Having our baby!!!

We were admitted last night and are continuing with the labor into today, February 17th. So far so good, the people here have been great and the labor is going as well as it could. Keeping fingers and toes crossed. Hopefully little Pink will be here soon!

Finally a home owner again!

Well, it has finally happened. After 6+ months in Mesa living with my parents in a retirement community, we have finally moved into our new home in north Phoenix.

Too busy to write any more. Still love my family, love my friends and love my job.

More to come...

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.