So I took a peek at Fabrique. I really didn't mean to rhyme this time. Dang, did it again... Anyway... Fabrique is one rockin' application. It took about 10 tries to get the sample application compiled and running, but I got there. They embed Orion as the default App Server, which is a good choice in my opinion. (Orion has always been a favorite of mine and it is good to see others appreciate it as well.)
Fabrique starts you out with a "task driven" environment similar to where Microsoft is going with the Control Panel. "You can do the following things..." and then it list out a couple of different tasks you can do, like open a project or create a new project etc... So I complained about it taking a couple of tries to get the sample to compile and run... It wasn't difficult at all. Click "Run" and choose your application server (I just went with the default), and then you sit back and watch the logs fly by. It finishes compiling all of the EJB's (which may have been the implementation used by the sample app, you may be able to use whichever persistence layer you want... I have to read some more), deploys to Orion and then launches your default browser.
Fabrique is one expansive application. It will probably be a very powerful tool for people that need to build webapps rapidly. One of the cool features... they have their own Calendar control. I mentioned the calendar because it was left out of the JavaServer Faces implementation which really annoyed my friend Scott. He has a point... Microsoft has a web based Calendar control built into Visual Studio .Net, why would you NOT put something similar into JSF?
JetBrains is getting to be a powerful group. Once they get Fabrique, ReSharper and OmniaMea into production, they are going to have three seriously unique and special applications that do not have any real competition. They are taking Microsoft's "embrace and extend" technology to a whole new level. Especially since they are embracing and extending Microsoft tools. OmniaMea extends Outlook and ReSharper extends VisualStudio. JetBrains is definately a company to keep your eye on.
Update: Apparently I was not paying attention in French class. Fabrique is fab-rick-kay not fab-reek. It must be the Texan in me.
"Why do my ActionForms have to have the same properties as my domain object?" is one of the complaints about ActionForms that you usually hear from WebWork users. My reply to this question is "They don't." My ActionForms all 'have a' instance of the domain object as a property. This allows me to easily create the forms using the nested taglib, which isn't really necessary since the dot notation is painless. I have been told that this strategy does not work so well with Hibernate, but it does work with iBatis, Jaxor and probably Torque.
WOOO!! I was invited to join Gmail beta! I love the interface, very slick, very responsive. There seems to be a small lag on receiving email. But that isn't a "big" deal, unless you are talking on the phone and the person is yelling at you "DID YOU GET IT YET?!?!?" I think one email got lost between the forward from my old account and Gmail. I don't think it is a bug perse, so I am not going to report it.
I would like to have some way of searching by contact quickly (like label, but not grouped with the labels). Of course typing in the contact's name and clicking search probably gets the same effect, but it would be cool to have it as a link on the left. The other thing that I miss is sorting. I would like to have newest at the top, but that is just me.
I am sure the more time I spend with it, will bring me enlightenment as to how their way is better.
My wife and I watched Matrix: Revolutions last night. Boring. Even the special effects were boring. Yes, they were good and you could rarely determine what was real and what was computer generated, but it was still boring.
Today, we sat down and watched Timeline. Now, I know movies are never going to be as good as the book. I even know that they rarely follow the exact storyline. But reading the book completely ruined the movie. I am sure it was a good movie, but it was hard to watch since the book was so good. They added a jittery Frenchman to go along on the journey that wasn't in the book. When he was added to the group that was going I asked my wife who "Ensign Jones" was... It was so obvious that he was there to be killed off later on. If you have read the book, avoid this movie.
I was getting about 3 spams a week on my blog. It was getting very frustrating getting the email, banning the IP, delete the post, rebuild. It was getting worse and I had to put a stop to it. I did some research and found MT-Blacklist, the best comment spam blocker for MovableType. Since I installed it three weeks ago, I have only had two spams come through, and those came through the first two days after I installed MT-Blacklist. I am very happy with the results and highly recommend it.
It has been quite a while since my last post. There is a crazy amount of things going on in my life right now, so I thought I would go over a couple. I suggest you grab a cup of Joe and get comfortable, because this is one long post!
I am working on a cool side project with a guy from Michigan. I am trying to decide which technology I should use. My own MadCMS, which would need lots of updating to support some security features, or MovableType, which would need some updating to support custom features.
I have been using JBuilder at work exclusively. It has been rough, but CTRL+J out+ENTER is almost as easy as sout+TAB. I had a fit last Friday because it hid some class files and didn't clean them when I asked. Apparently Paul had the same problem except in IDEA. I personally have NEVER had that problem in IDEA, so I wonder if he usually uses JBuilder :) This all lead up to an interesting discussion about should you centralize your development around Ant or around your IDE with my friend Cris. I have been preaching Ant but Cris is pretty adament about IDE. Just another vi vs emacs.
Work has been pretty hairy. My team really likes some of my ideas and that feels great. It feels good to contribute and solve a couple of hard problems and then be recognized for the effort. This is actually something that is fairly new in my life. I look forward to going to work every day and talking with my coworkers. It is always a new adventure and I am learning alot. I am particularly glad that the leadership on the team is what it is. One guy is like a grandfather to the entire team. I have learned alot about how to interact with management from him. He mentions from time to time that he reads my blog, so I would like to say "Hi Paul! Thanks!"
Another side project that I am working on is an idea I had a while ago called Googled Favorites. The idea is that the browser should present a good idea of what I want to read when I open my browser. From time to time I just sit down and want to catch up with reading things that interest me. My expectation is that my favorites would be ordered by previous surfing habits. My first approach to this idea was to create a plugin for the browser that would watch the history. But then the surfing habits would only be measured from one computer. And I would have to stick with the same browser. And it would probably require some C or C++ both of which I am not familiar with or eager to learn. So I stopped thinking about it for quite a while.
Then one of my friends told me about his bookmarks that he keeps online and how he wished that there was some automation behind those bookmarks. That kinda got my juices flowing and then I remembered my bookmarks idea. So I started thinking about what my ultimate home page would be. It would have to have my bookmarks, a Google Search, My RSS feeds would be nice and... Googled Favorites! Since it is on a web server I thought about capturing the clicks and measuring them from the page, but then I thought "PROXY SERVER!" A proxy server has access to all of that information, so all I have to do is point my browser at a proxy server. I haven't worked out all of the kinks yet but there is progress.
I have been using Opera for the last couple of months and I really like it, but I like Mozilla as a browser more. What I really like about Opera is the email client. It just blows Outlook away. The spam filter isn't as good as SpamBayes, but it works. What really hacks me off is that I have to use the web based mail from work, so I don't delete the mail off of the web server. This means that I have to manually remove it from the server which is a real pain. My provider said that they will have Spam protection in a month or so which will be nice. On the other hand, I have a feeling that as soon as GMail is available, email clients will be a thing of the past.
I have started reading a couple of new blogs. SlayerOffice is all about favelets, JavaScript and CSS. Kevin works for Google and seems to be an all around nice guy. I am gonna shoot a couple of ideas about how to improve GMail to him in hopes of making it a better service.
Last but definately not least, family. My daughter is now 8, my son is now 11 and my wife and I are both a year older. All of these birthdays are within 32 days of each other. It makes for a fun month :) I am finding that I love my wife more every day. My kids are very funny and fun. It is exciting to watch them grow up and become young adults. I am very proud of all three of my munchkins. My wife has painted most of the first level of the house. She has done a marvelous job.
Well, that is all for now. Hopefully it won't be so long before my next post! I hope you all have a good weekend.
Why would a group whose job is to build software, not budget purchasing computers for developers? That is like a taxi company not putting gasoline in the budget. Or better yet, tires. Tires are an expensive upfront cost! How could we possibly budget an extra $600 to tires?
We got new computers yesterday at work. They are quite nice. The developers on other teams are complaining about why they don't get nice new computers as well. I agree, why don't they have new computers as well? Developers should have the best tools available for their job.
My manager is out of the office in training, and the assistant manager got slammed with the question this morning. Since I was out of the office as well, when I returned my coworkers jumped on me, since I was the one who started the process for getting them in the first place. I invited the assistant manager over to my cubicle and showed her the difference between the environment that everyone else uses and the new computer. I simply started jEdit. On the old environment, it took 25 seconds to start. The new environment had jEdit running in less than 2 seconds.
There are a couple of people that support this stance. Joel Spolsky and Tom DeMarco are just two.
Some of these movies are already out, some are actually fading away. But I wanted a list of the movies that I intend to watch, so I thought I would post it here. Anyway, here is my list:
Hellboy
Jersey Girl
Lady Killers
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
50 First Dates
The Last Samurai
Mystic River
The Alamo
The Whole Ten Yards