Ghetto Java

Well, not exactly but we are moving to a new server. Hopefully some of ya’ll that been syndicatin’ my blog will step up and gimme some of my archives.

Peace

The JSF framework, Shale created by Tomcat and Struts founding father, Craig McClanahan will begin merging assets of the project into the Apache Myfaces project. It was once considered to be the natural (or unatural depending on what side of the JSF divide you were on) successor to to the venerable Struts Web Application Framework. After some controversy on the future of Struts 2.0 (see Struts in Flux) it became its own top level Apache project. Now, with some of the hype fading from JSF and competition from the hot new JSF/EJB3 framework, Jboss Seam, activity on the Shale project has dropped dramatically. Well, I’m wishing everyone good luck on the merger and hoping that we see some great things coming out of MyFaces in the future.
Laterz
GJ

With all the hoopla over the new Seam 2.0 CR2 release over at Jboss, it was something else that got me excited. Seam is now mavenized! It’s kind of funny because the Hiberate Posse has never been big on Maven. But like me, many are starting to see the light in having a standard for project structure. I will be trying out Seam this weekend, hoping that the seam-gen stuff is usable now.
Peace,

GJ

Am I the only one that is excited about the launch of Netbeans.tv? I love the concept and I hope the idea catches on in the development community. Parleys.com has been putting out some excellent videos an podcasts for a while now, even with their non-catchy domain name.. Looks like the “video” web is finally coming to fruition. Both sites make nice targets to point newer developers at to learn popular java concepts at their own pace. I don’t know about you but I’m tired of buying java books that no one reads. I’m currently looking at this one myself. If anyone knows of any other video dev sites, please let me know.
Laterz,
GJ

Remember the days when Wikis were the next great open collaboration tool? They were supposed to shepherd in the long promised era of open collaborative knowledge sharing. Wikis around the Net loudly proclaimed “You can edit this page!” A wikis’ commumity would “police themselves”and the karmic goodness of the Open Collaboration would keep evil spammers at bay. Of course they had previously made a mess of smtp, forums and bulletin boards. In 2007, it’s really hard to find an open Wiki. Wikipedia had learned the lessons of the open wiki love fest. Want to edit an Apache Software Foundation Confluence wiki? You better have a SLA on file with ASF, Mofo. Into this enviroment, I make a half-@ssed attempt to set up a JSPWiki webapp. It was supposed to be a tutorial wiki for GhettoJava.I installed and promptly forgot about it over a year ago. Don’t know what inspired me to check on it a few weeks back but when I did: Whoa Nelly! Girls Girls Girls! It was incredible. I had images, movies and lots of flashy text from all the various pr0n sub-genres. Apparently there must be a worm or something going around seeking out the standard wiki urls and attempting to overwrite them with … pr0n. I’ll admit that when I first saw it I wasn’t in a big hurry to delete it the thing, it was as if someone had giving a big free online stash. I quickly snapped out of my daze when I realized that all the images and links must be going somewhere. Anything I clicked on would be an alert to the spammer mothership that another sucker Wiki had been activated on The Node. I don’t have a lot of time for bs so I ended up doing rm -rf /pathto/JSPWiki. Anywayz, I managed to turn the tables somewhat and have since been making a little loot off it. What about you fellahs and ladies? Anyone else’s Wiki got hit like mine?
Laterz,
GJ

A few weeks ago, I decided to give Jboss Seam a spin to see if I could RAD myself an application for a Playstation 3 moonlighting challenge I was doing. I was relying on Seam’s “Sean-Gen” tool to knock this one out of the park for me. It didn’t. Buying the Seam book by Yuan, becoming a permanent fixture in #seam and posting on the Seam forum was all for nothing. The problem may have been that I didn’t use the stable 1.2.x version but instead jumped right in to the latest beta 1 release of Seam 2.0. I like shiny new sh**, sue me.

There were a lot of changes between 1.x and 2.x making the version number change a valid one. In theory I was supposed to be a few commands to with their command line tool (seam setup, seam new-project, seam generate-entities, seam explode) to get up and running with a CRUD app in no time. I guess I was kind of hoping to get away with setting up the initial app without knowing much about JSF and EJB3. Even though I got many errors and ultimately, the app never ran correctly, I will say that Seam does do an excellent job of abstracting the JSF plumbing. It does help, however, if one is very familiar with the EJB3 spec and the way that Jboss implements it.I learned a lot about that stuff, so it was not a total loss.

Though in it’s current form, Seam-Gen was not able to help me meet my RAD challenge, I will try out the next few releases to see if I can build a CRUD app from an existing database as one is supposed to be able to do in Ruby on Rails. Which, for some reason, I still refuse to do.

Anywayz,

GJ

Not to be outdone by IntelliJ IDEA with it’s very cool Dilbert plugin, Netbeans now has it’s own Dilbert strip plugin. I can not tell you how many times that little strip in IDEA has lightened my mood while as I am coding. That plugin has saved lives, kid.
Enjoy,
GJ

Like I was saying in my last post, the main reason that I had not made the full switch to IDEA 7.0 milestone was because of missing plugins that I use or will be using a lot in the future. Well I checked just now and I see 3 plugins that I’ve been looking for.

SoapUI plugin
Dilbert Daily Strip (essential)
IntelliFX

The first 2 were previously IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 only, I’m glad they have been ported to 7.0. The JavaFX one is new and came surprisingly close on the heals of the Netbeans 6.0 one. Since 7.0 has been running more like a release than a beta. I feel very comfortable now switching over.Hmm, now I just have to figure out a way to pay for thing in December.
Laterz
GJ

I wanted to choose between IDEA and Netbeans but I couldn’t. They both have great features that I need in my life right now. On the IntelliJ IDEA side, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between version 6 and the newest 7.0 milestone release. The only reason I haven’t completely switched is that 7.0 (codenamed Selena) is missing some of the 6.0 plugins that I really need (like SoapUI). 7.0 is a bigger leap forward in features than 5.x to 6.x was. So if you held off on getting 6, you might want to take a look at 7. On the Netbeans side, I’ve been using Netbeans 6.0M10 and I can finally stop b**tching about buggy milestones. Rather than piling on the latest gadgets, this release was all about improving the editor. They seemed to have taken a lot of hints from the way intelliJ IDEA editors work. The refactoring menu and some of the keyboard intentions are now very similar to IDEA. Hell, it’s no secret that Netbeans sees IDEA as the model for editing and refactoring. It’s been said often enough on the Java Posse. I wonder how the Ietbrains INtelliJ team feels about that? IDEA is still the best IDE for code writing but Netbeans 6.0 M10 shows that the gap is closing. Netbeans has always seemed to be the reference implementation of JEE 5 tooling in my opnion. Since they are supported by Sun directly, they get all the hot features first. So as I play with my first Jboss Seam apps, it’s Netbeans that I turn to. So for now I keep both IDEs open on different virtual desktops.
Laterz
GJ

InfoQ has been putting out some cool articles lately and this one slipped under my radar: Using Java to Crack Office 2007

"Without anything more complicated than the native
 JDK itself-in other words, no third-party libraries are
 necessary-a Java application can now read and write any Office 2007
 document, because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than
 ZIP files of XML documents."