The functional mess that is Oracle JDeveloper
By corporate mandate I've been using Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.1.0.3984, that version number is ridiculous and ought to tell us something, to develop Java EE web applications on and off for about 6 months now and I've never been so frustrated with a development environment in my life. I hear it from seasoned Oracle developers that the wizards are great, you can create web service in a few clicks, you can create an EJB effortlessly, and the application has come such a long way, my God how bad was it before. Honestly, I don't give a flying fuck what you can do with the wizards if the core application is unusable. Coming from an Eclipse/RAD background my gripes are probably slanted, I'm used to being able to do simple things easily and quickly without the IDE flaking out on me completely.
Endeca Discovery Conference 2007
In Boston last week for the Endeca Discovery Conference. Endeca is a fast-growing Boston-based company that produces a search and navigation engine that's being used by several major websites around the world, they're growing by leaps and bounds every year. They have a different spin when it comes to search, they call it "Guided Navigation," it's basically the concept of allowing the user to decide how they find information and guiding them along with attributes of that information displayed at relevant points in time and enabling a user multiple paths to that information while allowing a business to also provide contextual information and merchandising tied to that navigation.
Endeca is in their 5th year and has just released version 5.1.1 of their product, with 64-bit support, key enhancements to their WebStudio suite for business users, many-to-many relationships, and a slew of other improvements to their platform. At the conference Endeca also launched a user-community site for developers called Eden, http://eden.endeca.com. The developer site is just a shell at this point, with paragraphs describing solutions, but no real solutions. The site has potential and probably just needs time to grow, at this point it's a little frustrating, offering the hope of information with a lot of dead ends. Endeca also hinted at the conference at the future release of an Ajax framework called UICL, providing a Web 2.0 integration point with their navigation engine.
All in all it was great to be in Boston for a few days, the weather was beautiful and the sites were fantastic, however the content of the conference could have been compressed into a day, since the same concepts and features were repeated over and over.
Date Driven Development or what I like to call DEE-DEE-DEE
The company I work for has recently undergone a profoundly dumb transformation. Years ago when management seemed to care, we had a small development team striving to move toward a more Agile, test-driven methodology, we scheduled releases based on a realistic feature-set with realistic estimates and due dates. We were on top of our game, the best in our industry, and we cared about our work.
About a year or so ago that all started to change, upper-management made a culture-altering decision, they committed to an Oracle ERP implementation with a two year time-frame for completion, without asking IT how long something of this size might take. So the date was set and the countdown clocks were installed and the "Great place to work" mentality that the company had formerly professed went straight into the toilet. Development began to receive impossible tasks, with impossible dates, and the pressure became unbearable fast. We ramped up hiring and brought on droves of contractors to fill the parking lot and the smoking tents and collect unbelievable fees. Now there is not a person left in IT that is happy about their job or excited about what they do, even the new people hate the place. Our talent has started to look elsewhere and some of our best have already started to leave. The new developers smell the discontent from a mile away and with no allegiance or roots tying them down, they don't last long. Whether the company will make it through this remains to be seen, the word on the street is that nobody has successfully implemented an ERP of this size, which encourages us to throw our hands up. It'll pass.
Honestly, when management picked that magical date out of their asses and made the decision to drive their people into the ground to achieve it, they doomed the company to certain failure or at least us to certain insanity. If nothing else, money has been wasted and years will be spent digging out of this mess, and the competition will continue to surpass us. I believe a company's success is directly dependent on it's people, and I have yet to find a person that believes this project will be a success or believes in the direction the company is heading. I'm sure we're not the first out there to do this, nor will we be the last. We've seen over and over in the corporate world that there are more DEE-DEE-DEE's everyday getting paid huge amounts of money to screw things up, this is a losing battle.
In the future don't bother to ask me how long something will take, just pull a date out of your ass and let me know when you want it D-D-D-Done.
An AJAX email contact form using DWR and Scriptaculous
Coming from the Java Server side, my JavaScript skills are pretty limited, a lot of the AJAX frameworks still require a good deal of JavaScript, or wildly complex configurations, not to mention having to take into consideration how you plan to accept and answer the asynchronous calls on the server side. I needed a framework that was easy to configure, was at home in the Servlet Container, and could expose my existing API's to be called asynchronously.
I came across http://getahead.org and their AJAX framework, DWR, and found they had exactly what I needed and at the right price again, free.
Now down to the business of the article. The purpose here is to give some sample source that I worked through in following the directions on GetAhead's website. I had some issues following their directions and figured others might too, some things didn't seem to be working in their examples.
Source for this article is available here: testDWRContactForm.war
Step 1 - Download DWR and add it to your project lib directory
- Download dwr.jar
Step 2 - Add the configuration to load DWR to your web.xml
dwr-invoker DWR Servlet org.directwebremoting.servlet.DwrServlet debug true dwr-invoker /dwr/*
Eclipse – Open Resource Shortcut – Ctrl+Shift+R
The biggest time-saver I've stumbled upon in Eclipse is the Open Resource Shortcut. Under the Navigate menu is the Open Resource command, shortcut Ctrl+Shift+R, which opens a window that allows you to type a search for any file that exists in your workspace, in your search you can use the ? to replace a single character or * to replace an entire string, the search is amazingly fast. If you've worked on a project for a long time you know the names of all of your php, jsp's, classes, xml files, and properties, and digging through the folder structure in the Navigator and Project Explorer views can be time consuming and annoying. I've trained my self to use it so much that IDE's that don't have a comparable feature, like JDeveloper, annoy me to no end.