JavaFX and Air: a brief comparison

Paul Bakker has wrote an excellent post of our first impressions when developing the FolderVisualizer. Check it out and also don't forget to install and try both applications!

Efficiently reclaim you disk space

We started a new project on Google code named FolderVisualizer.

The application is able to visualize the relative size of files and folders below a given directory. With this tool it is easy to see which files and folders take up the most disk space which you then can use to efficiently clean your hard drive. See Olav Maassen's post about efficiency :).

Although such tool already exists, it is fun to see how different implementations compare to each other. At the moment, the following technologies are planned:

• A Groovy implementation with a command line client


• A Java implementation with a command line client


• A JavaFX client


• An Adobe AIR client

It is nice to see that the JavaFX client can make use of the Groovy implementation of the visualizer algorithm. For the AIR implementation we have to rewrite the algorithm in Action Script.

The project can be found here.

Once again: Assumptions are the mother of all fuck ups!

Even the most obvious assumptions aren't all that obvious. Who believes that a software tester tests a new release in the production environment! This has actually happened. When a new release was installed in the acceptance environment, the acceptance tester was signalled.

When he finished testing, a whole list of issues was reported via the issues tracker. We had absolutely no idea of what was going on until we asked for the URL and user accounts with which the tester had tested. The URL that was used was actually the URL of the production environment! After that it was totally clear to us what went wrong.

Lesson learned: even if your assumption is obvious, do not assume!