caucho’s got a facelift

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Jay

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!

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JSR 303… 2 years later

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Jay

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.

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Dr Uncle Jimmy…

Posted on March 10, 2008 by Jay

Saw this skit on SNL; I think it’s pretty funny. Ya might like…

OK, copyright infringement, so youtube took it down… crap. Oh well, my favorite line from the entire thing: “Sure you could find a better barbecue, or a safer surgical experience…”

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constrained resize

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Jay

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!
Posted in Swing | 1 Comment

IDEA hidden features…

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Jay

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.

Posted in Technical stuff | 1 Comment

I love NY…

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Jay

OK, so it had been maybe three years since I last visited NY. Just came back from a six day visit of that great state. You may not know, but I was raised in the Bronx. The Bronx happens to be the best borough of the five that make up the excelsior place we know as NYC. A bit much on the superlatives, I know.

Anyway, it’s great how thing change, and yet they stay the same. Driving in the city hasn’t changed: you can (and are expected) to drive like a mad man. I like that. The fine for driving while holding your cell phone (instead of using a hands-free set) is $150. I didn’t like that. The only way I learned that without actually getting a ticket was because an officer told me. Here’s some more background: all the people taking funds at the bridge tolls have been replaced by NYC police officers. I don’t know why, but I assume Mayor Bloomberg had a good reason. I think he’s a quality Mayor.

It was another whirlwind tour of friends and family. In six days, I saw about seven different groups. I went from Rockland County to Long Island, and various places in between. It was time well spent. The family and friends I saw included people that had been asking when I would be back in NY. My response was usually, “No idea”. After 2 years, that gets old, and these loved ones begin to plot your eminent beating. So I went primarily for love, and a little bit of fear.

I even got in a football game (actually three). I sprained my ankle in the first game. This rendered me fairly useless as a lineman in the following games. Also, at my size, when I say I have good hands or that I can QB, most people either silently (or audibly) laugh at my statement, and then move on with their lives. As usual, after gimping my way through 2 games as a fairly useless D-lineman, I called for the QB position. We were down, 3 to 1. I quickly made it a more respectable score of 4 to 3, them. Two separate guys dropped passes that would have tied it up. Regardless, it was a great day.

I’m am tired, and in a bit of pain. But it was definitely worth it. Oh yeah, although I grew up in the city, I never knew how serious Long Island was about seafood. Man, I love NY.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

webwork2 and unchecked checkboxes…

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Jay

your average Web-MVC framework does many things. It may simplify your life with some basic type-conversion. It may allow you to directly map an object’s method as a Web Action. However, even the best may gloss over an issue… at least for a while. For me that framework is WebWork2, and that issue was unchecked checkboxes.

In accordance with the W3C spec, when a form is submitted, its unchecked checkboxes, and other unsuccessful controls are simply ignored. So, you need some form of trickery to get that false set on your Action. A fairly simple (rubbish) hack for this is to search by name for the desired control in a given request, and set it to false when you can’t find the name/value pair.

Well, thanks to some innovation by Konstantin Pribluda, this horrible (OK, slight nuisance) unchecked checkboxes issue is now a thing of the past. For those of you who can’t wait for release of WebWork-2.2.7, there’s a download just for you (Thanks Toby). Guys, keep up the good work!

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java posse says please leave…

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Jay

So some guy (I wont link to him) had complaints about podcast lengths. He happened to single out the Java Posse. They didn’t take that laying down. Next podcast – episode 161, the English guy (Dick Wall) politely notes that unsubscribing is not a difficult task. The other guys were more forward – they asked the guy to please unsubscribe.

I have to agree w/ the posse. Stop crying about the length of a free podcast! Who cries about unfinsihed podcasts literaing their itunes? Who blames amateur content producers? Wow.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

certified in spring…

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Jay

Spring has definitely made my life easier. Not just on all of my side projects, but at work too. At this moment, I have all our domain objects and services wired and working via Spring-2.5. Mostly JPA, two JDBC Daos. A bunch of POJO services with some some basic transaction management. Client/Server, so some RMI invokers, and some JMS. Nothing too crazy. All of this took about 3 months. But I assure you, this would have taken double, maybe triple that time if I had to write any of real boilerplate junk. I’m not a fan-boy, just thankful.

Anyway, so you mightunderstand why I’d consider getting some level of SpringSource Certification. At only 150USD, it’s not that bad. Sun’s exams were about that, and more in some cases. Speaking of Sun’s certification, did it really help? I don’t mean just after you got it, but now. If you are a Sun certified JEE developer, and you’ve interviewed for a position in the past 3 years, do you believe having that certification helped you get a position? Maybe it did.

Personally, I fought with this between 2004 and 2006. In the end, I realized simply knowing your stuff probably goes a bit further. A reasonable technical interviewer will know exactly what to ask to weed out those lacking the required knowledge; certification or not. With that in mind, I wonder, how would I really benefit from the certification. Some might say, if it wont break your bank, do it. In some ways, this is like college: I know many who did not go to college, and are great at whatever they do. I also know some fellow CS alumni who are just rubbish.

Posted in Technical stuff | 3 Comments

the show me campaign…

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Jay

If you can, and care, here’s a charity to consider: the show me campaign. I came upon it watching a John Legend video for his song, Show Me. At first I thought he was doing a take on the two footprints in the sand inspirational. But it wasn’t… It was about 2 stowaways that lost their lives trying to escape poverty by climbing into the landing gear section of a plane. It seems this case, among many pulled on John’s heart strings… I hope it does the same for you.

Posted in Giving | Leave a comment