Found this funny. Looks like Lenovo has some issues in their pricing application today. I was planning on purchasing an X300 at some point, but with their new price tag of $11,000, I just don’t think I can afford it. Haha
Apr 112008
Apr 012008
I opened a new Google Code project to manage the scripts I wrote that allow multiple instances of Tomcat to be run on Ubuntu. These scripts are now fully open source (more so than before I guess) and available to everyone. They are also more up-to-date than they were in my previous blog post about them.
Anyways, here’s the project link:
http://code.google.com/p/debian-tomcat-scripts/
You can check them out from SubVersion or browse them online. Enjoy!
Mar 262008
First off, let me just say that I don’t like any rich text editors very much. They are all a messy mix of HTML, JS, CSS, etc. There isn’t anything out there that is truly clean, feature rich and performs well. FCK has always been my least favorite, but I thought I would try 2.6 BETA and I was surprised at how much they added and updated things. This release has better dialogs and a smoother JavaScript experience. It is also less static and easier on AJAX apps.
Anyways, back to the point. JCatapult applications all use SiteMesh for templating and decoration. They actually have to because of our componentization model, otherwise components would be coupled to specific decoration or worse require tons of configuration (anyone interested in this concept contact me directly). Well, SiteMesh decorates your HTML using the GoF decorator pattern. Essentially the servlet container renders your JSPs or FTLs. That HTML is written out to the output stream, which SiteMesh has nicely intercepted being as it is a Filter. Once all the other Filters and servlets in your app complete, SiteMesh post processes the request, parse the HTML and decorates it. Very simple. The issue is that FCK editor uses HTML, JS, and CSS inside iframes in order to work its magic. Very ugly. What happens is that SiteMesh might end up decorating requests for FCK files. FCK REALLY doesn’t like this and usually you’ll end up with one of these symptoms:
- No edit area, just the toolbar
- Empty dialog boxes
- Totally borked drop-shadows on dialogs
The quick fix, just tell SiteMesh to ignore FCK. You can accomplish that inside decorators.xml using an exclude:
<excludes> <pattern>/fckeditor/*</pattern> </excludes>
Mar 072008
With Grails, Rails, Python, etc offering developers the chance to change code, hit refresh and see the changes I often wonder if reload truly a feature that is a must have these days? It seems like it is one of the main selling point by most of the folks pushing those frameworks.
I think this is not a requirement, and doesn’t really increase productivity. Here’s why:
- This promotes less tested code as you can code an entire app without testing at all by simply hitting refresh
- The testing cycle is lengthy by nature, so you do any testing during development, it is going to take some time
- Rather than using reload, if you use the development cycle of write, test, run or test, write, run, than starting up the application incurs minimal overhead in addition to running the tests
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So, what are we really trying to accomplish while developing? Better code, less code, better tests, faster development. These things seem to imply great conventions and excellent extensibility and not reloading.
Feb 042008
I’m releasing JCatapult milestone 1 as I type. This is the first major release of JCatapult and the first of two milestone releases before 1.0 is released in March. This release is stable and contains the majority of the functionality that will be included in 1.0. The documentation is still in progress, but anyone is welcome to take a look and play around with JCatapult before 1.0. Here’s the website:
Enjoy!