Be careful when using NetBeans on DropBox

My recent experimentation with the cloud service took me to a revelation that says: "Well you should've known better!" At least I should be more careful setting up my system. Especially when being aware of the nature of things, but still let myself be sloppy. 

It cost me some precious time and puzzled, achy head, but at the end the situation is already crystal clear to me.

I was trying to run NetBeans with portable JDK - both tools in the DropBox folder. It constantly refused to run saying it couldn't find a proper JDK.
At some point I decided to go with absolute paths in the netbeans.conf file. I did it very simply by defining in all my environments the variable $DROPBOX_BASE (with the actual corresponding value for every system of course). No more misty relative paths.
Still I didn't have success running the IDE. Hmm!

These days I'm experimenting with the new JBoss AS 7. Well taking the same approach there, the result that followed is obvious - the JBoss complained  that it can not find a proper JDK unless I show it its position on the system with the --jdkhome command line option. Getting the same result after using the option in question, puzzled me the most. But it didn't take long until I realized that something wrong should be happening with some executable bits. Again some time and googling passed until I remembered that on the current (Linux) system I placed the Dropbox folder on NTFS partition, which was never even designed for the idea of executable bits being set as permissions. 

So, my conclusion: when using DropBox on Linux, never set its folder on partitions designed for Windows OSes. You might still sync properly, but successfully executing binaries from it is very unlikely. 
Touché!

NetBeans 7.1 is here and ...

The official announcement came almost a week ago and for me it almost coincided with another event. The guys from PACKT Publishing gave me the chance to review another one of their books.

First about the IDE:

May be the release notes would be more informative than the official announcement. At least it contains all the possible links you might need along with the latest top features presented visually. Of course there is this video presentation, which is worth watching.

It seems this time the focus is on JavaFX. Its 2.0 version is covered in a way that makes its applications' configuration and deployment easy and complete - it seems you won't miss a feature here. 

From the other features presented in the video the most attractive seemed the visual debugger, the batch and selective rectangular re-factoring and the enhanced maven integration.

Once I have more time to make some stuff with it, I'll report. Which leads me to the second point - the book:

JBoss AS 7 Configuration, Deployment and Administration by Francesco Marchioni.

Going through this book is a nice opportunity to check the new architecture of the revamped JBoss Application Server. I guess (and hope) it will have some in-depth tweaks. Scrolling over its TOC increased my appetite seeing topics like clustering, security and cloud leveraging. I'm anxious to start it, so I'll say no more in this post.