that’s great…

next…

Tonight I start my first GigaSpaces project. It’s been on my mind since last November, and it’s been building steam. Why do I need a JavaSpaces/OpenSpaces framework? This project is supposed to be for a larger user base (500+ to start), and based on my academic distributed computing experience, and the excellent posts on highscalability.com, I know I need to upgrade some of my current 3rd party libraries. For performance reasons, of course.

So, I’m going with Spring-2.5.3 for my AOP and DI needs; easy choice. Hibernate-3.2.6 for ORM (I’m staving off JPA, for as long as I can!). MySql-5.0 for database. The UI… Well, I haven’t decided. I know I have to start moving away from WebWork-2. This isn’t up for debate. But I’m torn between moving to Struts-2 (familiarity) or JSF (component-based). I read this FAQ entry for the differences between Struts-2 and JSF.

Ehh… here’s to new things: I’m going with JSF. I’ll take a serious look at Seam and MyFaces.

*****

Update: After some discussion, and further research, I’ve decided to hold off on using JSF. Since it’s a fairly mature, event-based API, I definitely see myself using it in the near future. However, since scalability is the currently highest priority, I’m compelled to go with Struts-2. This also allows me to upgrade all my existing WebWork-2 projects…

caucho’s got a facelift

You may, or may not know that I’m still a Resin user. Hence, every now and then I hit the Caucho site for documentation, mailing list archives, etc. Well today I decided to do just that; it had been at least a month since my last visit. I was pleased to see and cleaner and brighter interface, and even a blog. I’m taking this to mean there’s some new life in the Caucho’s/Resin’s development group (or at least their marketing). I for one am happy to see it!

JSR 303… 2 years later

Back in ‘06, I wrote about JSR 303, which aims to bring Bean Validation to the JDK. Well to be specific, it defines a meta-data model and API for JavaBean validation. The spec. draft aslo states that it will not be specific to any one tier or programming model. It will specifically not be tied to either the web tier or the persistence tier, and will be available for both server-side application programming, as well as rich client Swing application developers.

I, along with others, who relied on an external validation module, thought this JSR was a great idea. However, for whatever reason, it didn’t progress as fast as some of us would have liked. Now, it seems to be back in gear. Emmanuel Bernard has made a sneek peek available. Take a look, and as he asks, give some feedback.

constrained resize

OK, I have a JFrame whose dimensions had to be constrained on resize. Basically, it has to grow equally in width and height (think Checkerboard). In order to do that, I had to override the JFrame’s setBounds. However, I had no idea how to apply this same behavior when teh Frame is maximized. When maximized, the Frame would simply blow up and fit the entire screen. Well, it turns out that the same way setSize has been deprecated, setMaximiumSize - although not deprecated, it’s ignored for Frames. So use setMaximizedBounds.

   Rectangle bounds = getGraphicsConfiguration().getBounds();
   int minOfSizes = (int) Math.min(bounds.getWidth(), bounds.getHeight());
   setMaximizedBounds(new Rectangle(new Dimension(minOfSizes, minOfSizes))); // viola!

IDEA hidden features…

If you are a long time user of IntelliJ IDEA, you already know why it’s great. If you are not, I’ll tell you the IDE just makes things easier. Aside from the community, and large number of quality plugins, it has killer shortcuts. Now some of you may say, yeah you can add your own shortcuts in any reasonable IDE (eclipse). This is true. However, the major difference in IDEA is the built-in shortcuts dwarf what I’ve seen in other IDEs. There are so many shortcuts that you will miss a few, guaranteed. Well, a recent post on the Xebia blog gave me 2 new shortcuts, that I know I’ll be using heavily. Check ‘em out for yourself.