26 Mar 2005 esteve   » (Journeyer)

Parallel reading

So I have a bunch of papers and books to read... the rational way should be:

<geekspeak>

read_book("Jakarta Struts Cookbook");
read_book("Fun and games, A text on Game Theory");
read_book("Kanji para recordar");

Bah! It's funnier to implement it this way:

pthread_t th1, th2, th3;

pthread_create(&th1, NULL, read_book, "Jakarta Struts Cookbook");
pthread_create(&th1, NULL, read_book, "Fun and games, A text on Game Theory");
pthread_create(&th1, NULL, read_book, "Kanji para recordar");
pthread_join(th1, NULL);
pthread_join(th2, NULL);
pthread_join(th3, NULL);

This leads to lots of race conditions! By now, I have learnt that minimax is a MVC approach to eat sushi :D

</geekspeak>

A cup of coffee

I've finally set up my Struts environment, composed by:

  • Eclipse, all around good IDE
  • Jetty as my servlet container
  • StrutsIDE plugin for quick and easy development
  • JettyLauncher, for firing up Jetty

    At first I tried NetBeans. Everytime I must do some Java development I retry working with NetBeans, desperately looking for an improvement from previous versions... and I'm always deceived, it's a resource hog!

    Something new under the sun

    Downloaded a JavaStudio Creator (formerly known as project Rave) trial version, it's based in NetBeans (= slow as hell). Instead of writing raw HTML/JSP/JSF code, you drag'n drop controls and edit their properties, much like WebMatrix.

    I played a bit with Java Server Faces. I see JSF as a mixture of Struts (30%) and ASP.NET WebForms (70%), which in turn is copied^Winspired by Apple WebObjects. I like the approach (taken by WebObjects, ASP.NET and JSF) of thinking about the Web as a regular GUI: events, controls, etc.

    If Sun plans to compete against ASP.NET, it should provide a stripped-down version of JavaStudio Creator for free, much like Microsoft does with WebMatrix. Nothing too professional: a minimalistic servlet container, a small collection of controls and some features removed (workflow navigation, eg.) to persuade people to buy a bigger version.

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