Aug 10
I didn’t get too much done today because I spent a couple of hours trying to set up our development environment on my MacBook. Most of the stuff worked except the database. It turned out that Oracle hasn’t released a database server for Intel Mac yet. Most of the open source databases won’t work either because their syntaxes are not Oracle compatible. The only thing that comes close is EnterpriseDB. But for some reason our table creation script doesn’t work very well with it. I hate the idea of using VMware or Parallels. So I’m pretty much stuck with using Oracle on a remote box.
This unpleasant experience brought some complaints out of me:
- How hard is it for Oracle to release a version for Intel Mac? It could be just a developer or preview version. Plus, it already works on Linux, doesn’t it?
- What happened to ANSI SQL? Isn’t it supposed to be the standard?
- Our application is quite Oracle dependent. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Experience tells me that it’s unusual for an application this size to switch database vendor. But it still would be nice if our database layer could be truly portable.
I’ve been contemplating a switch from my current ThinkPad T42 (2gigs of RAM, 1.8ghz processor) to a MacBook. I do mostly Java development with the Eclipse based Rational Application Developer (using IBM’s WebSphere Portal server…the beast of beastly enterprise software).
Have you been happy with your MacBook so far (this blog content aside)?
Yeah. I’ve been very happy with the MacBook. It’s totally capable of my development tasks. Not to mention the awesome OSX. It’s pretty much the best OS I’ve ever used. (Sorry, Ubuntu
As far as development goes, I’ve tried Eclipse (3.2), MySQL, Tomcat and Ruby on Rails. Everything works well except the Oracle problem. I’m sure it’s eventually gonna be solved though.