Patrick Peak has a weblog that was just started last Wednesday. He wrote a great post today on Tiles that I hope to send to the struts-user mailing list (as soon as I get his permission). Unless someone else has already done it, of course. This is definitely a blog to watch and enjoy.
I don't believe it's started yet, but "The war in Iraq" was the only title I could think of. Anyway, I haven't been too concerned with it up to this point. I don't know that I support it, but I don't want to be the victim of chemical or nuclear warfare either. However, it became pretty personal today when I received an e-mail from one of my best friends.
For those of you who didn't already know, I was recently activated and deployed to Kuwait on the seventh of February. Obviously I had to withdraw from school and could be here for up to a year. However, this is very unlikely and I'm speculating and hoping that out unit will be sent home in either May or June.
....
I'm stationed at Al Jaber Air Base approximately 45 miles northwest of Kuwait City. As you can imagine the base in a very busy place right now with units from all four service braches present, along with a small contingency of British troops. I can't disclose too much information about the resources in place or our mission, but I can tell you the base is well fortified and protected. I'm sorry I didn't get in touch with some of you before I left. I had a very limited amount of time between the time I was notified and actually deployed, and was very busy taking care of personal affairs.
Yikes! Now I really hope we don't go to war!
I received the February issue of Java Developer's Journal today. I thought it pretty cool that java.blogs, Roller and MiniBlog were all mentioned. I barely skimmed the thing, so it's possible that there are more nuggets like this hidden in its pages. Maybe I'll find out tomorrow - Abbie wants me to read her a story tonight.
I received the reviews/comments back from Wrox today on my Security and Struts chapter. I briefly read the e-mails and gasped at the deadline for editing/returning (next Monday). Overall, the e-mails were encouraging and didn't seem to indicate a lot of change, just more code samples and a more consistent flow. Knowing my luck, there's all kinds of work hidden in the marked-up Word docs. Getting these chapters edited and returned could take a while since it gives me an excuse to dive back into struts-resume and add some more features. Maybe that's why they give the short deadline.
One interesting point that was mentioned is that the Struts chapter was so packed full of tools (i.e. XDoclet, Struts, Validator, Ant, Hibernate, Tiles) that they're thinking of renaming it to be something like "Leveraging Struts, Tiles, and other Tools." Sounds cool to me. In my current project, it seems that Struts only plays a small role in the whole webapp, but after teaching it to a co-worker over the last week - I guess it plays a larger role than I thought. The combination of all these tools and learning them can be a bit overwhelming - I guess I had an advantage in learning since I wrote about them and also did a sample app. I tell you what - "doing it" is certainly the best way to learn. Now hopefully I can come up with a better way to explain how to do it. The book is (to my knowledge) still scheduled to be released in March.
Boy, what a great weekend I had. Three of my best friends and I drove to Steamboat on Friday night and met up with some other very good friends. There were about 20 of us total that rented a house and had a great time. It was -21 (F) when we drove up, and about -10 when we went skiing on Saturday. The fun we had made up for the cold, and we actually ran into another friend that we hadn't seen in 5 years! Good times were had by all.
Today, back at the grindstone, I got to start working on a UI prototype. I did a lot of stuff with the DOM in JavaScript and CSS. Man that stuff rocks and makes it so easy to create a truly user-friendly webapp. I was doing pretty simple stuff like changing table row background colors, adding/deleting rows in a table and duplicating rows. Tomorrow, I'll be implementing a client-side sorting script on a table. I'm lucky on this project in that I only need to support IE 5.5+ - which has pretty good DOM support. I developed all day long on IE 6.0 and was amazed when I tested it (at the end of the day) and it actually worked on IE 5.5. Made me smile from ear-to-ear. I checked it in and left before I broke anything.