The double while pattern (episode two)

Well, I could write about the second loop around the first while pattern, used to compute statistics about how buggy "buggyProgram()" is, but... pictures are worth thousand words !

The double-while pattern

Ok, this started with a mysql bug with foreign keys : the schema just crashes randomly with syntax errors, but "sometime" succeeds.

No problem, here comes the "While Pattern".

Problem to solve :
A program crashes randomly but sometimes work

Solution :

boolean success;
do {
  try {
    buggyProgram();
    success = true;
  } catch (... well anything) {
  }
} while (!success);

Bonus point : the low voltage version with a 1sec sleep after the buggy program call.

Stay tuned for the double while pattern ;-)

OBM developper summit in Agde

The whole OBM team is spending one week in Agde to work on the major features of our 2.2 version, coming at the end of the year (hope so).

The first two days were pretty productive, with time zone support nearly done, conversation previews in MiniG. Debian packaging of alpha version is in good shape now.

Good coding week for MiniG. "from:tom filename:pdf" just works (all your mails from tom with a pdf attachment). All Gmail advanced search features are implemented and working :D

Next week I'll be giving a Tomcat training, but the minig team will be focused on email forwarding, templates implementation and UI polishing.

New minig release

Just released new MiniG backend & frontend binaries on minig.org. Also made an announcement on freshmeat to grab new users/testers.

This new release features folder tree, instant unread count updates, html email cleanups to strip images & javascript and my new imap4r1 library.

Just commited my new Java IMAP client library to MiniG svn. My lib is based on apache mina and looks like ristrerro imap api, with speed added. Pretty happy with the results.

Ristretto was fine, but switching to a mina based implementation cut the time for fetching an email from 170ms to 8ms :-) My new API still use a lot of Ristretto for header decoding & mime parsing, they did a great job.

MiniG can now send emails with attachments. Next step is attachments downloading.