Blog

I've had a lot of small discussions recently with people where they were just absolutely not interested in using Maven. Has it somehow gotten a bad reputation when I wasn't looking? Am I missing something? When did I suddenly become the guy using a tool that was too slow, or not agile enough for everybody? I can still sing and dance and jump like you guys, too! Even if I do use Maven...

Earlier, I wrote about having to build a solution using servlets to write out the contents of the RSS feed for my blog. I am using JSF on this site. There are solutions - like Pretty Faces - that work and provide a lot of flexibility for mouting JSF logic at a given URL. So, initially, my RSS and Atom feeds were being handled by a backing bean in JSF. Being JSF, this necessitated the need for a session cookie (even though, clearly, the RSS / Atom feeds are stateless.)

I just published a change to the code that should hopefully prevent readers (like Google Reader) from constantly requeuing all my old blog entries as "unread." �I don't know if it'll work (I've never had to debug this particular web client!), but we'll see.

Warning, this blog entry is as much a rant as a blog, and tends on the somewhat lengthy side. You've been warned. I'm looking for the secret of life, as always, and failing it, I'll settle for the secrets of software. This is a blog I don't know how to write, but have wanted to, for a long time. I suspect getting it out on paper will let me revisit with more clarity later.

Today started off nice enough... I went to Malibu Seafood today and enjoyed a lovely day on the beach and came back to check my blogs and, blam! mistake-in-the-face!

You're looking at a work in progress.

I'm trying to build a component in JSF that in turn has several drop downs that, with the magic of RichFaces, updates the server on the state via Ajax and rerenders the components "downstream" of the component whose state has changed. This is the classical idiom of a drop down has options depend on the previous selections made. The component's used in several places on the system and it would be magnificent if we could blackbox its internals.

This is my first working version of the system being posted from the EC2 cloud. Performance seems alright. I'll update as I dig more into the capabilities. So far getting things up and running has been relatively painless. There's something inherently awesome about being able to login and setup your own server without having to beg for certain extra capabilities.

I did a talk waaay back in March on Spring Integration for TheServerSide Symposium. If you're into Spring and want an hours worth of good wholesome ESB fun, may I humbly suggest you check out the talk. I'd love to know what you think so please feel free to leave a comment!

Recently, I've been playing with Tapestry 5. The experience has been extremely satisfying. Although there are issues that could be worked on, on the whole this is the most pleasant development environment I've ever use for Java Web development. Frankly, it started as just a way to keep my mind away from a main project I'm working on. I figured I'd give it the five minute test. Actually, this is the third time I 've given it the five minute test, and this time it took. What did it was release 5.1, which sports a few features that indicate that Tapestry 5 is becoming a very "practical" choice, not just the right one.

My life has been utterly and completely busy for the last several months. I don't know about you, but I love it when that happens, even if it does take me aay from priority things like maintaining this blog. I'll take this post to sort of stretch my blog legs out again, and then try to establish a blog with more frequency.