Jakub Korab

I just discovered an unreal Firefox extension today - StumbleUpon. Takes you to random pages visited by likeminded people based on some preferences and continued learning of what you do and don’t like (registered by clicking the “I like it” and “Not-for-me” buttons in its toolbar). Very cool.

So where does this marvel of technology take me? Steve, don’t eat it!

Greece was the best holiday ever! The food, the music, the coffee (I’ve stopped having lattes and switched to black. Ahh, bitter, bitter caffeine….), the people, the goats(?). Wicked!

Thessaloniki, a couple of villages in the mountains, Meteora, Athens, Mykonos, Naxos, Santorini and then Budapest to top it all off (the latter is not in Greece for the geographically challenged). It doesn’t get any better.

Activities included, but were not limited to:

• climbing an active volcano
• windsurfing with a bunch of Germans
• riding a scooter on roads that had cliffs on either side
• waterskiing at a black sanded beach
• drinking unreal wine from a 2 litre plastic bottle that Dim got for 2 euro
• getting airborne in a ferry on stupidly high seas at ridiculous speeds
• the Acropolis - what hellenic holiday is complete without it?

Photos to be supplied.

Mats Henricson has produced an excellent pdf outlining new developments and upcoming features in server side Java.

Researchers have found that talking on a mobile greatly increases your chance of crashing - regardless of whether it is handheld or hands-free. There are even suggestions that hands-free phone conversations while driving should be made illegal. How does a hands-free phone conversation differ from talking to a passenger? Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb…

Maybe it’s not phone calls but infuriating conversations. I’d like to see a ban on that

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the licensing of the .mobi top level domain for the development of mobile specific sites. This definitely sounds like a good thing. It will certainly give mobile phone users more confidence that their devices will be able to access specific sites.

Recently I became involved with the Dublin Java Meetup Group, a users group getting together once a month to talk all things Java. Having a think about the topic for discussion at the next meeting, Java after 10 years, got me to thinking. What comes next? The IT indiustry has moved on from one language to another for decades. Each successive language giving more power, more capabilities, than its predecessors.

So here we are in 2005. The most used languages in use at the moment according to ITJobsWatch are Java, C++, C# and VB (in that order). Are the minor incremental changes we’re seeing between language versions the future with the programmers in these languages safe in their jobs for the long haul (including greenfields work, not just maintainence like the COBOL guys) or is there still some huge paradigm shift left , as from procedural to OO programming, that will force another cycle of starting from scratch with a new platform and its idiosyncracies to learn all over again? Aspect oriented programming looks like it could unsettle things, but there are already AO language extensions to the mainstream platforms - things like AspectWerkz and JBoss AOP. There’s not all that much on the horizon…

I was thinking a bit more about my post on web frameworks and thought I would see what exactly happened to the Shale proposal. Having found the site, it appears as though it seems to be moving along at a nice pace in the background. Proposed as Struts 2, it has little if anything to do with the current Struts architecture (it’s based on JSF) and will probably become its own Jakarta project. That would make it 4 java web frameworks from Apache - Struts, Tapestry, Turbine and now this one. Choice is good, but aren’t they overdoing this just a little? Which horse do you back to make sure that your skill set is relevant in the future?

I heard a comment that one of the most desirable abilities of a programmer is knowing what’s out there and understanding which technology to apply in a given situation. I have a feeling that’s going to become harder than it already is. A great directory resource for open source frameworks and components broken down by category is available at java-source.net. Good luck evaluating them… And that doesn’t even cover any commercial options.

There’s a quick overview of what Shale covers here.

It seems that the most vexing question facing humanity has been answered.

There was an interesting post on The Server Side last week, regarding the difference in focus between the PHP and Java open-source development communities. PHP developers are comming out with huge volumes of collaboration and portal applications, whereas Java programmers seem to be obsessed with the latest and greatest framework.

Large corporations are more likely to standardize on a platform like Java for their development, and the people who develop in it are going to be focused on solving technical issues beyond the business domain. Most Java developers I have spoken to are looking for ways to get better industrial-strength software developed in as short a timeframe as possible, thus the focus on testing, integration frameworks and the like.

PHP, despite the claim (which has been around since I developed in it 4 years ago) that it is gaining acceptance within the enterprise, still remains a way to get something out in a short amount of time. It may be quick but I wouldn’t go around developing mission critical software in it - especially since I can’t test it easily (at the time of writing there isn’t a standard package to test PHP scripts - despite the fact the the language is in version 5). Given it’s accessibility and ease of learning many non-professionals may pick up on PHP to get whatever they need out the door.

According to Irishjobs.ie there are 35 PHP jobs and 658 Java jobs advertised in Dublin today - that’s could account for at least some of the difference.

It’s been a while since I last posted. Life can really get in the way of blogging

Having worked with Struts for a while now, I’m starting to agree with some of the criticisms. One of the most common tasks I need to perform is to set up an page with data before displaying it. What ends up happening is that two seperate Actions are required to manage one form. One to set it up, and the other to process a response. And then to make it more confusing, sometimes you need to skip the setup stage, as when viewing a form that was already submitted at an earlier stage. When you get a number of developers working on one system it become really hard to enforce a standard approach. Sure you can come up with all sorts of home-grown approaches for that sort of thing, but I really think that we should be past that stage now. I heard a great comment on frameworks concerning this - that a good framework should be restrictive enough to enforce structure and flexible enough to let you do what you need to. Sure Struts is pretty flexible, but I feel it’s certainly lacking in the structure department. I saw a proposal a while back for the next version, codenamed Shale at the time, that proposed a standard implementation of the two-stage page processing model. It sounded promising at the time but haven’t heard anything recently and the original proposal is nowhere to be found.

The other issue I have with Struts is its tight integration with the Servlet API. Unit testing becomes horribly convoluted when you have to set up session state, mock objects etc. StrutsTestCase helps with the details, but I just don’t think it’s unit testing per-se, it’s closer to functional testing. The WebWork framework looks like it is going in the right direction insofar as the Action-equivalent class deals only with variables set up by accessor methods. Unit testing can therefore be just that - a test of the functionality of the one class - especially if it’s designed to be integrated with a dependency injection framework.

I am not sure how WebWork handles my first issue, but it’s definitely worth investigating further. Struts has been an excellent starting point - it was like getting into a hot bath after having worked with ad-hoc JSPs/ASP - but I think it’s time to look at other stuff. I get the impression that it’s just not moving along anywhere near as fast as it should be.