Raible Designs

iTerm, StrutsForm Generation and the Work Life

I found iTerm via a quick scan of posts on java.blogs. Very cool - I'll have to download it tonight.

I'm still working like a banshee as you might be able to tell from my lack of posting. I was up until 4 in the morning on Sunday trying to complete my struts-resume app for my Wrox Chapter (still not done). I've backed off from my attempts at generating Struts Forms and Hibernate classes from the same POJO. It just doesn't seem likes it's worth the effort. I'd still like to generate the initial stubs for these classes form a database, but I've come to realize that it's not practical to have these classes generated each time. It's just too much of a nightmare to mix and match what goes to Struts and what goes to a Hibernate class. I am going to give it one last college try though. I hope to use a POJO with XDoclet tags, and then modify the XDoclet code for StrutsForms so they can be produced from a POJO. Of course, if I were smart, I'd just finish the damn application the hard way and be done by tonight. Wrox would be much happier I'm sure. I'll try for 2 hours and if I can't get it, I'm done. I think that I'll end up generating the initial struts form and then stuffing it into the source tree for later manipulation. I've found that it's nice to add getter/setters to the form (that never make it to the backend), so this is probably the best way.

Things at the office are going well. I spent most of the day installing Tomcat, MySQL, VeryQuickWiki and Scarab on a Sun box. It was fun doing the ol' command line thing all day and OS X makes it a real pleasure to interact with Unix systems. Transmit2 makes it super easy to transfer files and even allows you to edit with BBEdit. It's worth the purchase for sure at $25.

I've decided (once again) that OS X is not the development environment for me. Eclipse is too flaky (I'm running 2.1 M4) and takes forever to do anything. Ant runs slow as hell, and Tomcat does too. I'm also addicted to Windows Exploder and OS X's Finder does nothing for me. So I told my boss that they were losing money if I didn't get a faster box, and Windows would probably be best. They said it didn't look good, so I volunteered to bring in my own machine (Dell 8100 P1.5, 768 MB RAM) if they could get me a new hard drive. By getting a hard drive, I don't have to blow out my Red Hat 8.0 installation and I can transfer the hard drive to the new machine when they finally get me one. So they found a 20 Gig hard drive and I'm building the machine as I hammer out struts-resume.