Older blog entries for aeden (starting at number 20)

I will be giving a presentation on open source Java web application frameworks at the South Florida Java Users Group if anyone is interested. The meeting is January 16th, 6:30 PM at Nova University in Ft. Lauderdale. I will be giving an overview of what web application frameworks are and then will explain the strengths and weaknesses of six different frameworks:

• Apache Struts
• Webwork
• Apache Turbine
• JPublish
• Enhydra Barracuda
• Maverick

JPublish

Speaking of JPublish, I am currently working on the 0.7 release. My research into other frameworks has helped me realize that I need to focus on initial installation and ease-of-use of JPublish. To that end I am creating several WAR files which can be dropped into any servlet engine which supports WAR files. This has been challenging because currently JPublish requires full paths or paths relative to the working directory, whereas a servlet engine should use paths relative to the application context. It is coming along though, and I hope to have the next release out before my presentation.

Released version 0.5 of FormProc yesterday and a minor bugfix for it today. That'll teach me to not release after 10PM.

I am diving back into JPublish after some time away from it. I have decided that JPublish really needs to be packaged as a WAR so potential user's can just drop it into their servlet engine and see it actually running. Struts does a REALLY good job of this. Everything in Struts including the documentation is in a WAR so you have to deploy it to see it.

EdenCRM version 0.5 is now available at http://edencrm.sf.net/. I am happy that I finally got that release out the door - now I can focus on the long list of items I intend to put in the 0.6 release. Hopefully I can spend some time on modules OTHER than the Mail module. Face it though - the mail module is the most complicated and is probably where most customer service reps will spend their time. But the Ticket module needs major work to make it more usable. Onward and outward.

Haven't posted in a little while. I released version 0.4 of DataBind and EdenLib is now in Beta. I have been working hard on the next release of EdenCRM, but I just haven't been able to find the time to get it to a stable releasable state - I keep adding features. :-)

Has anyone ever considered writing load balancing software in Java? I was thinking about the state of load balancing software recently because our Local Director here at the office doesn't understand application level failures so it has no way of taking a box out of service if there is a problem at the application level. This got me to thinking: how hard would it be to write a Java app which would listen as a server on specified ports forwarding data to other addresses, which allowed you to easily add extensions which could deal with application level errors (for example doing regexp to determine if a server is sending 500 Internal Server Error messages)? Someone stop me because I see my next project on the horizon and I just don't have time to do it right now.

I finally received my new laptop and I must say that I am extremely pleased with it. I spent the weekend setting it up as a dual boot with Mandrake 8 and Windows 2000. Blew up the paritioning a couple times requiring me to start over. I finally found the good install order and now it works like a charm. I will finally be able to develop when I am away from the home and office!

EdenCRM

I have been working hard on EdenCRM. I spent a couple days rewritting the message storage and retrieval system in the mail module only to throw it away because I wasn't happy with how complex it was becoming. Now I am having issues with a swing component which seems to be caching its state in some way. Grr...

Development Environment

I am so stoked about the work which the authors of jEdit and all of the plugins for jEdit have done. If you want proof that Java can be used as a legitimate desktop development language then look no further than jEdit. Now that Ant integration is provided by the AntHill plugin I can ditch my commercial development environment and use jEdit exclusively! I love open source software and would much rather use it than commercial software.

This makes me wonder - do you think that commercial software developers are scared of the open source movement? I would be.

Work

Uhhh...yeah, I have to.

I finally got the creative juices going again. The funny thing is that I did it by working on a project who's last release 2 and 1/2 months ago. DataBind 0.3 is now available at http://databind.sf.net/. I added support for loading and storing collections of objects as well as for specifying search parameters in a data-store independant method.

Now if I can spend some time on EdenCRM...

I just can't get myself going today. I got postfix working on the Mandrake box I set up, along with IMAP and Tomcat. I know I need to work and be productive but I am just feeling drained today. I am not even in the mood to work on my open source projects. Guess this is one of those wasted days.

Finally installing a personal server for my site. I got fed up with my hosting company's crap...the most recent being the hacking of their credit card database. Haven't these people heard of firewalls? Anywho, I am installing Mandrake 8 and am going to work on making it a nice little machine for my personal work.

FormProc

Lots of good work getting done on FormProc. Several suggestions have come in over the last week-and-a- half and I am implementing them now that the holiday is done and gone. New release coming soon (need to test first.)

My new laptop is finally on order. I am looking forward to getting mobile. I am going to configure the machine so I can use it as my primarily development machine - no more waiting until I get home to write software. I have to remember that a vacation is a time to get away from computers.

I just realized after who-knows how many years that my email address on my web site was not correct. How many emails do you think I have missed because of this minor oversight? And is it necessarily a bad thing that I have missed all of those emails? :-)

freetype: All I can say is I know what you are feeling. Losing a month worth of work really sucks. I once formatted a hard drive and lost 2 years worth of music I had composed. I haven't worked on music much since then. (OK, its not really because I lost all of my work, but because I have triplets to take care of, but the story sounds more depressing if I blame it on technical mistake.)