Blogging Roller

I'm not posting this week because I'm busy managing my time.

Ted Neward reviews The Middleware Company's recent <a href= "http://www.theserverside.com/resources/article.jsp?l=TMCBestPractices">J2EE best practices document. He agrees with almost all of the practices and goes into detail on the three that he dislikes.

Patrick Peak offers an excellent and detailed introduction to Tiles, the Struts document assemby framework, on his new blog.

As Andy Oliver <a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/acoliver/20030210#dave_johnson_would_you_like">noted, comments are broken on this site and probably in the Roller CVS archive too. And Andy: I kid about the Wiki, but as far as I am concerned it is already a success (and JSP's don't suck and Redhat is open source).

This alleged Sun internal memo is making the rounds. According to the memo, engineers at Sun are not very happy with the large memory footprint and generally poor performance characteristics of the Solaris JRE. They want SPARC Java to be as light and nimble as SPARC Python. Who can argue with that?

Russell Beattie We need a license that says something like "I agree, by using this code, never to bug author with any questions, comments, thanks or support-related issues after TWO months of release date when said author has moved on to other more interesting things to work on."

Open source is not like a second unpaid job for me, as Russell suggested, because there is no real pressure for me to do anything. I could run off to the islands at any time and live off of coconut water and breadfruit if I wanted. Well, maybe not, but Roller is not the thing that is stopping me. Those questions, comments, thanks, and support issues are not irritants. They keep me interested. Still, I like Russell's OSS Prototype License idea. There is a place for that too.

Ok Andy. I opened up the Wiki for one and all as you demanded. It'll work fine, you said. You'll be doomed to failure with a closed Wiki, you said. You have not make any edits yourself, of course, but now this whip-crackin' <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/wiki/attach?page=Scott%2Findycomp_a.jpg">off-topic cowboy has made his way onto my site. What say you, open community boy?

A Slashdot reader recently dug up some details on the feature set of the upcoming Java 1.5 release including: Autoboxing, <a href= "http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/tiger/enhanced-for.html">Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports. Back in August, Henry Yandell summarized the official and somewhat different Java 1.5 feature list from JSR-176 J2SE 1.5 (Tiger) Release Contents.

<a href= "http://www.joeygibson.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2003/02/07#tech/eclipse/M5Install">Joey Gibson explains how easy it is to upgrade from 2.1 M4 and points out the new and noteworthy features list. Don Park says "Eclipse will become the second most popular IDE behind Microsoft's Visual Studio." I said something similar a couple of months ago.

Thanks for the vote of confidence <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20030207#152253">Dominic. I'll be working hard this weekend to live up to your expectations. One of my chapters just came back from review and I have my work cut out for me.

Dominic da Silva: After reading through the summary of Professional JSP 2.0, and knowing of some of the authors such as <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd">Matt, <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/">Dave, and <a href= "http://www.wrox.com/books/1861007701.htm">Sam Dalton and Dan Jepp, I expect this book to be a must have for any JSP developer out there. Having Struts, Tomcat and MySQL in there as well is a plus.

<a href= "http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/mozilla_coming_attractions.html">Blogzilla points out that Midas, a WYSIWYG HTML text edit control, is available in current Mozilla nightly builds.

Deigo Doval is digging into Open Office and it's programming interfaces and has discovered Open Office's own Universal Network Objects (UNO) component model. Components models like <a href= "http://developer.gnome.org/arch/component/bonobo.html">Bonobo, <a href= "http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/">Dot-Net's, <a href= "http://www.corba.org">CORBA, <a href= "http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/">XPCOM, and <a href= "http://www.microsoft.com/com/default.asp">COM, and <a href= "http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/">JavaBeans are fascinating, and I really mean that, but how many of these friggin' universes do we really need? I understand that OpenOffice.org wants to support cross-language components, but couldn't they have started with CORBA as Bonobo does, XPCom as Mozilla does, or the Dot-Net model as Ximian does? I guess inventing your own component model is just way too much fun.

It is just amazing to me that so many people have from $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 in the bank somewhere, need my help to transfer that money to the USA, and are willing to pay me a 5% to 30% commission for my services.

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.