Spring time

I've attacked another item of my TODOs list again. I ordered Spring in Action and Hibernate in Action from the Manning in Action series. Since I've been using Hibernate at work I thought I would tackle the Spring book first.

I've been searching for a good Spring tuturial for some time and I haven't found one that clicks for me till now. It's easy to read with plenty of example code. I now have a better understanding of the whole IoC concept. This is about reducing tight dependancy coupling between objects. The idea is that the Spring container takes care of initializing objects and hands all the dependant objects to you on a silver plater.

TheServerSide interviews Craig Mc Clanahan about JSF. They also have a piece about Struts being 5 years old.

SWT and the Doctor

I generally don't heed the endless people moaning about Swing in the front end. I've done a fair amount of it (using it in my current project) and find it reasonably nice to work with. It's a lot simplier then coding up a web front end in HTML/JSP/Taglibs/JSF/Struts and dealing with Requests and Sessions. [sigh].

It's not that slow and its not that ugly. If you use a different L&F such as JGoodies Looks, things become even more pleasant. It's really not that bad (or hard to learn) especially if you take the time to learn the mighty GridBagLayout.

Anyhoo, SWT has been in my TODOs techs to play with. I started to tinker with it and came across a nice tutorial at IBM developerWorks. Although I've used Eclipse for some time, I'm suprised how well the example program actually looks. I might put both feet into the SWT arena. Hmmm.


If you have access to the new Doctor Who (TV show currently playing in the UK, but floating in the ether), I would wholeheartedly recommend watching it. It has all the special effects that today's technology can provide but maintains the classic cheap-and-tacky aliens of yester-decade with an excellent story line. I actually found 'The Empty Child' fairly scary. I can't believe I watched this show as a child.

Hmm.. I guess that explains a lot.

NYJavaSig

Just came back from the NYJavaSig meet with Jim Waldo (used to be the lead architect for the Jini technology) as the guest speaker. The subject was "An Architecture for Service-Oriented Architectures" and it was both thoroughly entertaining and enlightening to learn about Jini. He also used a powerbook to do the presentation. :)

He mentioned that in order to get Java in devices a lot of the classes were axed. Most significantly from Jini's perspective, was the culling of the classloader (Jini is big in streaming objects between services) which kinda stops Jini dead in that aspect.

I couldn't help thinking that, wasn't this the whole point of Jini? For small devices? ie You enter into your office and your pda becomes aware of the printer and the mail repository.

Didn't Sun say "The Network is the Computer"?

It has been my plan to try and look more into J2ME (I want ALL my devices to talk to one another! Think Borg collective), but the last time I checked it was still lacking in features. I have no idea of the current state of that world is.


Also, an interesting article on KernelThread.com about fslogger a subscriber to file system events (for macosx tiger). This is how spotlight is aware of changes to the FileSystem and how the Finder finally updates to files created in the Terminal.

Apple to *not* use Intel.

Yet again another rumour that Apple is talking to Intel about using them instead of the PowerPC. I thought it was fairly obvious that Apple's income comes from *HARDWARE* sales and trying to compete in the PC/Dell arena is suicide. The creation of all those fine software products is expensive (iTunes/iPhoto/iDVD/iMovie/Safari) and if it were not for the hardware sales then Apple would be out of business.

Also..
Google Factory tour

Looks like video will be Skype's next big thing.

Sundays..

I think the quality of a Sunday can be measured by the time before you realize that you have to go to work again on Monday.