resistance to persistence

The intro to Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide (Exam 310-035 & 310-027) has some good tips on how to study for and write the SCJP exam. I haven’t got mine yet, but I do have my study guides…now I just have to find a bunch of free time to study for it.

AnyEdit.org has a decent looking free IDE that handles many languages (”AnyEdit supports powerful and customizable syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript,JSP,VBScript by default. Also, you can create your own syntax file to support other programming languages. More language syntaxes are available on File Listing”) and also has some of the more powerful features that should be standard in all editors now (code completion, auto complete, templates, etc). I think I might give it a try.

I read about this sort of idea on ShouldExist a while back and this p2p client from Konspire has built it into their service. It’s a push based p2p service, rather than searching for things you would like, it should automatically get things you like. I haven’t tried it, and doubt I will.

KickJava aims to give examples of api usages. If you’re not sure how to use a certain api, check the site and there may be examples to study. There’s also a link to a massive list of free books to download.

The past weekend I finally proposed to my long term (6+ years) girlfriend. I planned a secret trip away. Next up, wedding planning…

I’m currently reading “Software Project Management” by Walker Royce in an attempt to further my knowledge & experience in this area. It’s going to be a long tough book to get through. Standard textbook stuff. Trying to read a bit at lunchtime. I’m interested in what others thought of the book. Any other recommendations? Leave your comments. It’s originally published in 1998, but I figure most of the principles should still apply. I’m interested to see if the recommendations of this book are in line with our current management process, or completely opposite. So far, I think it’s the former, but I’m only through the first chapter so far

Well, WebLogic 8.1 wasn’t so bad. So far, I’ve ported my J2EE app from WebLogic7.0 to WL6.1 & WL8.1. Going from 7->8.1 was a breeze…nothing really to do. The deploy descriptors didn’t even change for any of the stuff I had specified. Once again, BEA has changed up the directory structure for WebLogic81. I thought with 7.0, they’d learned their lesson and finalized on one….not yet. Get it together BEA.

I tried to port to WebLogic 6.0 after 6.1, but without any luck. Really frustrating because it seems so close. BEA claims WL60 supports a prelim version of EJB2.0 (once you track down ejb20.jar - that was a royal pain in the butt…it is no longer available), but it’s giving me problems. There’s a problem with 2 CMP EJBs with a relationship between the 2. When one EJB is created, the second EJB is created from that and the relationship is on the primary key of the 2nd EJB. For some reason, I get a SQL error saying the primary key cannot be null. I’m theorizing that this is related to the fact that the ejbCreate method for CMP returns a null. I’ve searched for something similar in 6.0 examples, but no luck. Hopefully someone will see this and know what the problem is. If so, let me know if you have some suggestions.

Next up…WebSphere 4.05! Oh no!

After reading about Denim this morning, I peeked around a bit more on Berkley’s Group for User Interface Research site. I’m very interested in using technology to communicate & redefine the way work is done. The transition from the paper world to the digital world is still very new and I’m sure that a keyboard is always not the correct input method. Keyboard may be fine for writers, but isn’t the way for designers or artists. I looked at Designers Outpost for a while. Some good steps forward, but seems like a very complex (& expensive) setup of cameras which will be a hinderance to adoption. One thing I thought was very cool is the cameras capture where you are standing in front of the board and transmit your shadow to the remote users’ board as if you’re standing on the other side of the board. MIT’s Media Lab does a lot of similar work…I wish they could have had programs like this at my University. Maybe Grad studies for me?

Use Denim next time you’ve got to design the layout of your site. A new way to mimic the design process on paper and bring it into the digital world. This is totally the way I want to work. How many times have I done storyboards for sites and then have to mess around redrawing or trying to keep track of all my papers. I love the way you can switch from different modes by zooming to different levels. And the prototype site with all your scribbles actually runs and is clickable. Try out an example (click the blue text areas). Watch a Real Player video of the process of designing a site with Denim. Hopefully I can run this with a mouse & regular computer, rather than just a tablet pc. Now when will someone make some design prototype tools like this for other areas of code design.

JFluid - I saw this today. Quite interesting, especially relating to my work. I’d like to understand more about how JVMPI works. This looks like it might have some advantages over JVMPI.

“Using this mechanism, tools may dynamically inject and remove bytecodes right into the running Java code, making it emit all kinds of events, that can be collected and analyzed. Since event emission is highly controllable and can be turned on and off at any time, this technique should allow developers to introspect their applications with overhead that can be bound in value and localized in time. That is, one can attach a tool to the running JVM(tm), introspect the dynamic behaviour of the application (which may incur some overhead), and then detach the tool, letting the application to continue running at full speed. In this way, information about dynamic behaviour of applications can be obtained much faster, and with substantially smaller effort than when traditional techniques are used.”