Raible Designs

Testing from Kung-Log

I'm writing this post using Kung-Log. In the list of blogging clients in the latest issue of MacWorld, it received the highest rating. It's pretty cool, but IMO, NetNewsWire is better.

Customizing JSPWiki

I've installed JSPWiki on this server in order to better support collaboration among developers. In particular, I hope to get user's tips and tricks for my demos and downloads. However, JSPWiki out-of-the-box is ugly. Dave has done a good job in making Roller's Wiki look good. So here's my question: How did you do it Dave? Rather than digging for CSS files and what not - can you hook me up with the info. I'll try to document my customization process when it ensues.

The Marquises

Remember my buddy (Brett) from the Galapagos Islands? Well now he's in the Marquises. Below are the pictures that Brett and his fiance, Tiffany, sent us today.

vi plugin for Eclipse

I found this this vi plugin for Eclipse, thanks to the previous URL trail. It's kinda cool - it works - but it's a pain that you have to "load vi" each time you open a new file.

[ANNOUNCE] AppFuse 0.8 Released!

Not much new in this sucker ~ the main reason for this release is to demonstrate self-registration (and auto-login) in a CMA (Container Managed Authentication) environment. I also upgraded most of the dependent packages (i.e. Struts, Hibernate) to their latest releases, and added a binary release as an optional download. [More, Download, Release Notes]

For those of you that might not know, AppFuse is a project I created in order to help me ramp up web development projects faster. I've found it takes a long time to start a project and get the directory structure, build files (incl. ant tasks for junit/cactus/canoo) and all that jazz in place - so I created appfuse. I created it for myself, I'm using it currently at Comcast, and it works great. You might say that "Maven already does this" - and you're right, but I wanted to do it the Erik Hatcher way (after reading his book). I may make an attempt to mavenize the project in the future, but I currently don't see the need.

Is XDoclet the best thing since Ant?

I think XDoclet is the best thing since Ant but that's probably because I use it daily (and nightly on on other projects). If you're not using XDoclet now, chances are you soon will be - and then you'll wonder - What took me so long? Calvin Yu gives his take on JSR 175.

I'm very excited about the new Metadata feature that's going to be in 1.5. I'm usually in agreement with the view that adding new language features is just making Java more complex, but I think metadata is going to put a whole new emphasis in automating repetitive tasks. This should also bring xDoclet to the forefront as a necessary tool for Java development.

(emphasis mine) Let's just hope that Sun tries to use some of the goodness that the XDoclet team has put together. XDoclet rocks - if you don't believe me, you must like editing your web.xml and struts-config.xml (among other deployment descriptors) by hand. I did that for years - and my opinion is that using XDoclet is easier.

[JDO] Hibernate will provide an implementation if it's good

From Gavin on the hibernate-devel mailing list:

If JDO becomes an accepted standard, Hibernate will provide an
implementation. That is what I have always said. At present there are
simply too much problems / limitations with JDO for it to become accepted.
JDO 2.0 may fix that, but thats pure speculation since no-one knows what
JDO 2.0 might look like.

But we will continue to support and improve our own APIs since they will
always be more appropriate to the problem we are trying to solve: ORM. JDO
is a generic databinding API. Hibernate is not.

To me this says "You don't have to choose between JDO and Hibernate." You can chooose Hibernate and if JDO ever becomes good enough (as a standard), then you can (hopefully) find comfort in the fact that Hibernate will support it.