I do like Russ's new design, and I'm almost inspired to redesign myself. Naaahhh, I think I'll save that for a when I'm really bored, or maybe when Julie's in Florida for a week in March. The reason I'm
writing this post is to point out the sweet DHTML over at the International Herald Tribune that Russ mentions. In the bottom right corner of the page, you can adjust the font-size and number of columns. Very cool - and the top menu floats while you scroll. All cool stuff and nicely done.
Is there a Java API out there for workflow, or some package that will allow me to configure workflow for my app. At my day job, we're starting to get into some significant document workflow. For our next release, we'll probably just be keying off a status field - but I'm interest if there's an easy-to-implement workflow package that we can implement now (before we hard-code too much business logic). Thanks for any suggestions!
I looked at JMeter last week, but gave up after attempting to use it for an hour. My primary reason for abandoning my quest to learn was that it's usage has not been budgeted into our development schedule. If I manage to convince the schedulers that it's a good idea to use, I'll be definitely reading/doing this tutorial on JMeter. The section describing recording a test case looks very promising and will make the entire process very easy (I hope). Tip o' the hat to Erik for this tip.
I got this nugget of information off the tomcat-user list this morning.
I talked to the original Tomcat author, James Duncan Davidson, about the
name choice. He gave me a surprising answer. Here's a bit of history...
Tomcat was born in response to the need for an independant servlet
specification implementation. James wrote it hoping that it would
eventually be open sourced. He figured that since most open source
projects had O'reilly books about them that he should name it after an
animal. Essentially he was thinking of an animal that would go on the
cover of an O'reilly book. He came up with "Tomcat" since the animal
represented something that could take care of itself and fend for
itself. That's how he came up with the name.
And Craig McClanahan tells us why he named the Catalina Engine so:
Using "Catalina" was my idea, because I
wrote most of the original code that became it. The reasons are mundane,
but here they are for the record:
* Even though I don't live in Southern CA, I've always liked
what I've read and seen of Catalina Island.
* One of the towns on the island is Avalon, and we were (at the
beginning) considering using the Avalon Framework
(http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/) for the internal architecture.
It would have been a cute tie-in, but alas it didn't happen
that way.
* When I'm coding, I regularly have one or more cats wandering
around my lap and adding to the whitespace when they don't
think I put enough (you don't need fingers to press the space bar :-).
Another "code name" you'll hear in the Tomcat world is Jasper -- that's
the name of the JSP page compiler part of Tomcat. That name was carried
over from even before my time, but I'm sure it probabbly came from the
alliteration (JaSPer).
