Blogging Roller

I'm not going to be able to make it to the RTP WebShere Users Group meeting tomorrow (Tuesday Nov. 26), but it sounds like an interesting meeting, especially the Struts Builder bit.

WSAD is the successor to IBM's VisualAge for Java. It was first released at the version 4 level about a year ago, and now, with version 5, it moves to an Eclipse 2.0 base, and adds full J2EE 1.3 support, as well as numerous enhancements. Roger's talk will introduce WSAD 5.0, with an emphasis on the Web Development side. He will also demonstrate some of the new items, including Struts Builder and Cheat Sheets.[From the RTP-WUG meeting annoucement]

I'm working at home this week on various geekly projects and I'm spending lots of time with Leo. He was already a happy little guy, but now that he can sit up he is overjoyed. You can see he is so proud of himself. I think that this time, from about 4 months to a 9 months old, is the sweetest time in baby development. Babies at this age can't move around and get into trouble. They can smile, laugh, coo, goo, and babble in a pleasant way, but they can't talk back at you. They never say "Dad, you are so lame" even when they should.

Jeff Duska is forgetting a couple of things that many Servlet/JSP developers (myself included) often forget. He is forgetting the distributed nature of Servlet apps and he is forgetting the WAR.

Someday, when your app becomes incredibly popular, you might find that you need to distribute the load across multiple worker processes on multiple computers. All the major app servers support this, does your app? In a distributed configuration, if your app writes a file to the file-system on one computer, you won't be able to get to that file on another computer. If you want all instances of your app to share a file, then this is a problem. If you are just writing a simple little temporary file, which sounds like Jeff's case, then this is generally not a problem.

Even if you are only writing a temporary file, you still don't want to write it inside your Servlet context. When your app is packaged in a WAR file, may not be able to open files inside the Servlet context. If you are just writing a temporary file, it might be better to use one of the static java.io.File.createTempFile() methods to get a file.