Posts from 2004

Second article in new IBM developerWorks series alt.lang.jre is an introduction to the Groovy language by Andrew Glover entitled Feeling Groovy. The first article in the series is Get to Know Jython by Barry A. Feigenbaum and is also worth a read.

Groovy has a possible advantage over Jython in that it has become the subject of a Java Community Process (JCP) project (JSR 241) and so may become a "standard" for scripting Java objects. It is more Java-flavoured than Jython yet provides some familiar features. It might be worth considering for EG-358 because it could be introduced without needing the context shift that J/Python requires.

Thanks to dIon Gillard for this link. Having nothing much better to do today I watched J2EE Best Practices using a Real-Life Example a webinar by Carol McDonald. A good seminar showing how to use the Core J2EE Patterns to best affect. Comments on layering, the presentation, business and persistence layers all very good. But like Rod Johnson and Bruce Tate are telling us, a lot of these patterns are actually anti patterns whose purpose is to overcome architectural deficiencies in the J2EE architecture rather than best practice. Still useful material for my revised EG-M42 lectures in November and I’ll be adopting some of the explanations and diagrams I think.

I have installed a SnipSnap Weblog/Wiki at eehope.swan.ac.uk:8668/space/start. Not sure how to make it start as a service because it launches an instance of a Jetty web server which is a Java Daemon process that can’t be killed by killing the shell script that started it. Thus you can start the server using an init script, but killing the server is not so simple!

1. Catch up with email (allow an hour).

2. Play with OpenCMS for a while:

3. Install documentation modules if necessary.

4. Create a new engineering web site.

5. Report any problems.

6. Install SnipSnap:

7. Create a blog.

8. Play with the Wiki.

9. Report any problems.

10. Interview a student re his GDE

11. Catch up with Blogines.

I’ve just spent the whole day trying to install OpenCMS on my SuSE 9.1 box. I got stuck trying to get access to MySQL. In the end I had to delete MySQL and delete the old databases. When I reinstalled I noticed that it advised my to

mysqladmin -u root password 'password'
mysqladmin -u root -h hostname passwd 'password'

I didn’t do the latter first time around! When I fixed the error and changed the DB url to jdbc:mysql:<em>hostname</em>:3306/ it finally all worked. Permissions on MySQL is a black art at the best of times, but I wish there was a note to this affect somewhere in the documentation. Oh, for a decent user manual!

Anyway, after about 5 hours of hair pulling, here is my new OpenCMS server: http://eehope.swan.ac.uk:8080/opencms/opencms. I hope that SnipSnap goes better tomorrow.

I just did a google search for “collaborative programming” + wikki on google and came up with (the only match!) Pair Programming: More Learning and Less Anxiety in a First Programming Course. Not exactly what I expected to find, but very relevant nonetheless. Perhaps even better, the paper is hosted at The GE Master Teachers for Freshman Engineering at Northeastern University which seems to be a clearing house for best practice. A partcular gem is Chalk Talk with Jonas Chalk which is a essentially a L&T Best Practices FAQ written in the form of an Agony Aunt Column.

I just noticed that Blogger has updated its blog posting system. Along with the standard HTML composition window, Blogger now has a Compose window that gives a WYSYWIG view.

It includes picture upload, numbered and unumbered lists, text coloring, fonts layout and keyboard shortcuts. Great stuff!

After an interest piquing article in yesterday’s Guardian Online All Eyes on Blinkx, I downloaded a beta copy of the Blinkx client. It’s currently 67% through indexing My Documents at the moment. Key features:

• It uses AI techniques to index the content of document rather than Google’s page ranking algorithm.
• It indexes documents and email inboxes on your own computer.
• It has smart searches
• It can produce a sort of concept map of the results of your search.
• It scours USENET and Blogs as well as static web pages.

The home page claims to have indexed 10% of the Internet.

Interesting technology!

Update¶

The product is quite different today

BlinkX is a modern online marketplace and product discovery engine whose mission is to empower business owners, engineers, and consumers through clear, unbiased industrial insights.

A really small HTTP server.

Over the next day or so I plan to work my way though Thomas Risberg’s tutorial Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step. Read in conjunction with Rod Johnson’s new book, which I skimmed this morning, I should be up to speed with Spring in time to decide if it will work with my module EG-M42: Client-Server Programming with Java. If all goes well, I plan to have a look at Spring IDE for Eclipse and Spring Live before starting my own case-study project which will either be a reimplementation of the* World of Zuul* from Objects First with Java or George Reese’s bank account example from Database Programming with JDBC and Java.