Blog Yellek

Saw this in Oliver’s Blog and I mostly agree but see the comments I added.

I’ve been having a look at JFunc to help with some interface testing at work. There’s not a lot of documentation but all in all there are some worthy enhancements to JUnit.

Today I was looking at some software at work trying to figure out how it worked. It is a Java Web Start application designed to talk to a database via servlets. So far so good, a good move away from their VB client server app. Then I try and figure out how their client works because users are complaining about slow load times. To my surprise I discover that there is no GUI code, hmmmm, time to read the docs and figure this out. Hang on a sec, they have relational database tables defining the GUI layout !!!!!!!!!. They must be building the screens on the fly every time and transferring all the data for the field layouts every time the app loads. Great for configurability but really, how often does the GUI layout change ? Wouldn’t it be better to create classes via a code generator from the database, compile them and then let Java Web Start cache them properly ? As I said in the title, it’s certainly different.

Is it my imagination or is there a dearth of good Java wiki implementations ? Twiki has nearly everything I need but it’s written in perl (yuck!)

I just crated this java related blog because I figure that a lot of the people who read my normal blog aren’t interested in Java stuff and vice versa. Check out the link to my other blog if you are looking for more general ramblings.

JAXB is definitely cool. This article makes me want to go out and implement JAXB in our application now. Unfortunately I have to keep going with WebWork performance tuning.

JAXB Revisited

One of my colleagues pointed out this article on JDO Central:

http://www.jdocentral.com/JDO_Commentary_DavidJordan_10.html

The question I have is when will someone write a good JDO mapping layer to one of the relational databases that performs well ? All of the benefits that David mentions in his article are very real but JDO won’t be adopted IMHO until it can perform well.

Database performance is one thing that gets a lot of attention in IT circles, just look at the salaries paid to DBA’s for Oracle and DB2. Is anyone writing an open source JDO implementation ?

Saw this on the server side:

xReporter overview

Looks like an interesting architecture but I think that the Jasper Reports Webwork combination still has it beat.

Random thoughts

Rickard makes a good point, companies that use open source have a competitive advantage. I just wish that there were better open source solutions to things such as object databases and rules engines.