 16. Both teams gained 11 points up to now, but while Dynamo has not won since 8 matches, Unterhaching has an upward trend after two nice wins out of the last three games. That's the situation and all can read this from the news.

But how does it look inside?

• The team declines all critics for the coach and says, they will play for him.
• The coach is calm and silent as usual and even forgives those, who critizise him devastatingly.
• The fans are undecided. That's a bad point. Many of them know that the coach as achieved wonders within the last 4 years. He took over Dynamo when they were near death, playing in League 4 and led them into League 2 within 3 years. But all this does not count, if you are not successfull at the moment. Easy to see, that there are also fans who would prefer to see him leave and restart the Dynamo engine, before it is too late.

Personally, I did not want the coach to leave after the Aue game and I am convinced that the current situation is not his fault at all. But the rules in professional soccers are as that: he is the one responsible for the situation, because he is the easiest one to be thrown out. After two weeks of thinking, I do not wish him to be kicked out, but this is not because I admire him so much, but because I want them to win on Sunday. Everything else we will see afterwards.

The weather: 70% snow probability for Sunday. 100% supernatural heat probability in the stadium.

One - two - three - FIRE!

We really had a bad night today. Went to bed some time after midnight and woke up from the noise of a party in the room above around 4 o'clock in the morning.
I live in a dormitory, so such things sometimes happen. It's annoying, but you can do nothing about it (except maybe attending the party yourself... *g*).

So I was just a bit pissed of, because they didn't let me sleep. But then at about 4:45, the fire alarm started to ring. Cursing I stood up and went out to see what was going on. You could easily differ the experienced students from the newbies: as a newbie you rush out of the house when the alarm rings, if you are more experienced, you know that most of the time some drunken idiot simply wanted to make fun of waking up all the house.

As an experienced student I first went to see whether there really was a problem. Well, this time it was: The 4th floor was full of smoke which came out of a room. So now it was time to really leave the house as also the fire department was already arriving and requested us to leave the house.

Nice happening: all the residents standing out on the street at 5 in the morning. Let's see it optimistic: The good thing about this is, that you can meet all the people you know and haven't seen for a while. ;) But in fact it's terrible if you get awoken by a loud and annoying bell and then stand out in the cold. (Another advantage as an experienced student: I put on my warm clothes instead of rushing out in my pyjama...)

At 5:30 the party was nearly over. The fire fighters did their job well and we could return to our beds. I guess I don't need to mention that we did not get up as early as usual, today. Instead we slept until ten and then slowly started to get up and to embrace a new day.

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden vs. Erzgebirge Aue

Some weeks ago someone suspected that I might be Dynamo's guardian angel, because they always won when I was there and they lost when I was not. I suppose, these times are over. After the Aachen desaster, Dynamo lost 0-3 against Nuremburg in a national cup game last week. That was not that bad, because Nuremburg plays in the major league and it is okay to lose such a game.

After being thrown out of the cup, it seems plausbile that the team now can concentrate on the league games. This seems necessary, as after having a little high in the beginning of the season, Dynamo has not won a game since the beginning of September. This weekend they reached the descending ranks for the first time this season and needed to win at home against Erzgebirge Aue to get out of them again.

To sum the game up: it was horrible. Dynamo did not even try to resist Aue's attacks. Consequently Aue scored their first goal after only 6 minutes. The rest of the game did not get even better, Dynamo could have lost 0-6 or 0-7, but our great goal keeper once again helped us. Unfortunately his help yesterday resulted in only 4 goals for Aue. Many fans started to exit the stadium after 70 minutes - they did not see Dynamo's goal of honor in minute 89. The final result of 1-4 sounds like a disgrace for all of us, but in fact it was even flattering.

What we saw yesterday was a team with a huge menthal problem. These guys cannot be that bad, they already won against Freiburg and Munich this season. But through the last weeks all you could see were players in fear of losing. No one wants to possess the ball, so they pass it over to someone else. No one dares to fight, so no one kicks the ball onto the goal. Very sad.

But wait: hope is not lost yet. Only one point more and we wouldn't be descending. There are still 23 games left until the end of the season. It must be possible to make it. The next opponents are not that frightening: on Friday Dynamo plays in Karlsruhe where they tied last year and won at home. After that we play at home against Unterhaching - this team is currently positioned even worse. Then follow matches in Ahlen and Saarbruecken (both teams in the lower part of the league) and the very important home matches against Cottbus and Rostock where we need to recover the honor lost to Aue yesterday.

Linux Information Day 2005

Last Saturday I took part in this year`s Linux Information Day here in Dresden. I wasn't able to attend these events through the last three years, so I was pretty interested in what these people did there and how it was accepted by the visitors. Therefore I enrolled as a helper and was chosen to be the "track manager" for one of the three track rooms. In fact this position meant that I was inside all the talks, helped the speakers to prepare for their talk, announced their talks and gave information to the visitors.

To me this was a nice job and I really liked the possiblity to get close to the speakers. I really met some interesting guys there, doing admirable things and giving really good talks about it. On the other side of course there also were bad and boring sessions where the speaker seemed to be on drugs or to fall asleep the next moment - hey, but that's the way university goes all the day so there was nothing new or shocking about it.

One word about the geeks: Many of you may have heard or read about these guys. Pale, thick glasses, blains. Of course I am aware that such guys exist, but to me it always seemed, that this should not be the usual description for a computer guy, because I know a lot of people who are not of that kind. During the Linux Day my attitude was put onto a big test: there were countless guys fitting the description. Guys having problems to talk to other people, guys not seeming to know that there are different things in life than computers and Linux and that stuff. Sad thing. :(

Bash them hard!

A friend introduced me to german-bash lately. The site stores interesting, depressing, stupid and otherwise funny quotes from German IRC and chat sessions. This news gives me another blog entry for today... *g*

My current favorite (translated to English...):

• Hey, don't be that pessimistic. Optimists really live longer.
• *nodd* Yeah. That serves them right...

Business Strategies

Spiegel online today has an article about how modern life and business strategies are related to ancient or medieval philosophies. The article links to a test that gives you 21 questions to find out who you are and what you believe.

As a fan of such online tests (remember the coffee test some weeks ago?) I rushed in to take the test. My result: I am mostly the Machiavelli-kind of guy. True and sometimes unpopular focussed on my goals. Some of my answers also match Clausewitz (showing, that I am aware of the risks and take options into account) and Hagakure (meaning I seem to have some sense of taking risks).

Mmmmmh. I don't know whether others view me like that?

(The article as well as the test are in German.)

[Sports] Dresden Marathon

Yesterday a friend and I took part in one of Germany's largest city marathon runs - the Dresden Marathon. As our training was not dedicated and long enough to even finish the whole 42,195 km, we decided to take part in the half-marathon competition and did not plan to meet a certain finish deadline - we just wanted to go there and see what we can do without a lot of effort - We often cancel training runs, because we have something else to do... :( For being nearly completely untrained on the 21 km distance, we were very happy to finish in net times of 02:02:38 and 02:04:46. Of course we promise to do better next year, as we plan to do some more training and more competitions next year.
We chose Dresden as our first run, because this is the place where we live and so it was easy for us to take part. (Remember, we are students and cannot spend all our money for journeying around just to give us some pain anywhere... *g*) The route was very impressive and went along nearly every place you will need to visit as a tourist. As it was a city marathon, most of the run was on paved roads and we did not have any hills or mountains in here.

The marathon organization was also great. The day before we even got a noodle meal for free (carbohydrates.. yeah!). Also on Saturday we visited the Marathon Expo and got informed about clothing, food and competitions we can visit next year. During the run on sunday there were quite enough catering posts (water every 2 km, bananas, bread and isotonic drinks every 5 km) - you won't believe the great taste of dry bread and a banana at kilometre 16... :)

The greates experience was of cause the moment, when we reached the finish line and everything was over. Now after having slept nearly enough to compensate the run, it is time to think how to go on next. My plan is now to reach a half-marathon time of below 2 hours (which should be easy) and in the best case a time below 01:50 h (which will be some harder). If I can do this without a problem, I will look forward for the real experience. Maybe I can do a whole marathon in Dresden next year.

[Soccer] Dynamo Dresden vs. Alemannia Aachen

It's getting cold here. Autumn leafs are getting brown on the trees, the sky is all cloudy and if it is clear, this leads to even colder winds blowing through the streets. So how to become warm on a monday evening? Some friends and me tried the Dynamo way: Alemannia Aachen were in town and playing against Dynamo Dresden yesterday evening. That's why we went to the stadium to have some jumping and singing experience once again.

The game started unexpected: the Dresden team was pushed into a defensive position and did not often get out of it allover the game. Aachen attacked one wave after the other, supported by many bad mistakes made by Dynamo players. One could argue that these mistakes happened, because three or four of the players were only in because they played a position of other injured players - but even then you should not play that bad if you plan to stay in the Second League this year again.

First 30 minutes saw many attacks, some of them seriously bringing us near a heart attack, but up to then they did not bring the effort they should. In minute 34 however, Aachen scored a goal after kicking the ball on to the goal 3 times in a row without hitting it. No one of us was really surprised, we just stood there without talking - maybe even more shocked by the way the game went than by the goal itself. Some relief 2 minutes later: Witold Wawrzyczek (that's the guy with the name no one could spell by the beginning of this season - but our fans' Polish has improved at least a little bit over the time.) hammered the ball from 25 metres into Aachen's goal. 1-1 at halftime - we went to drink some mulled wine (did i mention that it is getting cold here?) and tried to forget the soccer disease we saw in the last 45 minutes.

Half two started as the first one ended: Aachen rushing and attacking, Dynamo in a defensive position which they were obviously not prepared to take. Another good attack lead to the 1-2 goal in minute 51. Some minutes later the Dresden players started to wake up. The fan curve hat been yelling "We want to see you fight" for minutes, now it seemed our players had understood. Unfortunately they were too nervous now to get something really done even though they tried to fight. The end of the game saw two of our players leaving the field because of foul plays, Dynamo's co-trainer was sent to the tribune because of shouting at the referee multiple times. No wonder, Aachen scored a goal for the 1-3 final result later that game.

Many of the referee's decisions during the last twenty minutes of the game were not quite easy to understand for the fans, many of them got very angry. However, these decisions did not change the game - we already had lost in the first 70 minutes. The defeat was okay, it even would have been okay if Aachen had made five or six goals. The referee only made the game taste even more bitter. (Greetings to the Bitterman in Brazil!). If Dynamo keeps on playing like this, we are going to face terribly dark times. 4 games at home are left until christmas, three of them are derbies against the teams from Aue, Rostock and Cottbus. Currently we are number two in East Germany - if we want to keep this place, we should win at least two of these games.

Besides, yesterday's game had a main sponsor: T-Mobile, a German mobile company. When we entered the stadium, we saw all the seats covered with magenta balloons, before the game started, some management guy of T-Mobile stood on the field and tried to convince us that magenta is a great color in combination with our traditional black and yellow. (We were not convinced afterwards.) But T-Mobile had spent a lot of money for this: they had hired the East-German band "Die Puhdys" to perform three songs before the game and they had a lottery running, were they gave away 1.000 prepaid handies. (I didn't win one.) The Ultra fan block presented a transparent shouting at T-Mobile and its commercial ideas, but this transparent was soon removed by the stadium security. That's what pissed off many of the fans if they were not already in rage because of this commercial attitude. My pragmatic opinion, although I know that many others disagree about it: Dynamo needs all the money they can get and if this means to have some terrible balloons at a game or to sell the stadium name - just do it.

Coffee?

You Are a Soy Latte

At your best, you are: free spirited, down to earth, and relaxed At your worst, you are: dogmatic and picky You drink coffee when: you need a pick me up, and green tea isn't cutting it Your caffeine addiction level: medium

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

[Sports] Running & Dynamo

The good things first: A friend and me went to Hamburg last weekend and took part in the "Volkslauf durch das Alstertal". As we were afraid of our bad training we decided to start for the 10 km run only, saving us the half marathon distance for another time.

Our personal goal was to run the 10 km distance in below one hour. I know this is not a real hard thing to do for someone doing regular jogging over this distance, but as we hadn't had any competition experience up to now, we just wanted to give it a try. The results were okay: my friend Rene ran 10 km in 00:50:19, I reached the finish after 00:51:32 - way below our goal, so that we were a little bit proud of us. I hope, I can put on some pictures in a few days. (Edit: I cannot - the official photo agency of the running event wants me to pay for the pictures they've taken of me. And these pictures are not that beautiful anyway...)

Now let's have a look at the bad things: Because of my holidays and the running event, I missed 2 home games of Dynamo. I've never seen Dynamo lose again - they always won when I was there. Unfortunately they once again were not that lucky. They played 1-1 against Eintracht Braunschweig a week ago and lost 0-2 against SC Paderborn yesterday. This is a bit sad, because both opponents played in the 3rd league last year and are not what I would call a hard opponent. Let's hope everything will get better in a few weeks. Dynamo will play in Siegen this weekend, next home game is against Alemannia Aachen in 2 weeks - I will be there and hope to see them win again.

[Holiday] Slovakia

Friends and me spent a week in the High Tatras - the world's smallest high mountaineous area. Not that much to mention as I do not want to bore the readers (if I should have some...). We went hiking through the mountains and had a lot of sun. Very nice.

One thing got me shaking during this week. I have been hiking in the Tatras for years now - the first time at the age of three. But one thing was different this year: there was not so much wood there as I hat gotten used to. Last year a forest fire killed some amount of wood. As if this wasn't enough, a tornado hit the mountains later that year, smashing even larger areas of trees. Driving the main road along the mountains (which once was a road through the woods), you only see devastated areas. Or as our renter brought it to the point: "No problem. In 50 years everything will be okay again..."

[Soccer] Dynamo Dresden vs. Kickers Offenbach

Probably no one will be interested, but here are the news anyway: Together with two friends I went to a Soccer game of our local team Dynamo Dresden. They played against Kickers Offenbach in the German Second League and won 4 - 1.

After last weekend's lame cup game in Leipzig, yesterday Dynamo managed to use their chances at least in some cases. They dominated the game most of the time. Offenbach had some good minutes in the late second half, but never got really dangerous. Of course there also was a good bunch of luck with this win - early in the first half Offenbach lost a player because of repeated fouls. However, I do not think the game had ended the other way round under other circumstances.

Player of the game? Ansgar Brinkmann. This guy is quite old for a midfielder, but even now you can still see some of his genius on the field. Due to his age, he isn't that fast - most of the time you will see him running behind someone of the opponent's team. But this guy is hot and doesn't give up, therefore he will get maybe 3 or 4 great moments in a game, where he can use his technical supremacy to rule the world. :) One example from yesterday: Dynamo pressed upon Offenbach's goal for some minutes, playing from the left wing to the right and back again and again. No real danger for the goal occured. Then maniac Ansgar took the ball on the right side and started running across the field alone. Reaching the left side he passed the ball over to Christian Fröhlich, who then flanked to central Marco Vorbeck - goal.

Another impression: 17.684 people in the stadium, about 500 were from Offenbach. As we were right near to their fan block, I got an impression about what real fans are. These guys had been driving 500 kilometers, probably took one day off-work for this. And even though their team was desperately losing, they kept on singing and supporting all over the game as if they were on the winning road. Very great experience to see this. - This is however no criticism for the Dresden fans - we were also supporting our team, but we were 17.000 and it is quite clear that the home team always gets the support it needs. From the visiting teams' fans I already saw some very boring stuff. In the end of last season we played against RW Oberhausen and LR Ahlen here in Dresden - these teams had about 10 fans each and these could not bring any support to their teams.

My friends and me yesterday visited the E block, although we normally attend L block in the Rudolf-Harbig-Stadion. The reason behind that was that in many games Dynamo scores in the second half, when they are playing onto the curve containing block E and we just wanted to be near to the goal. You can imagine our surprise, when we are not in L for the first time and after one minute of playing, there is a goal on the other side of the field... On the other hand it was nice to see the fan curve from the other side for the first time. It is quite impressing to see the guys jump, sing and clap their hands allover the game. Too bad, we were not in there. Anyway: block E is too silent for us - we will be in L next time again.

[Java Adventures] Remote Method Invokation

I've been learning Java RMI today. I currently do not yet know whether I like it or whether I should better hate it.

It has some nice features, sure:

• Work with a remote object,
  
• Do not care for setting up a connection to the remote server - this is done by RMI for you, and
  
• Do not care for the way parameters are sent around - your remote objects can have every data type you want, as long as this type is serializable. Marshalling (packing the parameters into nitty little TCP packets) and unmarshalling (the same vice versa) is performed internally by the magics of Java reflection.

All of the above features make your distributed application become clear and easy - your client simply looks up a remote object and then works on it as if it was a local one.

So why should one hate it? - Well, it is the above mentioned magic. Magic makes development easy, but it hides problems from the user. In many cases one will probably build a cleaner and maybe even faster solution by transferring data manually over a TCP socket connection.

Furthermore, I had some bad minutes searching for subtle exceptions thrown by my RMI application - took me some interesting command line arguments to get the JVM to do what I needed. This is not that bad - solutions are available from Google within seconds, but this is what makes learning RMI probably not that easy for beginners.

All in all: have a look at his grown-up technology and enjoy its ease. But keep in mind that sometimes it is just as breaking a butterfly on the wheel.

I found the following tutorials helpful today:

• Introduction to Java RMI
• How to create an RMI system

Entity

So this is going to be a weblog - as usual it starts with a test posting which is actually totally senseless...