Blog

What a month!

Not to cheapen such an awesome Bob Dylan song, but I felt it was a propos... Things are really going to be busy pretty soon.

I had the requirement to provision users of a system with an FTP solution. I wanted something lightweight and very configurable. I chose to embed The Apache Mina FTP Server since it's flexible, imminently hackable, (it's written in Java and is deployed using Maven and Spring) and embeddable. This entry is about that process.

My favorite show on television used to be The West Wing. The show was witty, and featured arcane, blissfully self contained plots and narrative.. dialogue... banter that would tickle Shakespeare. It was amazing. It was an ideal view of the White House and the men and women inside the executive branch. There were, with rare exceptions, no ludity, no over-the-top romances, no digressions into the characters' personal lives. Except, of course, where these digressions served the episode's plot. The plot - the challenges these characters faced in day-to-day governance - was the only thing respected.

A lengthy upgrade process caused my blog to die, but it's back!

In my last post I talked about habits geared towards acquisition of skills. It does sometimes happen the other way – where you need to unlearn something, or re-frame an existing skill in a different way in order to advance with it. This is a natural part o moving forward in life, of adapting. I like to think that I do an acceptable job of keeping current, of adapting.

I'm looking forward to the chance to get some code done unabated by distractions of living with somebody: synchronized meals, activities, favorite TV shows, etc. No disractions. Not if I can help it.

As I like to do every now and then I'm checking into the world of mobile. Theres been a flurry of activity in this space recently, so it's high time I recap, lest I forget. Among the headlines: Adobe announces massive Flash Mobile deployments: iPhone not accounted for, WebKit's just about the official mobile platform browser of choice, though irrelevant for mobile platform development, and finally JavaFX Mobile announced (surprisingly) amidst questions of relevance.

I go out of my way to make the development experience quick. I'm still a java developer and not, say, a Python developer, but I loathe the iteration time. It's the number one thing I wish we could do better in Java. Sure, during development I go out of my way to make iteration less painful. One aspect of this is using Maven's Jetty plugin, which lets me edit HTML, JSP(X), CSS, JS files without undo redeploys. However, it's not enough. I keep my model and services tier in a separate VM for testing, so that the code isn't collocated by default. This has the effect of making the occasional redeploy of a web application much more bearable. However, even thoere, sometmes you find yourself fidgeting with things inside of an Action or a Spring MVC controller that aren't broad strokes but really sort of fine granularity changes. Each time you redeploy you lose your session and it's just generally an unnerving mental interference, even if it is only a few seconds.

Sometimes people tell me, "Josh, you're an idiot!" Then I have myself a good cry and walk it off.

I published an article on Infoq.com recently. The code was sound but it used the cock-a-many OSGi friendly Maven jar dependencies that were being provided off the Spring Source Maven repository. The problem was that these jars were custom to SpringSource's build of the product. If you had an existing Spring application and then you introduced the Spring Integration jars it would bring down a different set of jars -- possibily conflicting with your existing jars' classes.

I've just posted a new blog entry on my Artima.com blog: "Scalability Is Not An Architectural "Capabity" Anymore". Any input's appreciated.