Looking at IntelliJ - not the best start...

In a recent blog post, I wrote that IntelliJ IDEA is a popular choice for Scala developers. I wanted to try for myself, but had no luck - just as many others. While there are people who successfully code in Scala using IDEA 12, the most recent version 14 seems to have major problems in this regard. The bug I encountered was this one - unfortunately a show stopper; I can't even properly add the Scala SDK to IntelliJ. Others, who probably upgraded their install from a previous version of IDEA, seem to come a little further, and then run into other problems, like Gradle integration - which I want as well.

So, no trying IntelliJ with Scala for now. I still want to give it a try, however. With Laterna being Scala-only now, it will stay with Eclipse for a while though.

I think I'll try it with Android, as the official IDE for Android was recently migrated from Eclipse to IntelliJ. So it can't be just bad ;)

Handling Arrays in web services

I'm currently working on an assignment to implement a simple web service, and started using the following tutorial: http://www.theserverside.de/webservice-in-java/ (German). I'm not sure if that's a general problem, but the auto-generated WSDL specification, and java's wsimport code generator handle arrays... strangely. So here is my ArrayHelper class. I was searching for something along its lines, but found nothing.

The problem: The code generator generates classes like StringArrayArray instead of using java String[][] objects. A StringArrayArray object is merely a wrapper around a List<StringArray>, and so on.

The solution: Use reflection to determine what type of wrapper you have to deal with (check the generic parameter of the list) and recursively convert the wrapped lists into real arrays.

The file: is free to use and modify, comes without any kind of warranty, and is available here. It was actually tested with String[][]; I'd strongly suggest testing with primitive types before using it. please leave comments if any problems ocurr. The code is nearly 130 lines in total, 70 lines being comments (recursion, you know).

Delaying Laterna Magica: Graduation Project

School has totally got me now. We spent last week in Carinthia and focused completely on the project. It was a great experience and we laid much of the foundation work. Today, we got even more long-term assignments, and my impression is that the difference to our graduation project is not the amount of work, but that the teachers don't give us as much time...

Okay, enough of that. What I really want to tell today is two things. Bad news are always first, so let's get it out of the way: I won't have much (if any) time to work on Laterna Magica in the near future.
And the reason is already the good news: I have a veeery interesting graduation project together with 3 colleagues: We're building and programming a robot to attend a robot competition in the USA.

Okay, to make my excitement clear, let's break this down:
We're building a robot
I think this is pretty clear. The competition consists of a few challenges, and the robot has to reflect these hardware-wise to show optimal performance. The challenges are presented at the end of October; an employee of the competiton's organization visits us personally, because we'd be the first team from Europe to attend.
We're programming a robot
This is probably the most interesting part of it. Our project is sponsored by TU Wien, Vienna's technical university, and our job is not just to program the robot, but to do so using a rule- and agent-based artificial intelligence.

• Rule-based is basically a programming approach such as imperative or functional. It means to define a program in terms of condition-reaction pairs. It is supported by a framework which checks the conditions and execites the appropriate actions. While this might not seem spectacular, think about it: have you ever written or seen a program using this approach? Note that this is not another name for an event system; events also result in a reaction, but they only allow for reactions on one-time events (if some event happens), not to states (if some condition holds).
  Rule-based systems are good for modelling intelligent behavior. A human reacts to events because of the state-changes they cause, not the events themselves: If a window falls open, you close it because it's cold or loud outside, not because the window has opened.
• Agent is just another word for actor. Remember how I wrote about the downloader; it's essentially the same. The only difference is that all this is now integrated into a rule system, which also changes the way how the agents exchange messages. Besides that, the concept of parallel processing stays. In our case, the focus lies on the independence of the actors to cooperatively reach a solution for a problem, and not on simpler multithreading by getting away from traditional synchronization.
• Artificial intelligence always sounds good, but what does it really mean? Our parent project at TU Wien has a very specific goal: To build cooperative robots capable of disassembling Lego models. We won't get anywhere near disassembly, but the cooperation is still there, just in the software though. In the end, an artificial intelligence is always task-oriented, and the border where intelligence begins is not well-defined. The question is very interesting, but more philosiphical than technical, so maybe in a later post.

...to attend a robot competition in the USA
This is a goal we all really want to reach, but if we do will depend on how we perform. Our project is definitely complex, so if it doesn't work out too well, we won't go. I'm positive about it, though.
The competition we would attend is BotBall, organized by the KISS Institute of Practical Robotics, and we have the honor to be invited directly to the final "Global Conference of Educational Robotics", without attending any of the qualification tournaments. (I hope you can read from all this how proud I am^^)

So the last point to check for today is: This is definitely good news for me, but how is it for you? Well, I'll write about it, of course. Some things might be off-topic in terms of Magic, but artificial intelligence is definitely in, right? Be sure to check back in a few weeks, there are definitely interesting things to come!