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...