Shouldn't $2500 be a little faster?

I have a MBP 2.4 w/ 2gb ram running 10.5.2. I have not performed any upgrades or modifications. Before getting this laptop I had a $800 HP DV6000z laptop from 2006 that had a AMD Turion 1.8ghz dual core chip and 2gb ram, running Vista Home Premium. I swear this computer started up faster and opened programs faster!
My macbook pro takes 1min, 42 seconds to startup, from the time I press the power button to the time when all the items in the menu, dock, and icons are fully loaded on my desktop.
Firefox takes 10 to 15 seconds to open.
Word 2004 takes 20 to 25 seconds to open a document.
I at least know for sure that word 2003 on vista only took a few seconds to open.
These speeds are all initial execution right after boot up. Obviously they boot faster once they have been opened previously, but this seems slow for a computer that has been marketed as the fastest laptop on the planet.
Do these numbers seem too high to you?
Thanks!

Hi. Well, since no one else is jumping in, I'll have to take a stab at this ... yes the times seem high. I have not timed mine ever though, maybe I will soon.
You so underpaid for your beautiful MBP! Mine looks same as yours and I think I paid more. And I would have paid way more, even, heh; love it so!
I just leave mine on; restart only if things get weird. I leave all the programs running. Have lidwake=0 in Terminal, so press any key when the lid is opened, to wake. You had a PC: so, where's the "any key," anyway (D'Oh!)?
No loose folders or files, except HD, on the desktop, makes startup snappier. You must have some processes thrashing away to have such slow startup and applications' bootups: have you taken a peek in Utilities > Activity Monitor > Disk Activity? I'm thinking MS Word virtual memory leakage ... I dumped MS Word and use NeoOffice (donationware OpenSource), because Word was IMHO the cause of major disk thrashings due to virtual memory bloat, which slowed everything down and usually crashed Word anyway ... evil. Do you have Parallels and MS Vista running on your MBP?

Similar Messages

FCP project sounds a little fast.

I opened up my FCP project(running latest version of FCP Studio 2) and the audio sounded a little fast, like it was rushing a bit. The picture played along in sync. I played it a couple of days ago and the tempo seemed fine. What might be causing it to race?

Funny thing and I thought this had happened before: although the computer had been on for a while, the FCP project had just been opened this morning. While it ran fast this morning, and leaving the FCP open all day (while I shopped for goodies for the 4th of July), I played the movie from the FCP timeline and it sounded "back to normal" in regard to audio speed. Since the media is spread out over several drives, maybe it had to be "woke up" a bit. As the project is only about 65 per cent done, I won't be trashing preferences just yet(did that once in the past and don't want to do that again!). And after it is completed and color corrected. I will consider the latest Quicktime update as well. I will export from the timeline when the project is done using the existing version 7.6, then install the latest and see if that makes a difference too.

Can A 1.25 Ghz MDD be overclocked to run a little faster, but still stable?

Just wondering.
Can't afford a new/newer Mac right now and was wondering if my G4 can be overclocked to run a little faster.
I am looking to eek out a little more performance out of my now 8 year old PowerMac tower.
If it can, how difficult is the procedure to do so.
Will overclocking cause any additional heat issues?
Are there any procedures on the web for doing this?

I agree with Allan. Overclocking is fun for a hobbyist, but you are putting your "work" Machine at risk. Sometimes you kill something.
Creating a Boot drive:
IDE/ATA drives accessed at the same time on shared cables "lock each other out" when they read or write. There is no possibility of overlapping operation. One Big speedup used in the Mac Pro (which can have four independent SATA drives) is to isolate System, Library, Applications, and the hidden UNIX files on a Boot Drive, and move all the Users folders off to another drive.
There are two sets of cables in the Mirrored drive doors G4. The "standing up" drives at the rear are sharing an ATA/100 Bus, and the "lying down" drives toward the front are using an ATA/Bus. If you created a Boot drive and put it in the slightly slower Bus, it would make your work go faster.

Looking for a camera to take pictures of little (fast moving) kids

I am looking for a camera that will take picutres of my little ones (3 and 1). My old point and shoot (Nikon Cool pix I think) camera takes forever to focus and take the picture after I push the button so the kids have already moved by that time. And it also takes forever to 'record the picture' to be able to take another. I was looking at the Canon T3 or T3i. What are the real differences between the two? I used the compare feature on the website but that didn't really help me out.

You are correct to move to a DSLR for faster auto focus, faster response and faster saving images compared to a compact camera.
T3i costs more, has more resolution, and has a flip out screen compared to the T3.
You would be smarter to consider Nikon DSLR's for cross-type focus points for faster auto-focussing. Canon DSLR's do not have focus assist lighting which can have a harder time to autofocus in low light when indoors.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/d3100-digital-slr-camera-with-18-55mm-vr-lens/1222817.p?id=1218237704411...
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/d3200-digital-slr-camera-with-18-55mm-vr-lens/5192349.p?id=1218642249528...
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/d5100-16-2-megapixel-dslr-camera-with-18-55mm-lens-black/1308091165.p?id...
Go the store to try it out the DSLR's. If you want more auto-focussing, consider a good external flash, they have illumination lasers.

A little disappointed in quad

First let me say that I am a photographer and not a computer whiz. I peruse these forums trying to learn as much as I can. I recently switched from an "old" dual 2.0 powermac to a quad. Originally sucked in by Aperture and wanted a machine to run it faster. I have since decided that Aperture in it's present form is unusable to me, but certainly expected much increased performance with my Adobe Bridge / CS2 workflow.
Previous G5 PM: dual 2.0, 3.5 g ram, ATI Radeon 9600 pro
Present quad: 6.5 g ram, geoforce 6600 (stock)
All external hard drives, etc. are the exact same as before. Photoshop configuration (scratch disk, ram usage, etc.) set exactly the same as before. Overall, the quad is definately much "snappier" and much improved for multi-tasking with different applications open, etc. but some commands and actions in PS are actually SLOWER?? Basic things like "save for web" and "file close" (command + w) give a brief spinning beachball now where before they were instantaneous. Actions I use constantly actually take longer now. Filters (sharpening, blur, skin soften, etc.) do run a little faster but the most basic commands take longer????
I used the firewire apple transfer utility to move all software, etc. to the new quad. I use external drives to store all image files, etc. just the same as before.
Am I expecting too much difference? Photoshop not able to take advantage of extra processing or ram?? Comments?
G5 Dual 2.0 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Photoshop configuration (scratch disk, ram usage, etc.) set exactly the same as before
You shouldn't be needing a scratch disk anymore, Tiger is supposed to override Photoshop CS2's RAM limit and give it all it needs. (only CS2 supposedly)
4GB is supposed to give 40% more performance than 2GB in a Quad.
So what I'm guessing is your using up your RAM for other things, widgets, other programs and now your swapping to your scratch disk, which if you need one, really needs to be the fastest thing possible because your replacing a drive I/O speed for RAM.
A RAID O pair of the fastest drives and the fastest interface you got. This would need to be a pair of 10,000 RPM external SATA drives with a large cache, preferably 16MB, like a pair of 150 GB Western Digital RaptorX's in some sort of external enclosure like a MiniG with a Sonnet PCI SATA card, which for the Quad isn't quite out yet.
However a pair of empty Firewire 400 external drives each with a direct connection to the Quad and RAID O'ed, might do the job cheaper for less performance.
The important thing is you need a separate channel to each drive, I don't know how many Firewire 800 ports there are on the Quad, but you would need two to use this interface at maximum speed.
Of course the problem comes up that your hogging all your ports, you just can't disconnect a RAID O set as a scratch disk at will either and expect PS to be nice to you.
But it would be just better to get more RAM and get done with it.
Overall, the quad is definitely much "snappier" and much improved for multi-tasking with different applications open, etc. but some commands and actions in PS are actually SLOWER?? Basic things like "save for web" and "file close" (command + w) give a brief spinning beach-ball now where before they were instantaneous. Actions I use constantly actually take longer now. Filters (sharpening, blur, skin soften, etc.) do run a little faster but the most basic commands take longer????
This is your scratch, boot or file drive doing this to you.
Mac OS X performs much better with a very fast, slim boot drive as it caches all the time. Western Digital is coming out with a 10,000 RPM, 16MB cache, 150GB internal SATA which will make a excellent boot/itunes/bare bones "home" drive for performance. With your files in new folders on another internal drive, like the stock or something faster.
I had to RAID O my two Raptors (74GB each) to get a little more space as I keep them less than 50% filled for maximum performance in Mac OS X. However it can be a bit risky and I clone once a week to a external drive with daily file backups.
Needless to say I don't see many beach-balls.
Now another thing is you got the stock video card, supposedly some processing is dumped to that, so that might be affecting performance.
Also you have to expect that PS CS2 isn't quite fully optimized for a Quad yet, it's are pretty recent hardware addition, and there is a lot of software being recoded at Adobe from Code-warrior (now obsolete) to X-Code for Universal Binaries.
Adobe might be standardizing their code based on a dual core, because most Mac's and PC's will be having that and it's easier to write once than to write a special version for Quads. Who knows? We will find out later I guess.
What's important is you got a monster computer at a great price, the software will have to catch up that's all. Just get more RAM so you have PS CS2 use it's 4GB needed and then make sure you get more to cover anything else you like to run at the same time. Run everything in RAM as much as possible without swapping to your boot drive or scratch disk.
I have some more performance and cloning info at my site, take a peak
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish

Screen has a bluish tint after fast user switching and then warning tone

Hi all I'm having a bit of a problem that I hope someone can help me with. First the details, I have a MBP bought in late '07 and running Tiger. I was doing full backups using "Backup" and I also had Safari, iTunes, and Word open. I briefly switched to my other account using fast user switching and when I returned to the original account the whole screen had a blue tint to it. Like the color profile was off. This has happened before and a restart usually cures it, I haven't restarted yet but I am fairly certain it will correct the problem this time too. But is there anyway to prevent this? My second question is the one I'm more worried about. It also has happened before but usually when using more CPU intensive applications. When I went to System Preferences and opened up the display preferences in an attempt to correct the previous problem I heard a very loud tone. Like some type of warning tone, it was loud enough that it startled me. I had iTunes playing and after the tone the music got very quiet but relaunching it brought it back to normal. I'm just wondering is this some type of warning tone? Is it something I should be concerned about? Besides the music everything else seemed unaffected, although the previous times that this has happened usually when using handbrake there was noticeable problems after the tone (like applications crashing). All of these problems are gone after the computer is restarted though. Does anyone have any insight on these issues? Thank you.
-James

OK I ran TechTool and everything passed except for the volume scan. Then I checked this with Disk Utility and the HD failed for a few minor reasons, like invalid block count. I repaired it using the fsck -fy command in single user mode. The computer seems a little faster now. I don't know if this error is related to the beep in any way, I may try talking to an Apple genius to see if they know. Since it seems like pretty minor errors I'm not too worried about it but it does seem to be happening often. The last time I had this error was when I posted a question here about it which I just checked was on March 1st. So this error happened again after a little more than 2 weeks which seems excessive to me. Any thoughts?

How do I make my Firefox 3.6 run faster on my Mac OSX 10.4?

My browser runs very sluggish these days. Tried to download
Firefox 4, but could not on this version of Mac. Seems I'm
stuck with the 3.6 browser. Any suggestion on how to make
it run a little faster?

See our knowledge base article [[How to set the home page]] to learn how you can set the home page to your liking (including restoring it to the default page).
Unrelated to your issue, it looks like you're using a very old version of Firefox. You should upgrade to the latest version -- just go to the Help menu and click Check for Updates. This link walks you through the process: [[Updating Firefox]]

Internet Frustration Over, But At A Little Cost

I've been following these discussion boards regarding the MacBook Pro's spotty internet connection. My MacBook Pro 13" was purchased in July of 2009 and I've had nothing but problems with the connection from day 1. I can surf for a while say 30 minutes or so and I would eventually get the spinning beach ball. I tried just about everything I read on these boards: changing router channels, disk repair, reinstall the operating system, reset PRAM, changing DNS, resetting Safari, use FireFox instead, airport on/off, deleting this file and that file, etc. You get the picture...
I took a chance and bought the Apple Airport Extreme Base and set up a new wireless environment. That was 4 days ago and I've had no problems so far. My family has probably surfed about 25+ hours over the past few days and we've had 0 problems. That's first for us!! The surfing is actually a little faster than my old router (Belkin F5D8233 Wireless N). It even detects the wifi signal fairly quickly upon turning on the computer too.
I know not everyone would be willing to spend almost $200 for another router, but I'm pretty happy that my Mac is finally working well now. I'm sure I've spent more than $200 of my time reading these forums to figure out why my brand new Mac was giving me problems on a very basic function.
Anyways, I just wanted to post a success story and share ONE way of getting it done.
Good luck.

JJ,
Me too - I have a late 2009 MBP which had all the disconnecting problems with a Netgear router to which every other computer could connect fine. Drove me crazy, tried every solution suggested short of opening the case and resetting antenna wires. Disconnected every day several times. Even though people said it still happened with them with Airport Extremes, out of desperation I bought a refurb AEBS and it has been fast and flawless since (going on a month). Very happy - set up a 5GHz and a 2.4 GHz, the first for my MBP and the second for my wife's MBP and her iPod touch. No problems, very fast.

Fast scroll in a very long song list

How to scroll a little faster on the iPod, if the song list is very long? With the iPod wheel it's a nightmare. Or is there any possibility of searching (I mean inside iPod not with iTunes)? Please, help me, my finger gets already hot from the iPod wheel.

Thank's for the answer, but I keep spinning the wheel all the time and it takes me uncountable rotations to come to the end (the song list has about 8000 songs).
Does it mean my iPod is faulty?
By the way, is there not a trick to jump quickly to a certain position (for instance to the end).
Anyway, following thing should be possible: If you are at the beginning of the song list and you start spinning the wheel anticlockwise, then it should take you to the end of the list. On my iPod 5th generation 60GB it's also impossible -> That hurts.

Background's color that was corrected showing up again in fast movements

I color corrected a shot and the color of background was changed via secondaries, just like a chroma key situation.
It works very fine, except when the actor is moving faster:
For example, when he moves an arm a little faster, then it creates a king of flicker, because the old color of the background is "coming back" on the edges of the arm, during the movement.
In FCP, when I go frame by frame, the shot is fine, the arm moves frame by frame and you cannot see the previous color of the background on the edges of the arm.
I see the problem on the TV, when watching a burned DVD. I tried Compression markers on the movement but it doesn't help.
I wonder if this due to Color or FCP or Compressor.
Thanks.

Most of the challenges that you're encountering are common compositing woes.
Whether its film-originated shutter blur or video interlace, motion generates values in the transitional zone that can't always be solved with a single approach.
COLOR was never intended to be a compositing tool. That is why there is AfterEffects and Shake and all the rest. A roto-scoped vignette probably won't help and will be arduous at best. A major contributing reason is that you would need a shape for every field, not frame, which is all you can do.
Try a second cloned layer in Final Cut if you don't want to deal with a dedicated green-screen/compositing application. Use your original as the foreground, cut a matte with it and reveal your cloned layer which you could re-correct with the three-way FCP correction filter.
With an app like Shake, which accounts for interlace, you can generate several mattes, extract and create alpha channels, dodge them, dilate-erode-blur them, combine mattes and so on til the cows come home, have a beer and leave again. Which I believe I will do.
jPo

Faster Hard Drives seem to make a difference

Hello,
I just swapped out Apple's stock Maxtor 250gig SATA I drive that came with my quad with a Seagate 750gig SATA II drive. Aperture seems a little faster. I don't know if anyone has posted on this but it makes sense. The faster the comp can read in the files the faster it can display them.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Luke

I have been reviewing my storage needs and thinking about how best to expand. Looks like a sonnet eSATA e4P & Fusion 500P for me, just need to find a good price in the UK. Anyhow i was checking hard drive perfromances/specs and noticed my default drive was specified pretty slowly compared to current options. So i'm also considering changing my boot drive for a raptor 150 and move the old one into the drive enclosure for backup.
One point when comparing, if your stock 250GB was near-full, it will significantly slow down. To be optimal drives should be kept to ~75% capacity or less. I now find that impossible hence i need more giglar blites of space.

MS 6156 with fast P3

hello again all,
the MS6156 mainboard (BX chipset) was originally designed to take a P2 up to about 450MHz, but as far as I can see it should be possible to run a slot 1 P3 at up to 800MHz by setting the core speed and multiplier to 100MHz and 8 respectively,
is this reasonable, or is there something else that I don't know?
and would the same theory also work for a socket370 chip on a slocket?
what about cooling, is this a form of overclocking - will it get extra hot?
thanxs all
xxCoral

hi again,
I have installed an 866MHz coppermine P3 on an MSI slocket, into the 6163pro and after a little head scratching it is running it at 133x6.5 (manual CMOS settings with SW2 jumper removed), apparently well enough, except that on startup, the system makes an obnoxious loud long beep and displays a red message saying "system hardware abnormal, press any key to continue", when you press any key the computer then boots up just fine, even a little faster than before, I think.
Do you think I am damaging anything by continuing? Can the error message be deactivated?
and I did the bios update first - but it had no obvious benefits
xxCoral

SSIS Fast Load fails to copy correct number of rows

Step 1 - truncate destination table
on success
Using obdc source table source to a odbc destination use a fast table load to take three colums out of source, and copy to destination.
In the source, column 1 is the primary key (int)
Other two columns are time stamps
Destination table, column 1 is int (no keys) - does not allow nulls, column 2 & 3 allow nulls
Noramlly the rowcount in the source and destination tables match after a run. However, on occasions, the destination table count is less than the source table. On the destination odbc source, we enable identify insert and check constraints. I can't see how we'd drop rows since by definition the row needs to existing in the source (we're copying the primary key).
The first time this occurred, anecdotal information is that the source sql server was under memory stress.
Has anyone seen this behavior before? Any ideas on how to resolve it?
Ken

I just ran into this same issue. After a solid half day of troubleshooting I found this little 'fast load' setting to be the culprit.
We have a very simple copy operation taking rows out of an ODBC source, adding a column and then stuffing them into a destination ODBC source. All the operations were run on a development machine with a local SQL Server install and plenty of RAM/CPU headroom.
I'd enabled logging of all kinds everywhere trying to detect the problem but nothing was tripped. When run under debug mode (in dev studio) I see the correct number of rows (684 in this case) reported being sent to the ODBC destination; however, when I look in the table itself I only ever see the first one.
As soon as I turned off the fast load option then I started getting the full data set moving over properly.
At this point, I'm of a mind to go through and remove 'fast load' from every one of my packages. I'll take reliability over speed any day of the week.

Failing Hard Drive...PLEASE HELP FAST!!!!

I noticed today under the Disk Utility that the S.M.A.R.T. status of my internal hard drive is "failing." I have done as much research as possible and come to the sad truth that I am going to have to replace it. This is my only computer and I am a poor college kid. I have a 160gb Lacie FireWire drive that has a partition big enough to hold my current entire system. The partition will need to be erased though and set up to do the backup. What I need to know is how exactly I can move all my data over to the Lacie and be able to boot from there and not lose anything (if possible). I know that soon my drive will probably fail and I need to be able to just start booting from the Lacie and run everything as I do now. And remember, I am a poor college kid so if there is any way to do this without having to shell out any dough for software, that would be greatly appreciated. Also, I tried to use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my current system to the partition but whenever I rebooted to that as the startup disk, it wouldn't accept my login password, rendering the whole process basically useless to me. Please help out a fellow Mac lover. I don't want to have to go back to Windows Land, even for a minute!
Mikal

Ok...You are correct...It is only when I boot from the Lacie that it is saying that. When I booted back to the internal drive it said it was failing still.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner (free) to make the bootable copy and it did a marvelous job. If you have FileVault turned on you may run into a few odd little things. Go to the website and download it and make sure to peek into the forums before you try and do the copy. They have great explanations of everything you need to do to make it work. The only problem I had was that after I got it all copied over it wouldnt let me sign into my account and I had to do some undercover Darwinning to get it to work. But I have been running off my Lacie for about 5ish days now and haven't missed a beat. (Besides the fact that my laptop is chained to my desk now...No late night surfing in bed!) It really is like absolutely nothing has changed, because nothing has! In fact, my PB is actually running a little faster because the Lacie is 7200 rpm and my internal was 5400! Makes me really glad I got the 7200rpm Hitachi to replace the failing Toshiba.
(Also, I own no stock in Carbon Copy Cloner, it is just a great product! And free!)

Ideas or help needed for a simple, robust pluggable framework

Hi all,
Having written a fairly decent plugin engine, similar in concept to the Eclipse plugin engine, although at a more generic scale, I am looking for any possible ideas for a Java Swing framework that is built around the engine, with the concept of using a framework that is built on mostly plugins. My engine handles, or will soon handle, a number of features to make the engine robust enough, yet still easy enough, to use for just about any purpose.
The engine is pretty simple, although with a bit more work I feel will be overall a pretty robust and powerful plugin engine. Each plugin is made up of one or more "services". A plugin is a .jar file that contains a plugin-conf.xml config file, the classes that implement the Service interface, and any supporting classes. The "plugin" is really the package of one or more services and supporting classes. The engine will handle the ability to work with expanded dir structures as well, so that the build process doesn't have to create .jar files on every build of a plugin. The engine has built in support to load, unload and reload a plugin at runtime. This helps during development by allowing auto-reload of a plugin service without having to restart the app. The engine has the ability to "watch" URLs in a separate thread (still working on this), and at given intervals if a change occurs to any plugin, that plugin is reloaded. This is configurable on a per plugin basis in the config file.
Every plugin .jar file gets its own classloader instance. Because of the nature of a framework that may rely heavily on plugins, it will be very common to have plugin dependencies, where a plugin service may rely on one or more other plugin services. The dependencies are configured in the plugin-conf.xml file, and the engine resolves these when the plugin is loaded, automatically. Once all plugins have been loaded, an "init" call is made that then goes and resolves all plugin service dependencies, setting up the behind the scenes work to make sure any service can use any other service it defines to depend on. Another area is plugin versions. There will no doubt be a time when some sort of application may have legacy plugins, but also have newer plugins. For example, an application built on a "core" set of plugins, may eventually update the core plugins with newer versions. The engine allows the "old" plugins to exist and work while new versions of the same plugins may be loaded and working at the same time. This allows older plugins that depend on the old set of core plugins to work, while newer plugins that depend on the new core plugins may work also. Any plugin may depend on one or more services specified by specific versions, or a range of versions.
Plugin services can define to be created when first loaded, or lazy instantiated. Ideally, an application would opt for lazy instantiation until a plugin is needed. For example, a number of plugins may need to add menu items or buttons that would trigger its service. The plugin does not actually need to be created until the menu or button is clicked on. There is one BIG problem with how this engine works though. Unlike the Eclipse (and other) engines where the config file defines the menu item(s), buttons, etc in an xml sort of language, this engine is built for generic use, and therefore is not specific to menu items or buttons triggering a service instantiation. Therefore, a little "hack" is required. A specific plugin that is created when first loaded will be required to set up all the menu items for specific plugins, then handle the actionPerformed() call to instruct the engine to create the service. The next step would be for the plugin service to add its own handler to the specific menu item it depends on, and remove the "old" handler the startup plugin added to it to handle the initial click. Another thought just struck me though. Because the engine must use an XML parser to load every plugin-conf.xml file, it might be possible to "extend" the parsing routine, where by an extending class could be added to the engine to parse plugin-conf.xml files. First the plugin engines own routine would parse it. Then, the extending class could parse for any extra plugin-conf.xml info, such as menu item settings, and directly set up the menu items and handlers in this manner. I will probably include this ability directly in the engine soon anyway, so that nobody else has to do this, but this is one area I would appreciate some feedback on.
Anyway, so that is the jist of the engine. There is more to it under the hood, but that sums up a good part of it. Now, the pluggable framework, much like what the "shell" of eclipse, forte and so forth offer, is built around my engine to make it very easy to build Swing applications with a pluggable framework underneath. The idea is to package up a startup main class that is configurable, a number of useful plugins that other plugins could depend on, such as an Outlook layout, menuing, toolbars, drag/drop, history, undo/redo, macro record, open/save/search/find/replace dialogs, and so forth. This isn't just for an IDE though. The developer using the framework could deploy the basic app with the plugins of his/her choice, and add to it with his/her own plugins.
Soooo, after this long post, what I am getting at is if anyone would be interested in helping out with ideas, feedback, testing, core framework plugins, and so forth. At this time I am keeping the code closed, but will probably public domain it, open source it, or whatever. The finished framework should make it easy for anyone to quickly build useable applications, and if all goes well, I'd like to set up a site with a location for 3rd party plugins to be uploaded, for download, comments, etc. Being a web developer, I myself will probably work on some plugins for Web Services, web stress testing, and so forth. I have lots of ideas for useable plugins.
On that note, one application I am personally working on for my own use, is a simple yet possibly robust internet suite of apps. I want to incorporate FTP, Email, NewsGroup, and IRC/AOL IM/Yahoo IM/MSN IM/ICQ chat into a single app. Every aspect of it would be plugins. Frankly, I hate outlook, Eudora is alright, but I want to do some things with the email app. I also want a single IM/Chat app that can talk with all protocols (not an easy task, take a look at GAIM). Newsgroups are handy to work with for developers and others of interest, as is FTP. But even more so, being able to have all in one big application framework that allows them to share data between each other, work with one another, and so forth is appealing to me, and being written in Java it could potentially work on many platforms, giving some platforms a possible nice set of internet apps to use. Being able to send an email to a mailing list AND have it posted to specific newsgroups at the same time without having to copy/paste, open up separate applications and so forth has appeal. Directly emailing from any chat or newsgroup link without another app starting up is a little faster as well. Those are just "small" things that could prove to be very kewl in a complete internet app. Adding a web browser, well, I don't think I want to go that route. But if there is already a decent Java built web browser, it shouldn't be too hard to add it as a plugin.
So, if anyone is interested, by all means, drop a post to this thread, let me know of interest, feedback, ideas, point out bad things, and so forth. I appreciate all forms of communication.
Thanks.

Yes I do. I am using it now with my work related project.
I am in fact reworking the engine a bit now. I want to incorporate the notion of services (like OSGi) where by a plugin can register services. These services are "global" in scope, meaning any plugin may request the use of a service. However, services, unlike plugins, are not guaranteed to be available. Therefore, plugins using services must be coded to properly handle this possibility. As an example, imagine an email application using my engine. One plugin may provide the email gateway, including the javamail .jar library and provide the email service. Other plugins, such as the one that provides the functionality for the SEND button, would "use" this service. At runtime, when the send button was pressed it would ask the engine for the email service. If available, off goes the email. If not, it could pop up a dialog indicating some sort of message that the email service is not available.
I am at the VERY beginning stages in this direction so I'd love to have ideas, thoughts, suggestions as to how this might be implemented. I do believe though that it will provide for a more powerful engine. The nice thing is, while the engine will support static runtime plugins, it will also support dynamic services that can come and go during the runtime. The key is that plugins using services do not maintain references to them, but instead query the engine each time a plugin needs to use a service.
Static plugins are those that are guaranteed to be available or if not, any dependent plugin is not allowed to load. That is, if A depends on B and B is not able to be loaded, A is unloaded as well as it can't perform its job without B; it depends on B in some manner to complete its function. Imagine a plugin adding an option panel to the Preferences page only that the Preferences plugin is not loaded. It just can't work. However, with some work, there could be variations on this. That is, a plugin may provide a menu item as well as a preferences page. If the preference plugin is not available, then the plugin may simply still work via the menu item, but have no preferences panel available. This should be configurable via the plugin-conf.xml config file. However, as I have it now, using extension points and extensions like Eclipse does, it is also possible that if the Preferences plugin isn't loaded, it wont look for ANY extensions extending its extensino point, and therefore the plugins could all still run but there would simply be no preferences page. So, I am not entirely sure yet which way is best for this to work.
My engine, as it stands now, allows for separate classloader plugin loading, it automatically resolves all dependencies by creating the plugin registry each time the engine is started up. To speed up plugin loading, it maintains a plugins.xml file in the root dir that keeps track of each plugin that was loaded and its last timestamp. Plugins can be open directory files or jarred up into .PAR files (think .WAR or .EAR files). The engine can find .par or open-dir plugins in multiple locations (including URL locations for direct .par files). When it finds a .par file, it first decompresses the .par file to a plugin work directory. Every plugin must have a plugin-conf.xml in its root dir, and either a /classes dir where compiled classes are, or a .jar file in the root path of the plugin, where the /classes dir superscedes the .jar file. Alternatively, anything in a /lib dir is automatically picked up as part of the plugin classpath. So a plugin that wraps the xerces.jar file can simply place the xerces.jar in the /lib dir and automatically present the xerces library to all dependent plugins (which can import the xerces classes but not need to distribute the xerces.jar file if a plugin they depend on has it in its /lib dir). The "parent lookup" process goes only one parent level deep. That is, if plugin A depends on a class in a /lib/*.jar file in plugin B, then the engine will resolve the class (through delegation) of plugin B. But if A depends on B, B depends on C where plugin C's /lib/*.jar file contains a class A is looking to use, this will not work and A will throw a ClassNotFoundException. In other words, the parent lookup only goes as far as the classpath of all dependent plugins, not up the chain of all dependent plugins. Eclipse allows each plugin to "export" various classes, or packages, or entire .jar files and the lookup can go all the way up the chain if need be. I haven't yet found a big reason for supporting this, so I am not too concerned with that at this point. The engine does support reloadable plugins although I have not yet implemented it. Because each plugin information object is stored in a Map keyed on the plugins GUID (found in the plugin-conf.xml file), it is easy enough to load a new plugin (since they get their own classloader) and replace the object at the GUID key and now have a reloaded plugin. The harder part is properly notifying all dependent plugins of the reload and what to do with them. Therefore I have not quite yet implemented this feature although the first step can easily be done, so long as nobody minds the "remnants" of older plugins laying around and possibly not being garbage collected.
All of this works now, and I am using it. I do NOT have a generic UI framework just yet. I am working on that now. Eclipse has a very nice feature in that every plugin.xml file builds up the UI without any plugin code ever being created or ran. I am working on something like that now, although I am focussed more on the aspect of the engine at this point.
Two things keep me going. First, the shear fun of working on this and seeing it succeed, even if a little bit. Second, while I love the idea of Eclipse, OSGi and other engines, so far I have yet to find one that is very easy to write plugins for, is very small, and is "generic" enough for any use. Some may argue JBoss core, at 29K can do this. I don't know if it can. It is built around JMX and I don't know that I agree JMX is the "ultimate" core plugin engine for all types of apps. Not that mine is either, but I'd like to see what I am working on become that if possible. Currently, with an xml parser (www.xmlpull.org) added as part of the code, my engine is about 40K with debug info, maybe about 28K without. I expect it to grow a bit more with services, reloadable/unloadable code, and some other stuff. However, I am thinking it will still be around 50K in size and in my opinion, with an xml read/write parser (very fast one at that), extension/extensino points, services, dependencies, multiple versions of plugins (soon), load/unload/reload capabilities, .par management (unjar into work dir, download .par files from urls, etc) and open directory capabilities, inidividual classloaders, automatic dependency resolution, dynamic dependency resolution and possibly even more, I think what my engine offers (and will offer) is pretty cool in my book.
None the less, there is always room for improvement. One of the things I pride myself on is using as little code and keeping the code neat and easily readable, not to mention as non-archaic as possible, makes for an easily maintainable project.
So, having said all that, YES, the engine can be used as is right now. It does not reload plugins, but you can dynamically load plugins, handle dependency resolution, have a very fast xml read/write parser at your disposal for any plugin, and for the most part easily write plugins. That is all possible now. I should put the engine I have now up on my generic-plugin-engine sourceforge project one of these days, perhaps soon I will do that! While I have no problem handing out the code, I am currently the only committer and I don't have it loaded into CVS at this point. I would like to do so very soon.
So, if you are interested, by all means, let me know and I'll be happy to send you what I have, and love to have more help on the next version of this.

Shouldn't $2500 be a little faster?

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