Saturday, June 16, 2007

Best of this Week Summary 10 - 16 June 2007

  • Good list of 30 questions you can ask when interviewing medium and senior Java developers for your team.

  • Good comparison of three bugtracking systems: Bugzilla, Trac and Jira. Bugzilla and Trac are open source, Jira is commercial.
    Bugzilla: exists the longest. It is the hardest one to install. Not an intuitive user interface. Trac: open source with Subversion integration. Lightweight. Just like Bugzilla a bit harder to install. Uses Python, not as many features as Bugzilla. Wiki based.
    Jira: commercial. Installation wizard.
    Which one you really prefer is up to you and the specific project situation. Check also the comments for other suggestions of bugtracking tools like Eventum, Mantis, JTrac, Project Dune and Track+.

  • Apollo has just been renamed to Apollo Integrated Runtime, or AIR for short. And it has gone into beta (was previously released in developer preview).


  • Apple released Safari for windows this week, a public beta version. Ars Technica looked at it. In general, the result is that the differences are so small, it's not worth it (yet) to switch to it. Pros and cons found were:
    + A little bit faster page load.
    + The ability to resize textboxes on forms (just like the new, just released, Netscape browser which is based upon Mozilla).
    + Since it should run on the iPhone (soon to be released), it should be able to fully support AJAX on that mobile phone.
    - On day one of the release 0 day security exploits were discovered.
    - Unstable, sometimes even requiring a full system reset while it was being tested.
    - Cross platform inconsistencies in for example the keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs.
    An update that fixes most of the exploits has been released already.

2 comments:

Gerard Toonstra said...

Hi,

I'm the project manager for Project Dune.

Thanks for mentioning my project on your blog!

Have you used the project already?

Techie said...

No, the last couple of years I've been mainly using Aardvark. Next time that I can pick the bugtracking system, I'm going to do a quick comparison of the systems mentioned the post I refer to. Maybe Dune comes out as best fit for me :-)