Yesterday, I was doing some refactoring on some code in Rational Application Developer (a derivative of eclipse) and I ended up creating a couple of new projects to house some of it. When I told my colleague he’d need to synchronize with CVS and pull down the new projects he expressed some concern about why I had created the new projects. It made me revisit why I actually did it.
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Here in the midwest we were inundated with a massive snow storm this weekend. I took the time I was stuck inside to finally give Groovy (and Grails) a day long once over. Recently I have checked out Scala and JRuby. I have to say, I like them all at this point. I definitely haven’t spent enough time with any of them to endorse one over the other, but it is exciting to see that the JVM is being ‘extended’ beyond plain ol’ Java.
If I was pegged down and had to pick one considering the limited time I have spent with them , I’d say I’d go with Groovy. All other things being equal, I like its closure style and Grails simply rocks. All the playing I did was really simple, but I tried enough scenarios to determine it would be capable of handling some of the database and domain scenarios I would like to throw at it.
I’m definitely going to get more into these dynamic languages for the JVM.
A few years ago, I worked as a consultant at a company that used DB2/400 as its main database platform. The company did not have journaling ‘turned on’ so their database platform did not support transactions/commit control. This did seem odd to me, but what I’ve found is that its pretty common that DB2/400 shops don’t use this feature. While this seemed like a mere oddity and an inconvenience for commit control, it actually caused a more measurable issue which was that we couldn’t use Hibernate, one of, if not the most common ORM framework. Hibernate requires transactions. This is a problem for anyone wanting to use a non-journaled DB2/400 instance… in particular me. Read more…
One of the cool things about the new job I will _officially_ be starting in November is that we are going to look to use open source tools first. The biggest choice we have to make on that front is which open source application server to use. We have the go ahead to get an environment setup and in-use for some pilot applications that are less mission-critical than most of the apps we have on our primary WebSphere servers. Now comes the time we need to decide which open source application server(s) we will use. Read more…
I have accepted a position at a company in Dayton. The position is with a company that I have been working for as a consultant off and on (mostly on) for the last three years. I will be a ‘Technical Architect’ in the ‘Enterprise Solutions’ group at WinWholesale. I am very excited about this new opportunity. In my new position I will be the technical leader of the group that is dealing with newer technologies. We will be making use of open source technologies where they make sense and employing an agile software development methodology. One of the most important things to me is Read more…
I firmly agree with Domain-Driven Design, but a few weeks ago I looked back at my last several projects and thought that I may not have been adhering to it. Martin Fowler wrote about an anti-pattern called AnemicDomainModel on this page quite a while back. Looking at the last few applications I have written for this client, I basically see a whole lot of bean-like objects, that is objects with a lot of state (getters/setters) but no behavior – a big indicator of the AnemicDomainModel. How could I have fallen into this trap? I struggled for quite a while trying to decide where I screwed up and what precipitated this issue. Have I worked at a high level for too long and forgotten how to take care of the details? Have I been doing too many WebSphere installations and integration setups to do the software development? After thinking about it for a while I finally settled on the opinion that what I’ve been modeling for the last few projects really is anemic, at least from the software design/class modeling perspective, so I can dig my head out of the sand. Read more…
I read a blog post about a developers journey from Smalltalk to PHP to Ruby and back with probably a bunch of other stuff mixed in between. In this post, the author puts into words many of the things I have wondered about for the last several months. I am by no means a Ruby or Ruby-on-Rails expert, but I have messed with it enough. I do like it. Its nice and clean, simple to use, and easy to get up and running quickly.
I remember my transition from Smalltalk to Java. When I had somewhat mastered Smalltalk Java started to become the big thing. For some reason I felt the need to move to Java. Read more…
Sun introduced JavaFX today at JavaOne in San Francisco. Basically (from the web perspective), JavaFX is Sun’s attempt at a Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework. Like MS Silverlight, Adobe Flex, and the many AJAX frameworks, JavaFX promises to make creating beautiful and user friendly web applications easier. I spent a couple of hours this evening messing with the OpenJFX tutorial and looking through the reference. Here are my first impressions. Read more…
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I rented ‘An inconvenient truth’. This is the documentary by Al Gore about global warming. In it, Mr. Gore presents pretty compelling arguments that we are headed towards great peril unless we immediately take steps to avoid it. I have long thought we were not doing right ‘by the earth’, but didnt think the effects would be evident as soon as he expressed. Fifty percent of the info I read are rebuttals to his claims and the other fifty are in support of it. After my own investigation (Google-o-rama) it seems that there is no doubting the ‘rapid trending’ in the negative direction over the last 30 years, to the degree to which it hasn’t been historically detectable over the past several hundreds of thousands of years. This affects me personally and professionally, doesn’t it? Read more…
Well, the post on javalobby created quite a stir. There are stirs all the time and I usually don’t even bother opining about them, but as you can see from my previous post this time I did.
Two major ideas prevail in the post responses. The first is the argument about actually adding new things to the language and the other, more prevalent conversation, is arguing about the merits of closures, properties, generics, etc.
I like the arguments. There are some really smart people (in the academic sense, at least) mixing it up. I think its all good.
The only thing I don’t like about where the thread headed was that, to me, Yakov Fain’s original post was pretty straight forward – leave java where it is. I just do not agree with that. The language is not perfect and if things are added right (not that I have the answer) they wont affect backwards compatibility. Quoted from his post:
Is Java the primary language that pays my bills today? Yes it is. Are there other languages/technologies I work with? Yes, there are. Do I want to see new language constructs in Java? No, I do not. People propose adding closures to the language. There are some attempts to introduce data binding to Java Beans. I do not think you can teach an old dog new tricks. If you remember, Java has been created as a simple version of C++. Let’s keep it as simple as possible.
There’s no inferring of anything there Read more…
