Date / Time API - JSR-310 - JODA
Stephen Colbourne and Michael Nascimento Santos’ Date Time API BOF was interesting for a few reasons. The number of people attending was impressive given the late 9:30 PM start… even more surprising was the intense discussion and level of interest. Stephen had to stay 45 minutes past the 10:45 PM session close to answer questions and listen to feedback about JODA - he showed some proposed Date Time APIs.
I hope JSR-310 is heavily influenced by JODA. JODA has a richer set of Date/Time concepts which are noticeably absent from the core Java platform. (Translation: I hope that JODA emerges from the JCP process relatively unmolested by the expert group.)
Struts 2
Ran into a number of people yesterday, Don Brown recently moved to Australia to work for Atlassian, and Ian Roughley. Discussed the Struts 2 / WebWork merger. (Just in case you missed it, Don wrote a History of Struts 2 last October.) Was checking out the Struts 2 site this morning, noticed the Plugin Registry.
Let’s hope the plugin registry takes off and is managed well….to me, the big draw of Ruby on Rails is the fact that I can talk to Michael Kovacs one day, learn about his sortable table plugin, and then rip it into my Rails application in two minutes. I don’t see any Java framework out there that leverages decentralized innovation in the way Rails has. (Did I really just type the word “leverage”? Did I just string together the words “leverages decentralized innovation”? I’m terribly sorry.)
Rife
I was able to meet a sizable portion of my RSS feeds at the ThirstyBear. Spoke to Geert Bevin about RIFE. Feels like everybody I speak to is interested in RIFE, but they’ve never taken the time to learn it. I feel like RIFE has been on my list for about two years, time to bump it up to the top of my queue and actually use it.
I got put off by RIFE's overuse of XML. I recommend trying out Wicket which doesn't suffer the same problem: http://wicket.sourceforge.net/
@Tim, no need to convince me about Wicket - I use it. But, as far as using XML versus not, I tend to believe in the mantra "Use What You Need" - which (coincidentally) is the name of Geert's company. RIFE is still at the top of the list.
Rife is interesting if only for the fact that Geert took a very different aproach then the others. It'll be interesting to read about your experiences with it.
Eelco, I said it was first on my list, but it got knocked off by a Wicket back migration a few weeks ago. I had an application running on an unreleased Wicket 2.0-SNAPSHOT, I had to upgrade it to back to 1.3 which just involved changing all of the constructors back to the old way.
Still thinking about Rife, and Wicket, and JavaFX, and Flex, and the list goes on. There's too much interesting stuff to learn these days.
Hi Tim, thanks for your interest in RIFE and the use of "Use What You Need". Just for completeness-sake, XML use in RIFE is up to you and writing an application with only Java is totally supported. Some of the examples even show that. This is all really a matter of preferences. (you can even use Groovy)
Just thought I'd mention this :-)