Unruly Rambling - spring tag

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 3

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:19:05 GMT

Java Collection Power Techniques
By: Glenn Vanderburg
Glenn's talk covered many of the methods that live on the Collection interface which many programmers end up implementing themselves. He also showed many code examples of advanced way's to utilize decorators and adapters with Collections. I've done some of this in the past so I was pretty familiar with the concepts. Unfortunately, many of the problems he solved after this seemed to be very academic in nature and I can't say that I've run across them in the real world. That's not to say I will never, but at this point I will take them for what they are worth. The best take away from this session is to look around before implementing something yourself.

Introduction to Spring
By: Bruce Tate
I'm typically not a big fan of Bruce Tate's presentations since they are very slideshow driven but since there was nothing else of interest, I attended anyway. I've been looking at Spring for sometime now so I'm fairly well versed with what it can do. My goal was to gain some insight for his presentation and apply it to one that I will be giving soon. All in all, he did a pretty good job describing the benefits of Spring. One thing that scared me was he made the comment that Spring is similar to the BASF marketing spiel "We don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better". I've said this very thing several times in the past couple months. Weird!

Javascript Exposed
By: Glenn Vanderburg
All I can say is Wow. I never knew Javascript was as robust a language as Glenn portrayed. The talk started off talking about how Javascript got a bad name back in the early days of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Neither did a very good job of supporting it. The other downfall was that developers were not really learning the language either. Instead of starting from the ground and working their way up, they performed copy/paste/modify routines that quickly spread bad or inferior code world wide. The next 30 minutes or so went over the language constructs followed by a demonstration of how dynamic typing works. I got pretty lost from this point forward. The one take away I had from this was that if I ever need to do anything in Javascript moving forward, there will be a learning curve. Im interested in the upcoming release of Tiger that will introduce Dashboard widgets. These are small javascript modules do quite useful things. Looks like I will be face down in the books Glenn suggested in the near future.

Spring Live - First Impression

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:00:45 GMT

First thing I'd like to say is that this book is very readable and flows well. One of the best parts so far is using equinox or appfuse light. I knew appfuse existed but had never really played with it before. After creating just a couple sample projects, I'm convinced I will use them going forward. Great work!

With all the raves, there is also one rant. After going through just a couple chapters in Spring Live, I'm already tired of not being able to copy/paste code. While I realize a chapter by chapter download is available, I don't want to have to keep switching from the pdf to the downloaded code and then back to my working editor. This is one step that I don’t have to do with the pdf’s from Manning’s MEAP Program and therefore speeds up my progress. I’m assuming they disallow copy/paste for copy write reasons, but this is a major pain. Is there any way to allow copy/paste on just the code snippets?

SourceBeat Anyone?

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:35:17 GMT

First a few questions. What is the best way to sell technical books? print vs pdf? owership vs leasing? What is a reasonable price? What is the lifetime of a technical book? Is it more than 1 year?

I ask because I have been recently looking at SourceBeat's sales model. I don't know about anyone else, but I think the $29.99 per book per year from SourceBeat seems a bit steep. While I agree 100% that the authors should be compensated for their great work, $30 for something that isn't tangible and its service expires after 1 year seems like a bit much. I much prefer the Manning approach where around $20 and plus the option to purchase the real book for full price less what you paid for the pdf. This offers the consumer the best of both worlds. This gives the reader greater flexibility at a more reasonable cost. Until Sourcebeat charges around $15 per year or moves to a full subscription based service, I will have a hard time purchasing their material. Of course, I say that now :)

Why the rant? Im very interested in Matt Raible's, Spring Live book but for the reasons mentioned above, I'll probably be waiting for Spring in Action from Manning.

NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Java Symposium - Day 3

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:06:21 GMT

Day three's events began at 8am and ended at 5:00pm. A continental breakfast was served from 8am-9am with the first presentation beginning at 9am. The following are the sessions I attended along with any random thoughts.

Better, Faster, Lighter Java (Bruce Tate)
Better, Faster, Lighter Java was about everything EJB isn't. Bruce started off by explaining how Java has gone from a 4MB download to a 40MB download in less than 10 years. He also brought up the fact that deprecated method's rarely are actually deprecated. The only examples our group could come up with were situations where leaving the method would actually break something. Otherwise, deprecated methods have been left to rot for backward compatibility purposes. We also discussed how EJB had been around for sometime and newer lighter weight frameworks like Spring were not far behind feature wise. To cut to the chase, this session could have been called, "EJB's are usually not necessary and there are much better ways to get the benefits they provide". Bruce stated that a lightweight container, like Spring, was the future and that EJB's were dying. While I have to agree that EJB's are abused and not needed in many cases, there are a lot developers out there with this skill set so they will likely die a slow death.

TDD for the web tier (Rick Hightower)
Lets see, hmm. How do I put this. To be blunt, this presentation sucked from start to finish. While Rick may know the subject very well and write decent books, an effective presenter he is not. Not to mention, his slide presentation could have taken the entire 3 days to cover. This session was suppose to be about junit, httpunit, dbunit, strutstestcase, cactus, and jWebUnit. I think we may have completed the junit part, it was hard to tell since I was too busy fighting to keep my eye's open. Sorry for sounding bitter, but this presentation was painful. Instead of throwing up a editor and giving a hello world presentation of a couple of these tools(obviously there was no way to cover all of them), we were subjected to bullet point after bullet point of ways to use them. I got nothing out of this presentation except that I will never attend any of Rick's seminars again.

AOP with AspectJ and Eclipse plugin (Venkat Subramaniam)
To start off with, im very thankful that I got to this room early. It became overly crowded in a matter of no time. I guess you could say that AOP was the buzzword of choice this past weekend. While I can honestly say that I understood the basics of AOP beforehand, I learned a bunch from Venkat. His presentation style was similar to Stuart Halloway. Lots of little tiny programs that did nothing but get the point across. I learn best in this environment. Venkat had a single program where he instantiated a JMenuPanel that contained 2 menu items. When you ran the program, both were available. He then proceeded to put logic to determine if your locale was US and gray out one of the options. The next step was to explain that this type of logic might be useful all over and that copy/paste was not the best solution. Instead he moved this code into an aspect and applied it that way. It was a clear and meaningful example that most people enjoyed.

Introduction to Spring(Bruce Tate)
The last presentation that I attended was on the spring framework. Bruce did a pretty good job here, but like in all his other presentations he lacked real code. This presentation was really nothing more than an overview of spring, how it compared to struts, and how easy it was to keep your object testable using it. My favorite statement from the presentation was, "Good OO design is more important that any framework". This idea is very foreign to EJB since Session beans like monolithic utility classes and Entity beans are similar persistence via peanut butter. Spring or spring like frameworks are on my radar and will be something I dig into soon.

To summarize the weekend, I would have to say the NFJS Tour was a success again this year and that it was worth every penny. If my company hadn't paid for it, I would have. A coworker of mine brought up the fact that the tour is in Chicago in the September timeframe. I will seriously consider going to it as well if the topics are different enough.