WTP Tutorials - Building a School Schedule Web Application

WTP Tutorials - Building a School Schedule Web Application

Nice example.

Java EE without Ajax

Saw this by accident: Apusic is a chinese middleware company that has licensed and passed the J2EE 1.5 tests.

JavaEE without Ajax

The basic argument is that via a JSF render engine, you can AJAXify your JSF based JSP with minimal effort. The big issue with Ajax now is that you call javascript, hence a maintenance nightmare.(especially after my experience with SBW!!)

to quote:
Java, Yes; Java Script, No!
“We Love Java, Not Java Script.” Alternatively, such meaning can be put in the typical sentence pattern of the former Chinese leader Chairman Mao, “Java, yes; Java Script, no!” I believe that many readers may not agree with the title of this section. Yet it is a common voice of a large number of J2EE developers.
Quite many Java engineers have a strong favor in, or even obsession of, Java. They love the simplicity and elegance of Java. Once they are given an assignment that requires Java Script, they will feel puzzled. Overly flexible grammar, no way of checking the grammar through compiler, lack of good debugging tools… all hampers the use of Java Script by the developers, not to mention development with Ajax.
In short, the Java community needs Ajax to improve the man-machine experience of the Web applications based on javaEE. However, people do not like the current Ajax development mode. Needless to say, we want some new solution.

Who Will Rescue JavaEE Ajax ?
What is it then? My answer is JSF . Now, a popular belief about JSF is, in a somehow comic way, “Tragic life – Sun places JSF into the world of Java Web, naked.” My belief, however, is that as a revolutionary server component technology, JSF is like the sun at eight or nine o ' clock in the morning, hopeful and possible for anything.

Weblogic, Eclipse WTP, and RAVING MAD!!

Listening to the soundtrack of Battlestar Galactica. Bear McCreary. wow, what an imaginative and invocative soundtrack. I haven't seen most of the episodes but the music alone is enough to make me want to see the episodes in question. Got distracted looking at the composers website (bearMcCreary.com) where he describes the themes. Love it!

Am going insane preparing for the Adv Java Prog short course this saturday. Have been working around the clock and not seeing much of my wife and kids. not to mention subject material prep for web services development and going to meetings for the impending merger of facIT and facEng.

Monday was a meeting with our peers in engineering ICT land. Spent most of the time wrangling over title of the new "school". met Bob Rodowski and David Davis. I agree this david on his suggestion (School of ICT)

One reason I'm so mad is I had time to do and rethink the AJP course to something nicer like J2EE 1.5 or whatever.
Anyway, it took me 2 F*CKING months to get weblogic 10 working. Turns out there are a million bugs in it (and I though 9.2 was shit). What ever happened to the quality and speed of 8.1?
I investigated (ie: wasted time) looking at WASCE and Geronimo and so on (I didnt go for JBoss for some unknown reason). WAS 6 could've been a go-er except that it's not that friendly for young-uns at uni.

I wanted to use eclipse WTP 2 to do the development stuff - hey, the embedded JSP container (Jetty, aka J2EE Preview) is cool. But hey, Eclipse WTP 2 under Europa breaks all the time with permgen errors and a million little nigglys. Bleeding edge, more like haemorrage edge. Also because bloody IT support at faculty of IT UTS insist on the latest and greatest software so by default (ed: Fedora 8's fault) it runs fricken "icedtea" Java 1.7. This of course is ALPHA code and breaks not only eclipse but everything else under the sun (or should that be solaris .. chuckle!)

So I kept trying for 2 F*CKING weeks to get it working. Finally, 3 days ago (and a massive panic attack) I gave up and ran Workshop for Weblogic (comes with the server in $BEA_HOME/workshop_10.0 ) which was quite decent actually.
What am I saying??? IT ROCKS. The downside? It CRAPS the other server runtimes. Why did they remove J2EE preview and block you loading any plugins for other server runtimes? Oh well, that's why it's free. I wasted quite a few hours trying to hack it, but hey, ran out of time (suspect they have overridden a few Eclipse WTP classes deep inside in its bowels)

And BEA Workshop (or Workspace whatever) for JSP is wonderful. Has a JSP and Struts and JSF WYSIWYG editor. Amazing that I can run it for free (or at least 1 year). They combined everything together at last in the latest (march 08) versions of Weblogic 10 ?MP1?.

Now one more rant before I finish typing up the labs. I wish there was a way to manage slides. Powerpoint slides that is. I'd like some form of content management system that works for presentations so I can reuse, extend, do OO stuff. Slide Executive (looked interesting but it's a bit of a wank really. Just scans your directories for PPT slides, grabs the text and converts the slide into a GIF (!) then lets you generate virtual presentations via drag drop. You can search (using the extracted text) but there is nothing like version control or whatever. It ain't content management!

Oh goody. Maybe that will be my next project.

Code and content manage rulez!