Chillisoft Blog
 

There was a time when I was very idealistic when it came to the IT world. In fact, I still am, but it’s been tempered by experience, circumstance and necessity into another form of idealism. I’ve always supported the Open Source movement, and use a lot of the projects that are hosted on SourceForge or Tigris. But I’ve come to realise that when doing custom development the person or company using the system you’re developing is not really worried about philosophical issues, they’re more worried about whether the system achieves its objectives. The fact that I’m developing the software on a Microsoft platform or using open source products like Ruby doesn’t usually factor into their thinking - usually they’re completely unaware and unconcerned.
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Habanero Beta finally hit the roads today. We’ve been banging away at the keyboards for four months now, wrapping up loose ends, cleaning up the method interfaces, renaming classes, designing utilities and the like. Habanero has been a long-running project over the last few years, but sorting out the loose ends was more work than we thought.

Habanero, by the way, is an ORM tool. If that doesn’t ring bells, ORM stands for object relational mapping, which is a means of mapping data in databases to objects in code. If you have any experience with creating applications that use databases, you’ll know that you have to do a bunch of work to set up the database connections, then you have to transfer data back and forth between the tables and the code, and do all kinds of error checking and synchronisation. Habanero kills most of that work, as well as adding some mapping for user interfaces.

Needless to say, our launch ran a little over-schedule, but it comes as no surprise when you’re doing your first big launch of this nature. It certainly is a relief to see the Habanero website live and with the Beta download link active. A sense of satisfaction, like watching your son graduate from university.

Habanero Beta is available for free until November 1, 2007.  For more information, check out the Habanero website.

Why is it so difficult to find a decent utility that sorts and or compares XML files?

That was the question I was asking myself a couple of weeks ago. All I needed was some way of finding the differences between two XML files. I thought there would be a decent freeware program out there somewhere, but after a couple of refined and more refined searches, I found nothing. Maybe I need to take some course on how to get the most out of Google or something. Anyway, writing a program from scratch wasn’t the best option due to time constraints so I was a bit stuck. But then I stumbled upon an awesome feature of XSLT: recursion.
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