Unruly Rambling - tapestry tag

My hiatus

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:40:58 GMT

Well it has been a long while since I last posted a blog entry, 54 days to be exact. A lot has happened in that timeframe. On a technical level, I'm in the process of dumping my current website which is written as a model 1 JSP app and moving over to Tapestry. I have the shell created but the hard work is still to come. I think I'm going to scale it back since most of the pages that are currently out there are not even interesting to me :)

On the Ruby front, I've been involved with the St Louis Ruby User Group for about 3 months now. The 3rd formal meeting is tonight. Hopefully I'll have more time to dive in soon.

On a personal level, our first child, Alex, was born June 1st so the past 4 weeks have been a whirlwind. It is an awesome experience but very time consuming. Things like learning Ruby and redesigning my site have been put on the back burner. Hopefully now that Alex is sleeping more I will have additional spare time to work on those things. Fall/Winter have always been my most productive seasons anyway since summer tends to be nonstop.

Java Blogger Meetup at the Thirsty Bear

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 17:52:26 GMT

Last night a large group of geeks got together for a beer and some socializing at the Thirsty Bear. I think the event was set up by Simon Phipps, but many java bloggers attended. Heck, even Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystem's showed up. Apparently, he has a blog as well.

As a side note, I would like to thank the guys from Atlassian for the java.blogs tshirt. The tshirt says, "More People read this tshirt than my blog" or something to that affect. Tshirts are top notch and have high geek appeal.

I got to meet Simon Brown and Sam Dalton while at the meetup. Although, I didn't get to buy Simon the beer I promised him. So Simon, if we meet up again, first beer is on me.

At the end of the night, Andrew and I spoke with Erik Hatcher for sometime about Struts and it's problems. Erik strongly suggests Tapestry so we may have to give it a test drive soon. I saw Erik's talk on Tapestry at the 2004 NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Java Symposium and I have to admin I was impressed. The question is, is it worth learning another framework that most people are comfortable. Regardless, a test drive is not out of the questions. If nothing else, it's a learning experience.

NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Java Symposium - Day 2

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 02:08:33 GMT

Day two's events began at 8am and ended at 5:30pm. 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.

Tapestry by Example (Erik Hatcher)
I thought this session was really good. It had a totally hands on style. Erik started with nothing and banged out a sample app in a matter of 90 minutes. Other than a beret of off the wall questions, the seminar went pretty smooth. The parts of Tapestry that I liked most were "Previewable HTML", correct line numbers in stacktrace's, and there seemed to be less moving parts than Struts. One overwhelming thought was, do I really need to learn another framework that competes with struts. Good or bad, struts is fairly widespread and my efforts would probably be better spent learning more advanced ways to use struts or looking at a lightweight framework like Spring.

Pragmatic Mock Objects (Dave Thomas)
Pragmatic Mock Objects was a tough topic to glean information from since I have never really relied on them before. Sure, I've stubbed out classes before but Dave was very clear that mock objects were much more than that. Unit testing is a personal goal of mine. Im hoping to start incorporating unit tests into every line of code that I write, very soon. I think this shift would be much easier if I didn't spend my time working with the web tier. Even though there are frameworks to aid in unit testing web apps, they never seem very easy to use. Although I've never fully bought into XP, I think there is tremendous value in writing unit tests. I have also had problems believing that TDD is about design and not testing. Well, maybe but testing seems to be a pretty big one to me, I wouldn't discount the safety net that it provides.

Metaprogramming (Stuart Halloway)
As I mentioned previously, Stuart was probably my favorite speaker at this years symposium. His session on Metaprogramming was much of the same. In a nutshell, metaprogramming means writing code that manipulates code. To be more specific, automating repetitive tasks that cannot easily be automated within the language. Stuart picked out a handful of patterns, explained why they existed, and offered better ways of solving the problems.

Programming with Hibernate(Bruce Tate)
This presentation was a bit disappointing. It was made up of entirely powerpoint presentations with no coding examples. Sure he had some code splatter on a slide or two, but at no point did he open up an editor to show or run any code. I liked Bruce's Bitter EJB talk last year, so I expected this to be a good session. Turned out, I was wrong. Other than giving a general overview of Hibernate, Bruce didn't do much to sell the framework. Instead he seemed to be more partial to JDO instead. On a few occasions, he mentioned advantages JDO had over Hibernate.