I’m convinced that this blog platform doesn’t quite work. Blogs are supposed to be about random navel gazing, but instead of that I think people view the O’Reilly blogging platform as a political megaphone through which they can make themselves appear to be ubergeeks. Anyway, I’m going to continue to write here, but just know that I’m always reticent to say anything real here. Whenever I decided to say something like, “I’m sick of parsing Strings in Java” I’ll get a bunch of hate mail from people about how what I said didn’t fall in line with the expectations they had of OnJava. In addition, I’m very skeptical of the idea of “topical” blogs. I’ve never worked on a system that was in one technology. Enough self-reference.

Web Frameworks IM Log

I don’t think we have any clarity in Java Web Framework land, here’s a chat log from yesterday that has been anonymized to protect the innocent…the topic was, “What framework should we use?”

tobrien: Waffle
tobrien: GWT
tobrien: Wicket
tobrien: SpringMVC
tobrien: Struts2
tobrien: Django
tobrien: Rails
other: why not all?
tobrien: PHP
other: you should do it in all of them and then we can decide which is the most elegant
other: it should be a standalone AIR app
other: wait, silverlight
other: no. it should be a firefox extension
other: i know i know. do it in an excel macro
other: it would be more efficient. you could enter all the meta data in excel and just hit 'upload'
other: although... c++ would be faster
other: you know what, just use assembler
other: f*** it, we can do it in hardware
other: it can have a usb interface
other: win32 api?
other: too legacy. use XAML
other: wait. make it a cocoa app, dont want to be a ********
other: no, do it in a osx widget
tobrien: yo!
other: you can use javascript for those right?
other: facebook app

:-) I think I’m going to just do it in Wicket. The person I was conversing with is partial to GWT.

Adobe Fx

Here’s a fun little icon:

fx-screen.jpg

(Anyone heard anything about JavaFx?) I know APress published a book on it, but that seems a little crazy at this point. Adobe released a public beta 3 for Flex 3 and there’s an icon on my desktop “Fx”. That’s nice, so that’s what Ward meant when he noted that name overlap at JavaOne last year. Has Sun selected another name for JavaFx yet? Googling for JavaFX just brings up a bunch of Sun stuff, and an entertaining article from last May. Check out what Andy Patrizio wrote in May:

You know all that AJAX code you’ve been writing and tearing your hair out over as you attempt to get the JavaScript working in both Internet Explorer and Firefox? Yeah, that AJAX code (define).

It’s all going to be useless real soon.

Seriously? It’s going to be “useless real soon”. The internet “press” is crazy.

Anyone care to wager what the big announcement is going to be about JavaFX? What the new name is going to be? It was interesting when it was announced, I was impressed by C. Oliver, but I’ve also been impressed with Abode over the past year.

Tomcat Love

I’m a pulitzer prize winning author, I’ve written a few fictionalized accounts of my own experiences in Vietnam. And, my most interesting book is about my love affair with Apache Tomcat - “Tomcat in Love”. This is what happens when your name overlaps with someone much more famous and successful than yourself.