Greetings from The Spring Experience 2007 in Hollywood, FL. So far this has been a great conference - I’m currently waiting for my third session of the day to start. As much as I enjoy all of the hype and eye candy at JavaOne, I really get a lot more out of these smaller conferences as you’re not running around stressed out trying to weave through thousands of geeks as you move from session to session (or more accurately, from session to queue!
This was my very first session of the conference. I’ve really been looking forward to it. I became pretty excited about object-oriented programming when I first really learned it in my computer simulation course at Ole Miss. In that course we built discrete event simulation programs using collaborating Java threads. Each thread implemented an object from the domain model representing a particular simulation problem. Once I got into the “working world,” I found that the architecture described by Rod Johnson as the “J2EE stove pipe” had made my OO skills essentially unusable in the projects on which I was required to work on a day-to-day basis.
Here’s my vote for Java 6 on Mac OS X Leopard!
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I posted earlier on my desire to become a better programmer. Well, I’ve since put together a plan of action for the next twelve months. I’ve based some of these goals on suggestions from The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.
Learn Groovy and Grails Andy and Dave suggest learning a new language every year. I had already informally started learning Groovy and Grails after JavaOne 2007. Since I already have a head start on this one, Groovy will be my language for the next year (I’m learning Grails mainly because of my web development background - it will provide me more opportunity to apply my Groovy knowledge).
Recently I was faced with the challenge of implementing form-level (or page-level) validation in a JSF-based application. What I mean by form-level validation is the need to evaluate a subset of a form’s fields as a unit, rather than simply validating each field in isolation. An example of this type of validation can be found on a user registration form where one has to select a password in one text field, and then retype the same password in another text field for confirmation.
Thanks to everyone who pointed me to Commons Collections and its Functor package yesterday. To me, this is just one step below having closures natively present in the language. FYI, I was able to remove all duplication from my class and reduce the LOC from 211 to 136 - in other words, 75 lines of useless code GONE.
Here is what I did. First, I defined Predicates for each of my conditions.
I’m sure everyone is sick of reading this same rant over and over, but I just had to add more fuel to the fire. I’m attempting to implement access privilege delegation in a JSF application - basically, users can delegate their ability to do “stuff” in our application to other users. I have a backing bean that has several methods that are called by the JSF components, returning whether or not to render that component based on security privileges.
I found Project Able while reading Raible’s blog this morning. While it doesn’t claim to duplicate everything that AppFuse does (i.e. they pick a framework and stick with it instead of providing choice), they are doing some neat things. I may take a look at it if I ever have time. Project Able is a full Java-based web development stack designed to make web development painless. In a sense, it is an attempt to bring together quality opensource tools in one cohesive stack, similar to what Rails has done for Ruby, while also encouraging common practices I’ve used in software engineering for a long time.
Raible updated the AppFuseRoadmap yesterday. I’m really excited about where the project is going. XDoclet has been a good friend, but I’m really happy to see its demise in favor of annotations. JDK 5 and JSP 2.0 will also be really helpful - I’ve wanted to leverage these technologies for a long time, but haven’t had an easy way to do so. I think the most interesting thing for me will be the switch over to Maven 2.
I’ve wanted for some time now to write a blog entry promoting my favorite open source project - AppFuse. Since I started developing web applications using AppFuse as a base, I can truly say that I’ve rediscovered the joy of software development. I’ve found no other technology or methodology that has allowed me to place as much focus as I now do on solving business problems and not on technology ramp-up or figuring out the eccentricities of “framework X.