Raible Designs

Why iTunes for Windows Rocks

Because now everyone in the office (regardless of PC or Mac) can listen to each others music libraries. Can you say 100 GB of music?!

Web Frameworks - which one should I learn?

I've seen a lot of talk about Web Frameworks these last couple of weeks - particularly JavaServer Faces, WebWork and Spring. There's also been great articles posted comparing Spring and WebWork as well as an Introduction to Spring from TSS. Spring, WebWork and JSF all look like excellent frameworks to me, but I also continue to believe that Struts is a great framework. And I would go so far as to say that it's the best web application framework. Yep, I said it - Struts is the best web application framework to learn if you are a web developer wondering what to learn. Why? Because it will get you a job.

I've continued to receive a fair amount of calls and e-mails over the last couple of weeks - and they're all calling because of my Struts experience. Good luck in finding a company that wants you to build their web application using WebWork or Spring. Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to hire employees for Raible Designs and build web applications in my own office with my own employees. Then we'll get to choose whatever technology we want to build customers' apps. Until then, I'll stick with Struts and continue to be an employed developer.

I strongly believe the best way to learn anything is to get paid to do it. I've learned Struts over the past couple of years, not because I wanted to, but because someone else wanted me to - and they paid me to do it. Of course, there are some companies that will probably pay you to learn WebWork or Spring, but most would rather not.

Another thing to consider is that WW and Spring will probably someday develop "migrating from Struts" documentation. Sounds like a good idea to me - until then, and until someone pays me to learn the others, Struts is #1 for me.

Now it's your turn to tell me why my logic is flawed... if you can. ;-)

Is it possible to share Safari's bookmarks with Firebird

Now that I have the pinstripe theme for Mozilla Firebird installed, I think I'll start using Firebird a fair amount. However, all my bookmarks have fallen into Safari's black hole. Is it possible to share Safari bookmarks with Firebird? It'd be sweet if these browser vendors would get together and allow all their browsers to read from the same bookmarks file.

OS X: Apps I dig

I'm suspicious that there's more cool apps for OS X out there, so I'll tell you my favorites, and maybe I'll hear about some new ones in the process.

• Transmit (FTP Client) and CandyBar for Icon customization.
• SmartCVS for CVS access.
• CodeTek's Virtual Desktop.
• Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection - just because you have a Mac doesn't mean you have to give up Windows.
• Fire Instant Messaging Client - because iChat sucks and only lets you see one line at a time (while typing).
• iTerm - a tabbed terminal for OS X.
• MySQL Cocoa - for administering MySQL. It's invaluable with Roller to correct HTML errors in comments. On Windows, I use MySQL Control Center, which will have OS X support someday.

There's more that I didn't feel like listing because I figured most folks know about them - NetNewsWire, Tiger Launch and Clutter to name a few.