January 31, 2003

Looking for more Webwork insight

*oops* I Re-added my blog today, and it looks like every entry got put on todays list somehow...sorry

So, I just wanted to start out saying that the more I interact with Webwork the more I enjoy the ride and thanks to Epesh, Jason Carreira and Llucifer I have a much better understanding now, thanks you guys!

One of my questions, coming from struts ideas to webwork ideas, and looking through example code and such, is that it seems Actions have request data tied into them in other words there is no ActionForm/Javabean like seperation, and every data field has protected access instead of private,I'm used to having properties be private so I initially wrote them with that visibility, but that breaks the property stack? My terminology may be off, but I hope I'm getting my confusion across. Is this how its supposed to be? I kind of think the idea of the ActionForm and Action is good.

Actually what I really think would be great is if I didnt have to write any code to deal with request parameters at all or write beans for them,Let the framework take care of it. if I could just specify parameter names I'm expecting in views.properties, that would be cool! eg

login.action=LoginAction
login.sucess=index.jsp
login.failure=login.action
login.parameters=name,password

And then my action and view could just automagically pick up these values with getter/setters or property attribues provided by the framework.

January 25, 2003

Project Prometheus: LETS DO IT!

So I heard that the President is thinking about announcing and going forward with a plan for Nuclear propelled space travel to Mars, and I also heard that in order for it to happen, there had to be a good deal of public support for it. In fact on Coast to Coast last night Richard C. Hoagland said it might come down the number of Emails recieved over this weekend. So I sent out a little email to president@whitehouse.gov and I encourage you to do the same, make sure to have the subject be "Project Prometheus" or some such variant. Let him know we want to go.

Mr. President,
I fully support project Prometheus and the use of nuclear propulsion in space to go to Mars. Please go forward with this mission for our country, and planet.

Regards,
-Andre Mermegas

How Does WebWork Do?

Heya, I've been going through struts for a while and I was curious about a few things that I didnt see in WebWork but are probably there somewhere, hopefully one of you guys can enlighten me.

Here is my shortlist of initial queries:

1. Is there a dynamic tempating framework similiar to Tiles? Whats the best practice used by most WW guys?
   
2. Is there a Valididator engine, other than rolling your own doValidation method? Do you guys use the Commons Validator?
   
3. Is there a html taglib engine similiar to struts-html ?
   

January 22, 2003

re: hibernate kickstart

So,I hear hibernate is a pretty neat persistance mechanism, I've used EJB's in the past, but usually I'm doing straight up JDBC stuff. I've been meaning to look into hibernate for a while, it seems to have a pretty good buzz out there, and then I saw Glen's hibernate kickstart and said woot, perfect! Worked my way through it and persisted my first object, thanks Glen for a nice contribution =) I think I'm on my way.

January 18, 2003

Together is dead, long live Together!?

Well if it werent official before, I just checked out togethersoft.com and it now has Borland written all over it, seems everything must be final now $82.5 million in cash and 9,050,000 shares of Borland common stock later. Wonder how it will affect togethersoft customers. I personally use IDEA for development and dont think I could ever happily use another product, but I always thought Together was kinda cool. I don't think that you can really compare IDEA with it though. I wouldnt really classify Together as an "IDE" per se, It's more a "UML/Coding/Designing Experience". Where as IDEA is like having your own personal Java fairy dancing through your code, anticipating your every thought and keystroke.

As far as JBuilder goes, personally I think its crap, and its overpriced warmed over crap at that. Here's my prediction, pain.I think Borland is gonna dump it and Together, drop support for websphere studio plugin after all IBM is acquiring Rational, and create they're own new JBuilder based on Eclipse with Together built into it as a new flagship product JBuilder X. Then there will be 2 overpriced Eclipse based products! how lucky for us Java developers.

January 14, 2003

Struts: I like it.

So far, I'm still very new to it and some of what I say is probably wrong.

But the more I read Struts In Action the more I like it. I think the idea of ActionServlet being this black box that sort of delegates to the appropriate Action based on the struts-config entries is pretty cool, not being compiled in it seems like a pretty spiffy way to use the Command pattern. ActionForms seem good, I like that they do the processing parts of picking through the request/session value pairs for you.

DynaActionForms in struts 1.1 seems like a pretty good idea as well, for generic form data,but I think they would be even cooler if somehow they just picked through all the name value pairs created and dynamically made the bean type object based on the parameters available w/o any configuration at all.
*edit* this is possible with mapped forms, cool.

I've read a few people say that there is too much API to get a simple app moving, but I dont really think its so bad. You have basicly 4 things, The Action,ActionForm, struts-config.xml and possibly the application.properties to code or write out per action. And if you just have a display with no control structure you can setup a forwarding in the struts-config.

It seems to me that the struts-config and application.properties can save a lot of time allowing you to dynamically change stuff without re-compiling and re-deploying. It seems like a worthwhile investment in time to me.

As far as the the taglibs go, I'm still wading through them.I think some of the naming may be a little odd at first look, but I think a lot of them will be deprecated in favor of JSTL, which seems like a smart thing. The struts-config also has some weird naming conventions, why in a actionmapping the actionForm is labeled name, I'll never understand. It seems like they wanted to keep a similiar naming to using/creating taglibs, why?

These are my fairly immature thoughts so far, as I dont have a full grasp on the framework yet.

January 11, 2003

Soundwaves are pretty!

So I was peaking through all those nifty manilla blog themes and I saw this one by Bryan Bell and said damn that is pretty spiffy. So I decided to see how hard it would be to template over to moveable type which is what I blog with. The result is what you see here. I think it worked out pretty good, though I cant seem to figure out where the template is for search results, oh well.

Good Reads

Ala Good Eats one of my favorite shows on the food network.

Am I the only one who can leave food tv running in the background 24 hours a day? I can't get enough.Every show is good and of course everyone loves Iron Chef I think I'm going crazy.

So, I've kind of been going back and forth between a few new books recently, and I'm hoping to make some more headway this weekend.