February 18, 2003

Imagine if Apple..

Hadn't killed the clone market, and let the natural course of a free market continue. We might see the $1500 apple entry level machine more in line with the $700 PC one.

oh well. I'm quite delighted with win xp, and I can always get the aqua look thanks to this guy.

February 17, 2003

This blizzard is crazy.

For all you bloggers in the north east of the US, you know what I'm talking about. Here in NJ, we got about 2 feet of snow, and its still coming down. So much for global warming making my winters easier. Hello shovel, my old friend.

February 15, 2003

Finished the StoreFront WebWork Port

Ok, So I finished up most of the loose ends and tossed the project onto sourceforge for fun, you can go and grab it on there. Its been great,learned a bunch doing it. There is probably some more work to do but its as complete as the Struts version I believe.

I might make a velocity version too, could be a good way for me to get up to speed on that.

February 13, 2003

WebWork StoreFront App

So yesterday I decided it would be a jolly good time to try and port the Struts StoreFront application wars and src here to WebWork. This is an example app from the oreilly Struts book and it seemed like it would be a good excercise for myself, and also a little addition to the WebWork community.The next fun thing to do, would be to port the JSP's to Velocity templates, that is probably next.

So far so good, I've got a lot of it done and it wasnt terribly hard. There is still some stuff that needs to be sorted to make sure I've stamped out all the Struts bits, but I think I've got all the taglibs and actions ported correctly, and it seems to be running smoothly. I still have a lot of tidying up to do though, but the main functionality seems complete.

I think it might offer some more insight to people playing around with both frameworks if they can view the same app with the same architecture implemented both ways.

I'm not sure if I should toss it on sourceforge or something for fun but in any event I'll be putting it out for general consumption in a day or two =D

February 10, 2003

re: WebWork: aaargh!

If you wanna see a simple semi blank, semi skeleton type app, I put a simple war together last week here.

Hope it helps, it should be noted, I'm still learning webwork myself so some of my info may be incorrect, but I think its mostly harmless.

I'm Amiga OS =)

I guess, thats cool, right?

Which OS are You?

February 09, 2003

Finally easy win xp services

Finally I can set up my own services on windows, easily. The guys at firedaemon have made my life a lot happier. One of the only things I miss from my old linux on the desktop days, is how easy it was to hack up my own daemons.

The only catch, its not free, well its free for up to one service, but to have more than one service you have to buy the professinal version. oh well.

February 03, 2003

How do you like your Actions?

So, I've been doing research on struts and webwork. I started with struts because there seemed like there was more info on it, read the manning book, enjoyed it thoroughly now have delved into webwork. I must say that I like them both, though at this point if I had to choose, I'd probably go with webwork just because it seems a little more open ended and cleaner to use.

Along the way during my education, I came across two different Action models. Struts uses the Action/ActionForm mindset for separating data from Action and thats it. Which seemed like a good thing to me at first, I thought well why should the parameter data be tied into the action that uses it, its a good separation. Its kind of ugly seeing all that getter/setter in an Action that supposed to do logic.

Webwork allows you to do it 2 ways,but most of their examples tie data into the Action, theyre mindset being that the Action is basicly just a Javabean with an execute method, give or take for simplicitys sake. They also allow you to separate the data using a javabean via the Beanutils class and reflection which yields a result similiar to Struts' Action model.

So the more I think about it the more I wonder, which is the best way. Does anybody have any compelling arguments as to which they prefer? Or maybe they mix it up, depending upon the use of the data. I'm open to suggestion at this point but one situation which comes to mind that points to separation is the following:

If I wanted to have my Action take a bunch of user info from a form for later use during the session, and I had my data tied directly into the Action how would you go about putting that data in a beanlike way onto the session?

As per my current understanding, you'd have to populate a bean first,if you do that you may as well have started out with the separation,and toss the bean into the session, that was already populated. Unless there was some way to reference a previous Action's data on the property stack? like:

February 01, 2003

Godspeed, Columbia STS-107

A sad day in the history of space flight, but in context tragedy and exploration go hand in hand, as witnessed throughout history. If you embrace the idea of exploration you also must embrace the tragedy that can and will accompany such activities.

These seven brave individuals were explorers of this time. My only hope is that this tragedy does not lead to an even more weakened NASA than currently stands.

Look at their faces, and think of them the next time you stare into the night sky.