Annotations and Maven

Thinking a lot about annotations and maven.... I love and hate Java annotations. I love them because you can put metadata and behavior hints on classes, fields, methods, and parameters.

I hate them because it ties you to framework which might have 20 mb of dependencies that you may decide not to use one day.

Compile time dependencies are great if you are the standard not so great if you are depending on some random project on github or googlecode which depends on different versions of jars you need.



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Location:Hobert St,Castro Valley,United States

JavaServer[tm] Faces Technology - Download

JavaServer[tm] Faces Technology - Download

Big Demo: Okay so I hit some milestones in the project. Today was the day to demo the product (in progress) to the customer. I give a few test runs before the big meeting. Everything works. During the meeting..... I run the demo (the most important part works), then another feature breaks with a problem I have never seen before. I run it again later, and can not reproduce the problem. I showed the customer the feature (working). I hate demos. The chance of something going wrong during a demo is so much higher than when not doing a demo. Why? Oh well. It is a work in progress.

JRoller seems to be down... I am back to using blogger.

Moved to JRoller

JRoller

This blog has moved to JRoller. I am going to keep this blog site for a while. But for the latest and greatest blog stuff go to my JRoller account.

SourceBeat - Open Source Documentation for Eclipse, Tomcat, Struts, Apache, Perl and more...

SourceBeat - Open Source Documentation for Eclipse, Tomcat, Struts, Apache, Perl and more...

Hey... I got mentioned on this site! Free plug for me.

"SourceBeat is the first publisher to create always updated open source technology books, written by expert authors such as James Goodwill, Rick Hightower, Bill Dudney, and many others. Utilizing our patent-pending "OpenBook™” process, you are always sure of getting the best information regarding the open source topic."

I tried JRoller out.

Hmmmm.....

I may switch.

I just bought four books:

JUnit in Action written by Ted Husted and Vincent Massol.

XDoclet in Action by Rickard Oberg, Craig Wall, and Norman Richards.

Expert One-on-one J2EE design and Development by Rod Johnson. There are no books on Spring yet, but I heard much of the Stuff that is in Spring is covered in this book.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler.

I almost bought Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins by Erich Gamma, Kent Beck, but I went way passed my monthly book allowance already.


I think I have every book Kent Beck has written. I like his writing style, and his message. It is on my wish list.

I am currently writing a book. I've written several hundred pages so far. In fact, I need to get back to my writing now. L8er

TheServerSide.com - Kito Mann Interview

TheServerSide.com - Kito Mann Interview

Kito is the Man!

Good interview. I will be buying his book.

between the lines: For whom do those e-bells toll? Ask promoOrder

between the lines: For whom do those e-bells toll? Ask promoOrder: "'The reason I think eBlox will succeed is we're self-funded,' says CEO Brent Buford. 'We don't have those outside investors telling us we have to perform a certain way. In the case of PromoFuel, we hit our stride right when the economy went down the tank.'"

My old boss tells it like it is. Venture Capital stinks. You don't want somebody who made their money seeling coin operated laundry machines how to run your software company.

Software Development Conference and Expo West 2004

Software Development Conference and Expo West 2004

I'll be speaking at SD West on extending Struts and J2EE development with Ant.

Extending Struts
Description: Okay you think you have mastered Struts, but you wish it could just do this one special thing? This session shows you how to go beyond the Struts basics to extend the framework to fit you needs. Struts was designed to be extensible. Learn how to extend it. Advance Struts topics about extending the framework using Struts plugins, and extending the Action Servlet, Custom Actions, the RequestProcessor, and more. This is an advanced topic that assumes previous knowledge of Struts.


J2EE Development with XDoclet and Ant

Time/Date: Friday (March 19, 2004) 10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Track: Java Programming
Format: Class
Level: Intermediate/Advanced
Description: This class covers developing J2EE components with XDoclet. XDoclet can drastically speed J2EE development by generating component support files by embedding meta data in what looks like JavaDoc tags of the component implementation. This class will also demonstrate developing Custom Tags, Entity Beans, Session Beans, and Struts Actions with the assistance of XDoclet combined with Ant.

Erik Hatcher - Blog

Thanks Erik (Erik Hatcher - Blog). Erik is always so way ahead of the curve. I have to check what technology he is working with so I know what technology I will be working with in 6 months. It was fun working with Erik at eBlox.

logic:present and logic:notPresent good for model 2 but use JSTL instead

The and tags check to see if headers, request parameters, cookies, JavaBeans or JavaBean properties are present and not equal to null. You can specify the string which can be a cookie, header, request parameter or bean property by using the attributes cookie, header, parameter, or name & property. Additionally you can check to see if the current users is in a certain role using the roles attribute (this integrates with the J2EE security model).

TIP: both the and fits really well in a Model 2/MVC architecture. You can allow the controller, i.e., your actions, to decide which objects to map into scope based on executing business rules of your application model. The JSP page, which should have very little logic in it, will just check to see if an object is in scope and if it is in scope then it displays the object. This way if the underlying business-rules of the model changes, it does not affect the JSP code. The JSP never knows why it's displaying object just if that object is present then it should display that object. It's up to the controller to decide which objects to map into scope after executing business rules on the model.


You can do the same thing as the logic:present and logic:notPresent tags using JSTL. New projects should use the JSTL equivalent.

EL would be foo!=null
or not empty foo

Best Struts Course, Struts Training, Struts Consulting

A Sleepless Night in Tucson

A Sleepless Night in Tucson

I read my blog entry from last night, and I realize it had a little too much bile in it.

Amazon.com: Books: Professional Jakarta Struts

Amazon.com: Books: Professional Jakarta Struts:

Sooyoung Park write a review as follows.....

"I have two gripes with this book. First, it's really a shame that the authors didn't take the time to include information about Unix/Linux installation and configuation since the vast majority of us will be deploying on those platforms, if not developing on them outright.

Any self-respecting Linux/Java developer can translate instructions from Windows/DOS into Linux, if not they should not be using Linux. We also don't have instructions for AIX, Solarix and HP-UX.

Secondly, the book is a little behind the curve regarding Struts 1.1. For example, the use of Struts tag libraries has been considerably simplified and the file upload example on page 391 uses the deprecated FormFile class instead of Jakarta FileUpload. It's only natural for APIs to change, but if you plan on buying this book, be prepared to spend some additional time on the Jakarta web site. "

Is not! Check out the javadocs from the nightly build for FormFile. It is not deprecated. The book does not cover Jakarta FileUpload directly as it is used under the covers by Struts. Look a little further and you will find CommonsMultipartRequestHandler.CommonsFormFile. This class implements the Struts FormFile interface by wrapping the Commons FileUpload FileItem interface.

So in short.... You don't know what you are talking about. Spend some time on the Jakarta web site before you criticize me for not spending time on the Jakarata web site.

Amazon.com reviews are a farce.

Amazon.com reviews are a farce.

Who says there is no drama in our industry?

I've been reading WSI profile spec. until my brain started bleeding, when I found the above link in an unrelated track of thinking. If you like controversy, and heated debated then you will love the above.

I hardly every buy books based on their Amazon review. I may be old fashioned but I usually go to the book store and read chapters from the book first. I spend at least an hour reading through a book before I buy it. Unless, it is the only book on the topic.

I got my first endorsement on www.linkedin.com

I got my first endorsement on www.linkedin.com

"I worked with Rick at eBlox - he literally saved the company from a sure death and he documented much of our experiences in the fantastic Java Tools for Extreme Programming book. Rick is a jack of all trades, and master of most - I wish he was on my team now!" -- Erik Hatcher

If you are going to get an endorsement..... getting one from Erik Hatcher is a good thing. Erik Hatcher is the Ant, Struts, and WebDevelopment guru.

I dig linkedin.

Struts book doing well: Professional Struts

For a while the first edition of our Struts book was outselling the second edition. It sure did not help that the first edition was under a Wiley imprint and the second edition was under a Wrox imprint, and they changed the name of the book. My understanding is that Wiley bought the rights to Wrox name and their best selling books when Wrox went out of business. Now the book is third on Amazon (out of all Struts books), which is not too bad considering the Orielly's book and Ted Husted's book are number 1 and 2. For a while, the book was second on bookpool right after the Orielly book, which blows my mind. Now the book is no longer second on book pool, it is has dropped. This could be because bookpool is out of stock! Come on. You may wonder why I care. Mainly, if I am going to spend time writing a book, I want people to read it. Perhaps this is vain. The biggest complaint about the book seems to be that it does not cover Linux installation. Hey, if you can not translate the Windows instructions to Linux instruction in your head, then you probably should not be using Linux. We expect more from Java/Linux developers.

The Artful Blogger: Struts jobs in London... Struts jobs in the US.

The Artful Blogger: Struts jobs in London

Hmmmm.... this made me think.... what about the US?

I checked Dice....

370 Struts jobs in Dice.

1 WebWork job in Dice. (0 for WebWork2)

The momentum still seems to be behind Struts. I think Struts and JSF is the ticket (Struts + JSF). Hmmmm....

Struts vs. WebWork

Jason Carreira

Another WebWork vs. Struts comparison.

Struts has great IDE support. WebWork has some very cool features, but none that cannot be added to Struts. There are parts of WebWork I really like, but everywhere I go, the client is using Struts. Hmmmmm.....

Kris Thompson's Weblog

Kris Thompson's Weblog

WebWork vs. Struts comparison.