Hi blog, its me Jay

It has been quite awhile since we last spoke. Life has a way of being busy, when you have a one year old, you are selling a house, working at a new job, searching for homes in another state and preparing to move 1500 miles away.

With that said, lets get back to it. Where was I.... oh yes, Tapestry.

I am currently trying to figure out how to pop-up a window after a form submission. Sounds easy enough but its implementation is proving to be very elusive.

Since our last chat many positive things have been accomplished. We have confluence and jira installed and integrated. The dev team is slowly getting acclimated to making jira and confluence a part of their daily processes. We have stand-up meetings every morning. We have a new colo of servers, consisting of 10 new machines, dedicated to serving pixels. We recently got approval to treat the conversion of our existing project to a maven project, as a production task rather then a dev task. Thats a big win and will be the trailblazer for future requests.

All in all I still like my job. Its a good company with good people. It has the typical small-company issues but also the typical entrepreneurial spirit.

I will try to write more often, I promise.

Page Conversions - Tapestry

The past few days I've been working on converting existing tapestry pages. The conversion includes basic look and feel of the the html and some behind the scenes changes to how data is handled.

At this point I don't know if its Tapestry's fault or our own, but it seems like we're standing on our heads. I'm hoping that it is us, cause if its not I'm going to have to push hard to remove tapestry from this project.

Time will tell...

Is Enterprise Java dead?

I was unable to attend Java One this year and maybe its a good thing. After conversations with some respected colleagues who did attend the conference, it appears that enterprise java as we know it, is dead.

So what is taking its place? Clouds. We'll see where this takes us...

IDE auto-complete rant

You know what annoys me, the fact that IDEs such as NetBeans and Eclipse have wonderful auto-complete capabilities that are almost perfect.

For example, in NetBeans you can type sout and hit tab and it will produce System.out.println(""); for you (sysout in Eclipse). However, if you type System.out. it will bring up all the methods available for the "out" portion of that command. However it does not put a ';' at the end. The IDE should be smart enough to know that println() is a void method that can have no other operation after it, and insert the ";" for you. There are many different ways to apply logic to determine this but I won't go into that here. Just wanted to rant about it for a bit.

Show and Tell

Today I discussed setting up a "show and tell" within development. This is meant to dedicated a portion of time for new technology discovery and discussion. We've agreed to have these discussions on every other Friday. Anything technology related is game. I hope to sneak in sessions on NetBeans, Glassfish, Maven and Hudson sooner rather then later.

I love these types of round table open-floor discussions. However their success depends largely on those involved. If the developers are not engaged and excited about it, it will not last. Thankfully, the developers total in 3 people, so we shouldn't have many problems.

SQL and Fusion Charts

My first "coding" task for FetchBack deals with SQL, php and fusion charts. The most difficult part is getting to know the FB data. Both what it means and where it lives. From what I've seen of fusion charts so far, it looks like a real nice charting solution.

Cron and php

Over the next few days I will be learning about the worlds of cron and php scripting. Cron works in a style very different from my brain so this will be an interesting adventure. php has never made it onto my radar other then water-cooler speak, so diving into existing php scripts and attempting to make them more efficient, could prove to be interesting as well. As stated in my previous blog posting. Learning new things is always good. However, can the same be said about learning new old things? Hmmmm.

But for tonight, I'm back in my comfy EJB3 world debugging some live code that is hiccuping along the way. It appears that one piece of functionality works locally and in the dev test environment but fails in production. Don't you just love environment issues. Apparently the client doesn't care that it "works on my machine". How rude!

Tapestry

Today I learn tapestry. From a glimpse it looks like a lot of work. I'm coming from years of working in a Glassfish/EJB3/JPA stack. I've had dates with Spring/Hibernate projects as well that tie together using Spring MVC. Learning new things is a fun part of my industry, gives me the ability to debate intelligently for/against certain tools and methodologies.

With that said, apache tapestry here I come...

UNIX

I'm learning more of the guts of UNIX today. I've known the commands in the past but not the history. Time to learn about the various flavors of UNIX, the shells and such.

Call me a nerd but this stuff is interesting!

Did another mysql dump/load today and am setting up tomcat. Working on getting my new company's application running locally. Slowly but surely...

Eclipse - Ant and such

I'm back into the world of Eclipse and Ant today. How much will I miss Netbeans, Maven and Archiva by the end of the day? Time will tell.

I also need to complete the move of our subversion repository from a machine in Louisville to a box in Tempe. After that I'll be installing Confluence somewhere, destination unknown.

Lots going on

Today I'm working on a few things. Getting up close and personal with Subversion and it's 'move' capabilities. Downloading and perusing my new employer's code base, and researching a few things: blog software, CMS solutions, Jameleon and JMeter.

This is why I love my job, there is always more to learn.

FetchBack

Today I became an employee at FetchBack. I'm very excited.
www.fetchback.com

PHP: Sink or Swim

Today I'm taking my first real dive into PHP. I've dipped my toe in before but have never put on the wet suit. O'Reilly's Programming PHP will be my instructor. I'd imagine google will provide some tips along the way as well.

Can an OO man come to terms with a structured scripting language? Or will I run out of air along the reef? Ships ahoy!

Tuesday, April 28th

I'm working with portlets deployed to glassfish, running inside of Liferay 5.2.2. The portlets are written using html, jsp and jstl. I'm wishing I had a framework such as JSF for component definition. Unfortunately the JSF lifecycle has not proven to play nice with the portlet lifecycle. So for now, I've got component-specific code duplicated in multiple portlets. Make it work, make it right, make it fast. I'm on step one. At some point I'd like to introduce AJAX into the mix.

I'm also working with BPEL/JBI, utilizing the LDAP and J2EE binding components. The more I work with BPEL, the more impressive it is. However it is only as powerful as the binding components that exist. Last year I drudged through the JDBC bc but so far the LDAP and J2EE bcs seem fairly mature.

My First Post

This is the first post in my newly created blog. I usually blog in family-oriented and inspired blogs, as a means to share news, photos and life. With the advent of Twitter and Facebook, I've found my family blogs to be... quite.

So I've started this blog to track my professional experiences and thoughts as my career progresses. I talked with the CTO of FetchBack today and he turned me on to the idea of using blog history as professional promotion. I like the idea, so with out further ado...