The long way round…

In a previous post I talked about the pain I’m in trying to give up Intellij and move over to Eclipse. I was just about there this week when this happens…damn, damn and double damn!

3D desktops have been around a while, and the one below is interesting but I just cannot see myself going for it. Really, can you see yourself doing serious work on it as a developer? But for other people, it might work. Maybe…

Pay particular attention to the video after 12 seconds and the guys $$$ ring. Nice touch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ

Does anyone know how to embed these youtube’s in wordpress? It can be done but the stuff on the net is really poorly structured and totally random…

Enough is enough, is ENOUGH! Windows Explorer has hung my damned machine again for the most mundane of things.  Time to move on and start listening to my work colleagues love of Total Commander.  After a simple install, i’m up and running.  After the initial shock of seeing a Window 3.1 user interface on my desktop again, total commander is fierce! It does everything you want and more. Windows explorer rest in peace, time to get some licenses sprinkled around the office…

I’m a jetbrains fan and in particular a long running user of their IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. I have been flipping between eclipse and intellij for years. The defining moment for me was moving from eclipse 2.1 to intellij 4.x. For me there was no competition. Eclipse simply didn’t cut it for the speed of refactoring and navigability once inside the java editor window.

Of course both IDEs have moved on, IntelliJ to 5.x and Eclipse to 3.x. I am now migrating back to the eclipse platform (project constraints) and its painful. The biggest pain is its lack of support for hiearchical project structures. In other IDEs there is no problem in having projects and subprojects (or modules in IntelliJ), but in eclipse all projects are peers. No parent/child relationships allowed. I find this absolutely nuts! Can someone out there in eclipse land explain why we have this limitation? There must be good reason that I’m just not getting.

When you look at open source projects (e.g. geronimo) that use build tools such as Maven 2, they support hierarchical project structures. Having to fight with eclipse to support common project structures is something we all could do without…

I’ll keep looking!

As I start to read more on the internet, listening in on technology rants, observing the way people move about the web and use its tools, it is absolutely clear to me that you cannot do this without a base set of tools (over time I’ll discuss these tools here).  And one key tool is the good old RSS reader.  Now I’ve been through a number of RSS readers, but for all the free ones, OMEA is a damned fine product from those guys at JetBrains.  With its aggregation and syndication capabilities and its firefox 1.5 plugin, its simple choice for windows users.

Now I have to find a similar beast for my Linux boxes.  Anyone got any recommendations?

Choosing your blogging software is hard.  After asking around I settled upon Serendipity.  However, our network administrator told me to check out WordPress.  I was sold.  It’s simple.  It works.  It’s free.  Job done.

The one-pager from tamba has everything a newbie needs to get up and running with WordPress.  The most important thing from the one-pager is the test site for trying out pingbacks and trackbacks when you’re setting up your blog.   It work seamlessly.  Be careful though!  I lost a day reading up on how the whole blogsphere works.  More specifically how blogger posts propogate around the web (and web2.0) to consumers.  But I’ll save that for another post…

Off to read up on some php stuff which you need to know if you’re into WordPress…

Just over two and half years ago I embarked upon a large-ish Java-based ecommerce project and was pretty much pushed into Struts as the presentation layer. Struts was well known. Struts was not beta code. People on the team were skilled in Struts. The Struts community was large. So, Struts it was. Also, we needed a way to break up the web pages into manageable smaller chunks, so Tiles was the natural choice. Struts and Tiles. Tiles and Struts. Struts, Struts, Struts, Struts, Strutssss…….enough already, let’s do Struts.

I never liked Struts! I can’t put my finger on it, but I was always working around it, never with it. Another sure indicator for me was that I never really wanted to learn it. Sure, I read stuff, but only when I had a problem to fix. Typically with things you like, you do the tutorials and you enjoy them. You then read around edges, check out the news groups and blogs, gauge the community feeling, and generally dig deeper because want to learn more. So I can pretty much say for certain that Struts didn’t do it for me. Struts and I were never friends!
Now, half way through this ecommerce project we get a new web dev who says, “Why are we using this crap (tiles)? Have you not heard of sitemesh, tapestry or webwork?”. Too deeply entrenched in Struts (and boy does it lead you down a yellow brick road to hell) we couldn’t act on the web dev’s advice. (He is still miffed about doing Struts to this day!)

I have since left that project and started another web-based project. I decided to put my old web dev’s recommendations to the test. I went with WebWork and SiteMesh. Enlightenment. I cannot tell you what a joy it is to work with these two web-based technologies from opensymphony. It as though they have not only kept things simple but have provided a tool box thats enable those people that need to do complicated things. And right there IS big difference for me between WebWork and Struts. WebWork is a framework that acts as a tool box that you use to build web sites. You can start small and get bigger. Use this tool, that tool and/or somebody elses tool. The integration with other techologies (Hibernate, Spring, Freemarket, Velocity, Sitemesh, yada, yada, yada) is smooth. Struts, in comparison, is large and clunky. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. It’s as though from day one you step into ring with Struts and fight until someone, typically Struts, is the winner.

I am not going to go into the details of WebWork and SiteMesh, except to say if you are a Struts and Tiles web developer, you must, absolutely must, no questions asked, try them out. Take off your Struts boxing gloves and try something new. It took me 2 days to grasp the basics of WebWork. In that time I implemented a web site that provided most of the horizontal services that I need in place such as securing uris, logging, timing requests and handling dumb ass users that double-click hyperlinks (why, o why do users do this?) and any unnecessary use of the back button. I’m still impressed.

However, things are changing. Damn, just when you find what you need…stuff happens!

Struts and WebWork are merging. It’s not surprising given WebWork is the superior implementation and Struts has the larger community. The new product is called Struts 2.0. I sincerely hope that the name is more politics and that the product is more like a WebWork 3.0…