Unfortunately, there were two issues in DataFox 1.9.1 released to earlier today; there was a data unit problem where a gigabyte value was incorrectly assumed as a megabyte value (if only BSNL really did that when calculating usage ) and I accidentally removed the DataFox update URL from version 1.9.1. Any users who updated to 1.9.1 will not receive any update notifications . If you did not install 1.9.1, you should see an update for 1.9.2 via the regular update mechanism, if you did install 1.9.1, simply go to the DataFox page and manually install version 1.9.2 to fix the problem (you will see subsequent updates as well).

Also, for users clamoring for Chrome support, DataFox for Chrome has been available for a couple of months now and includes this fix.

FireBible Install Manager

This release also adds support for Strong’s words and word morphology. Simply enable them from the View > FireBible menu and load a module which contains this metadata, like the KJV to see the links inline with the text. Note: Please make sure you have the  Strong’s / Morphology modules installed and then select the modules you wish to use on the Display tab of the FireBible preference page.

Viewing Strong's Words in FireBible

Viewing Greek Word Morphology using FireBible

This version of FireBible was submitted as an entry to the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest and I had to create a few screencasts describing how it worked – you can check those out here: FireBible Screencasts I hope you like them, they took way too much time!

As always, if you have FireBible installed, please check for updates to install version 1.1, or head on to FireBible to get it!

The key new features in this release are:

• Centralized, categorized history & bookmarks access.
• Commentary support.
• Ubiquity support.

An earlier blog post I made already covers the bookmark and history enhancements.

What I am most excited about, is the Ubiquity support; this is only available if you have the Ubiquity extension installed, something I highly recommend even beyond FireBible use. You need Ubiquity 0.5 or higher, 0.1.x versions are not supported. With Ubiquity, looking up verses is easy and fast. Just type in the verse reference and you will see the verse in the preview area. If you want to see content from a different Bible, add the from BibleName modifier and the preview changes accordingly. If you want to study this further in Firefox, just press enter to open the passage in Firefox. Want to place the contents in a blog post or another text area? Invoke Ubiquity from within the intended passage destination, type in your reference and press enter. If you want to copy the content into an external application, just add the to clipboard modifier and the passage will be copied into your clipboard, ready for pasting anywhere. Detailed preferences allow you to customize exactly what you would like inserted or copied. I have plans to add more Ubiquity support in the future, perhaps support for looking up definitions and searches to start with, so please let me know what you think!

Commentary support allows you to view commentaries directly from the FireBible toolbar just like a Bible, or you can have one selected in the sidebar and it will automatically synchronize itself with the passage you are reading. Commentaries will even be available for search results. Having commentary support means that FireBible now supports almost all SWORD module types. It still does not support user commentaries or locked modules, but that will arrive soon enough. Combined with the Ubiquity support, I decided to change the intended version for this release from 0.9 to 1.0.

Other relatively minor changes in this release were:

• Visual refresh, favicons now used for pages so they can be easily identified in history / bookmarks / address bar.
• Daily devotionals will be initialized with the current date preselected.
• Bible list now alphabetized.
• Pages can link to bible:// or sword:// URIs without causing security exceptions.

For more details and the actual download, head on over to the FireBible page. If you already have FireBible installed, it may have updated to this version already. If not, just go to Tools > Add-ons and hit the Find Updates button. This version will also be the first version of FireBible to be submitted to AMO so please let me know if you run into any issues as the audience for this extension will now grow manyfold and I’d like it to be a smooth experience. As always, feedback appreciated!

• Bibles/Commentaries/Questionable
• General Books/Daily Devotionals/Essays/Other
• Maps/Images
• Dictionaries/Glossaries

FireBible annotates the URLs when you visit them, placing them in one of the four categories above. Then using a simple places query, I can list them out in any way I want. What you see in the screenshot is just a number of queries I think will be useful. Besides the FireBible toolbar, they are also available in the Bookmarks menu where they can be modified and queries can be added or deleted.

Of course, FireBible has always had history, bookmark and tagging support since the beginning. Anything you read is recorded in Firefox’s regular history and locations can be bookmarked just like regular HTTP URLs. FireBible 0.9 simply adds annotations to these URLs so they can be correctly categorized and presents them in a central location, without being “disturbed” by your regular browsing history. Because the annotations will only be added for content you read after installing FireBible 0.9, the categorization might seem off for a bit, but it will settle down with use. I plan to make FireBible 0.9 available around the time Firefox 3.5 is available. FireBible 0.9 will only work on Firefox 3 and above, Firefox 2 support has been dropped, primarily because of the places queries and some cool new features yet to arrive. Stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions or critique, do send them along or leave a comment.

Note: The AMO version will be updated next week

MyEclipse 6.5

At my EclipseWorld presentation, I gave a talk on web services. To elicit the audience’s interest in REST, I demonstrated ad hoc REST development using MyEclipse 6.5. Now MyEclipse 6.5 web service tools did not explicitly support REST, so I improvised for my demo. With a few hours of trial and error web project setup and configuration I was able to create a helloworld REST web service project that I could deploy and test. I mention this ME 6.5 experiment with REST web services and the troublesome and time consuming process as a contrast to the convenience of the new MyEclipse 7.0 REST web service features.

MyEclipse 7.0

MyEclipse 7.0 introduced REST developer tools that make REST web service development drop-dead simple with no configuration complexity, Maven or otherwise; create a REST web services project in a few clicks. Jersey 1.0 libraries and dependent JARs are split among a few MyEclipse containers to help you choose exactly what you need for your application. If you want to manage your dependencies with Maven, that’s possible too, all you have to do is check a box, MyEclipse will deal with your pom.xml dependencies for you.

New REST Project Wizard

New REST Project - Library Selection

To create a web service, select a class (or create a new one), specify the path, add a few methods and you’re done.

REST Class Wizard

The method wizard can be invoked from the above class wizard to add new methods or directly from the Java editor to add methods to a class you are currently editing.

REST Method Wizard

If you’re a MyEclipse PRO subscriber, you can use the REST Web Services Explorer to test your web service from within the IDE.

REST Web Services Explorer

For all their coolness though, the wizards in MyEclipse 7.0 had no editing support. You could use them to add a new class or add methods, but you could not use them to edit existing classes or methods. This left you hanging when it came to modifying existing service annotations. REST with JAX-RS is annotation  heavy, and a complex method could have at least 10 annotations and you certainly wouldn’t want to be editing those by hand if you could avoid it.

MyEclipse 7.1

In MyEclipse 7.1, I worked in the editing support for both the method and the class wizards. You can bring up the editor from the context menu in the Java editor, Outline view, Package explorer, etc. Just select (or place your cursor in) the method or class you want to edit and bring up the context menu to invoke the wizard.

Editor Context Menu

Outline Context Menu

The wizard will open pre-populated with all the REST annotations filled into it’s fields. You can now add, edit or delete annotations. You can even add and remove parameters from methods. When you hit finish, only the changes you made are written back to the editor, you don’t have to worry about losing any other (non REST) changes you may have made manually.

Edit REST Class Wizard

One of my favorite things about these wizards is the ability to invoke them while typing using Ctrl + 3. So if you’re in the middle of editing your code and you want to bring up the wizard, press Ctrl + 3, type in “edit rest” and choose the wizard you want. Much faster than moving your hand over to the mouse and selecting from the context menu, I say.

Edit REST - Ctrl + 3

In 7.1, we also moved on to Jersey 1.0.2, which brings in a new MIME and Multipart API and a large number of fixes and enhancements. The REST Web Services Explorer will now display JSON output in the Raw View, you no longer need to save it as a file and then open externally.

Onwards…

The intuitiveness of the REST tools are all about making REST development a no-brainer hassle-free experience. The Eclipse World demo I discussed at the beginning of this post took me under five minutes to finish with our REST tools. Now you’re probably thinking, “But isn’t REST supposed to be easy? Why do I need tools for a process that is easy?”. True, but only once you know all the principles behind the process and have gone through the initial error prone setup; hopefully not having quit due to sheer frustration! Even after you know what is involved, execution is still a manual process for most part and will still take time, no matter how much you know. Why spend hours pottering with your dev environment, research and syntax when you can just use MyEclipse? Spend the time working on a bad-ass service for your customers instead and let us do the heavy lifting for you.

We have plenty of ideas for future REST features; Spring integration, JPA integration, WADL support for top down service / client generation, … how about you tell us? We’re listening.

Do read our MyEclipse REST / JAX-RS tutorial for more details.

New in version 1.7:

• Support for data.bsnl.in (bbservice.bsnl.in still works as well for 117.* series users).
• Support for MTNL Bombay users with ‘@’ usernames.
• New {rX} variable contains the remaining amount of transfer for the current month.

Will be pushed to AMO (still has version 1.5) later this week, the review process usually takes awhile. Enjoy!

There are no Map or Image modules in the Crosswire repository due to copyright issues, but you can find many in Karl Kleinpaste’s public module repository. FireBible may only display text for a few of these modules due to a bug in JSword which should be fixed in the next JSword release. Watch this space for updates.

As always, all feedback appreciated; hope you enjoy this release!