Blogging Roller

Raleigh News and Observer reporter Karen Mann attended our most recent lunch and spoke with a number of other Triangle area webloggers. The resulting article <a href= "http://www.newsandobserver.com/front/story/2171116p-2057661c.html">A web for your thoughts is now online. See <a href="http://loebrich.org/2003/02/05.html#a2874 ">Bruce Leobrich's, <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/05/unabashed_media_whoring.html ">Mark Pilgrim's, and Frank Boosman's weblogs for additional comments.

So says <a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/04/HNsidewinder_1.html">InfoWorld.

James Strachan reports a new top-level project at Apache db.apache.org for database related technologies:

James Strachan: Various database related projects will be moving under one roof such as ObjectRelationalBridge, Torque as well as various db commons projects like commons-sql, DBCP and maybe even PoolMan.

Chris Winters points out a new presentation by Dave Thomas one of the Pragmatic Programmers.

Chris Winters: I thought it interesting that many of the action items centered around getting yourself known, including contributing to open-source projects. Not just for the sake of getting your name out there, but to further your own knowledge in a more dynamic environment than learning by yourself. With the nice side-benefit of getting your name out there :-)

That's my plan and my excuse for my constant tinkering, writing, blogging, etc. I hope it works. On a related note: Dave Thomas has a blog and an RSS feed!

I'm wondering the same thing. If they were running in the same ServletContext, we might be able to make them do some interesting tricks.

Matt Croydon: How easy would it be to integrate something like JSPWiki with Roller? I really like the integration that Mr. Orchard has accomplished over at 0xDECAFBAD. I'm not personally a Roller user (tho I've played with it and love it), but given the JSP connection, I think it might not be too impossible.

Borland is moving Java veteran <a href= "http://www.borland.com/news/press_releases/2003/01_27_03_borland_accelerates_acquisition.html"> Tony de le Lama to Raleigh, NC to head-up research and development for the Together products. According to <a href= "http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,848792,00.asp">eWeek, former Sun marketing exec George Paolini will be taking de la Lama's place at Borland HQ in Scotts Valley, CA.

Stuart Halloway: At the last Triangle JUG meeting I was stunned by the level of unemployment in the local Java community. Here's something that may help. <a href= "http://www.techengage.com">TechEngage is a new non-profit organization dedicated to providing technical training for out of work IT folk.

In a recent <a href= "http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_02/magazine/features/dsavarese/default_pf.asp">JavaPro article Daniel Savarese helps you choose between serialization, JDBC, EJB, JDO, and JAXB for Java object persistence. He ignore the O/R frameworks, I suppose, because they are non-standard.

Ed Cone: ...there remains something noble and unique about NASA's mission. It's the application of science to expand human frontiers, the courage of the highly-trained crews, the sense that what these people are doing is done to some degree for all of us, everywhere.

Excellent article with quotes from software pioneers and bloggers Dan Bricklin and Mitch Kapor.

CNET: "Web logs (commonly known as "blogs"), message boards and other online forums are becoming increasingly important vehicles for developers to attract customers -- and development talent -- well before an application even enters the beta stage."

It's nice that there are multiple competing Roller sites now.

<a href= "http://blogs.application-servers.com/blogs/page/leecho/20030131#sorry_blog_moved">Carlos Villela: I had to move this blog to another Roller. Sorry guys and gals, but freeroller.net is just too slow, and I don't know if it's a problem in their bandwidth, mine, or if they're just too loaded.

You probably did not notice this, but my site was getting a tremendous number of hits this week. The reason is Scooter. Scooter is the AltaVista search robot. Scooter is persistent but not very smart. Scooter is not content to index a page, follow the links, and then index the linked pages. Scooter tries to guess the URLs to pages on your site and does a terrible job at the guessing game. If Scooter gets thousands of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND errors in one day, Scooter does not care. He just keep on guessing. According to Seach Engine World, he may be here for several months:

Search Engine World The Altavista search engine starts by spidering your entire site with its spider Scooter. Although lately Scooter hasn't been scooting too well. Scooter may take up to three months to spider and index your entire site (if it is going to crawl your site at all). It normally spiders about 2-10 pages per site in any week. Sometimes Scooter needs a good swift kick to get it to index certain pages.

Yep, I would like to give Scooter a good swift kick. Scooter obeys a robots.txt, if you have one. I'm hoping that the following addition to my robots.txt file will make him go away.

User-agent: Scooter/3.3
Disallow: /

User-agent: Scooter/3.2.SF0
Disallow: /

There was a record crowd at the RTP-WUG meeting tonight. Shakeel Mahate presented a nice overview of Struts and Thomas Roche presented an energetic and entertaining overview of the (Eclipse-based) <a href= "http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/studio">WebSphere Studio's Struts tooling. There was not much time left for Jason Garcowski, who provided a brief demo of IBM's example "Trade" application.

The Struts tools were pretty impressive and included a Struts tag-aware WYSIWYG JSP/HTML editor, a sophisticated struts-config.xml editor, and an innovative Struts Web Diagram Editor or 'Woody' as Thomas called it. If you want to learn more about these tools, visit the WebSphere Studio Zone or check out IBM's redbook titled <a href= "http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246806.html?Open">Legacy Modernization with WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer. Chapters 4 through 7 provide a good introduction both to Struts and the WebSphere Studio Struts tooling - including lots of screen-shots like the one below.

I mentioned this before, so this is just a reminder. The meeting starts at 6PM at IBM.

According to the trade rags, Borland has licensed the Dot-Net SDK and will include it in Delphi 7, Together, and other development tools later this year. It will be interesting to see what other Borland products target Dot-Net. Borland's Dot-Net page makes it look like they all will. Does the inclusion of Kylix on that page imply a Borland-supported Dot-Net implementation on Linux? I get the feeling that Borland believes that bridging discordant technologies like Dot-Net and Java is a significant business opportunity, so maybe a Java-Dot-Net bridge product is in the works as well. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

<a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/27/030127hnbornet_1.html"> InfoWorld: Borland on Tuesday plans to announce it is licensing the Microsoft Windows .Net Framework SDK for inclusion in Borland's Delphi 7 Studio development tool immediately and in other .Net-based products afterward.

ZDNet: The forthcoming Borland product that incorporates the .Net Framework SDK will be an enhancement to TogetherSoft's current .Net product

Sounds like Andy would enjoy Piemaster Pete's BSOD gallery.

Whether you back Java or Dot-Net you have to agree that Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net has resulted in some very interesting discussions. I've learned a lot from reading the responses from both camps. The latest and so far the best post on the topic is Ted Neward's <a href= "http://www.neward.net/ted/weblog/index.jsp?date=20030126#1043568228687">85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted.

This looks like it could be useful. Congrats to Matt and team. I am looking forward to taking a closer look at the code.

This release is the same code-base that Anthony Eden is currently running on FreeRoller. It includes some minor bug fixes and makes more effective use of caching on the main (index.jsp) page. Get it on SourceForge. Roller 0.9.7 is still a little ways off. By the way, FreeRoller is processing 1,000,000 hits per month, all on a "dinky" little eMachines box.

Charles Ditzel has taken the time to write a thoughtful article in the form of a weblog entry on Swing versus SWT. For those who have been stuck on the server-side for their entire Java careers: Swing is Sun's emulation-based Java UI toolkit and SWT is IBM's native widget-based Java UI toolkit. Charles works for Sun, so you can expect to find a little bias in the article. For example:

Charles Ditzel, Comparing Swing and SWT: Swing can provide a look and feel that exactly matches that of the platform, provides a more consistent cross-platform story, and offers a level of flexibility far and beyond what is possible with SWT.

I have yet to see a Swing-based GUI that exactly matches the Windows look-and-feel. There is always some noticable difference, and where is that Windows XP look and feel? Other than that, he has some good points (disclaimer: I know Swing, but not SWT). If you care about Java GUI development then the article is well worth a read.

One thing that Charles fails to point out is that Swing is intended to be a general purpose GUI toolkit whereas SWT is intended to support Eclipse. SWT/JFaces may grow into a world-beating general purpose GUI toolkit someday, but right now Swing is the choice for general purpose Java GUI development. Maybe that is why the payware version of Eclipse (Websphere Studio) supports GUI building with Swing and AWT and not with SWT.