We're leaving in a few hours to go to Tucson, AZ for the weekend. We're flying to see my Great Aunt Mary and her friend Judy - and my Mom is going to meet us there as well. Hopefully it'll be a nice relaxing weekend since there will be 3 ladies fawning over Abbie. I'm also meeting up with Rick Hightower since he lives there. The snow is supposed to start in Denver this afternoon - good timing eh?
I've never been to Tucson, but here's a webcam so you can checkout the weather there while I'm gone. Have a great weekend, I'll be back on Monday night.
I figured out a way to remove any ActionForm references from my Managers yesterday. It was pretty simple, but I thought others might benefit from this knowledge. Basically, you just need to add a couple methods to your BaseManager.java file. Here is the latest one from CVS HEAD. Then you can pretty much eliminate any *Form references in your Manager by using the convert(Object) method. This method will convert POJOs <-> Forms and vise versa. You will likely have to do some tweaks on the package names if you're using anything < v1.4. Looking at this diff of the UserManager before and after this change will show you what's changed.
I started this task thinking I could remove the need for Forms in my classpath when compiling the service layer. However, I soon discovered that my Tests have Forms all over the place - since they replicate what my Actions will pass in. Oh well, at least my code is a bit cleaner now.
Of course, this code will become even simpler when I start using an MVC Framework that allows my POJOs to be my data handlers on the UI. These frameworks make me question if I even need Managers. Then again, it's nice to unit test what your DAOs are returning/receiving from the web layer.
It looks like JDOM 1.0 might finally be released next month. The main motivation for this release after 10 betas? According to Jason, it's all about saving face:
As we got closer to the four year mark, JDOM began to be my own problem again. It wasn't that I had different use cases, I just didn't want to be the guy who never finished JDOM. There's nothing like a little face saving as a motivating factor.
Personally, I don't use JDOM, but I've heard good things about it.
