Andrej Koelewijn

I ‘m now using wordpress to run this weblog. Part of this is due to the fact that the Licence of MovableType has changed, but i didn’t really investigate if i need to pay for it. I do think MovableType is a nice piece of software, and it’s really worth some money, but why pay when you can get something equal for less? I need my money for other things (I really need a new 12 meter kite)...

But the real reason i’m swithing is because i think that the Movabletype team is too busy doing commercially interesting things that the weblog software isn’t really improving. I’d expected hierarchical categories and better photo upload support a long time ago, but nothing seems to be happening. Hopefully WordPress will keep moving forward.

Because of the swith you may experience broken links, i’ll fix those in time.

You can now download JDeveloper 9.0.5.2 (fix list) and Eclipse 3.0 M9 (new and Noteworthy).

Yesterday i attended a seminar on ADF organized by AMIS. Oracle’s Steven Davelaar presented some slides on ADF, and he discussed some of the result of his first projects with ADF.

To demo that ADF databindings aren’t Business Components specific Steven showed that you can use the ADF databindings in combination with castor, to easily access xml data, and with web services. Databinding are just declarations describing what services and data you have (data controls), and declaration describing where you use them. Once you’ve created the required java classes for your xml and you’ve create a service class with some business methods, you can create a jsp by dragging and dropping the data controls on your jsp.

Ofcourse Eclipse was also discussed and many agreed that for coding java (as opposed to using wizards and drag and drop) jDeveloper still lags Eclipse. But apparently the Jdeveloper development team is now focussing on improving the java code editor. (Suggestion: ctrl+shift+o, suggest fixes.)

Steven also mentioned that they would like to offer a real alternative to TOAD with the database support in JDeveloper.

Another interesting piece of news was that Oracle has licensed jess, which will be integrated into ADF to handle business rules.

UIX version 3.0 will be Java Server Faces compatible, which would normally mean that you could take UIX components and use them in any IDE which supports JSF. If these components use ADF databindings you probably won’t be able to use them in other IDE’s. We’ll see…

Some of the problems encountered with ADF:

• You can only have one struts config file per project,
• No support for out-of-the-box multi row editing,
• It’s hard to add an empty row to a dropdown list (UIX),
• No support for Struts Tiles,
• Some drag & drop bugs.

There will be a patch release for JDeveloper this week. This will be version 9.0.5.2, and it will have some IDE performance improvements.

Regarding JHeadstart, there will be a new version this year (end of summer?) which will be ADF compliant. This means that applications generated using JHeadstart for JDeveloper 9 can be regenerated for Jdeveloper 10G. However, you’ll have to redo all you customizations, so this will probably mean a lot of work. But the good news is that Jheadstart offers some migration help, as opposed to JDeveloper itself, which doesn’t help at all in migrating application from JDeveloper 9 to 10.

JHeadstart offers solutions to some of the current problems in ADF (e.g., multi row editing), so you may want to use it to be more productive with ADF.

We’ve just gone live with a new website for IT-eye. We’re using the Infoglue CMS, which has been a pleasure to use. The html has also been improved, as most pages should now be valid xhtml. I’ve also removed all tables used for layout. I’ve used the suckerfish dropdowns method for the dropdown menu’s, but unfortunately i’ve run into a mozilla bug, the dropdown’s don’t work over div’s with “overflow: auto”.

I’ve also added rss feeds for our list of articles and news items.

Mattias Bogeblad mentions an easy way to use custom libraries in Infoglue on comp.cms.cms.infoglue.devel: You can use $templateLogic.getObjectWithName(“classname”). Now you can use the object in your velocity template.

Open Enterprise Trends has an interesting read on the state of Geronimo, Apache’s J2EE container.

Just found usability.gov while searching for some usability guidelines on page length. Usability.gov has listed a great number of usability guidelines and also indicates how important these guidelines are.

The last 2 weeks i’ve been setting up a new website using a fairly new and unknown content management system: infoglue.

While searching for a java cms I first looked at MMBase. MMBase is a wel known CMS framework used for many sites in the Netherlands. The problem with it is that it’s a framework, it doesn’t have a complete user interface to setup a website. You unzip the mmbase application, which results in a standard java web application structure. You can add a new application by adding an application directory in the mmbase web application directory. I choose not to use mmbase because i was afraid it would be too difficult to maintain by others and i’d be doing that for the coming years.

Next i looked at infoglue. Infoglue is pretty new, the current version number is 1.2 (although that doesn’t always mean much). You can create a new website through infoglue’s web ui. Templates are also edited through this ui. I like the fact that Infoglue uses velocity as a templating language. Infoglue is also very flexible, you can add and modify new content types and define relationships between different pieces of content. In this sense it resembles mmbase, but with a user interface.

Infoglue does have some problems though, i’ve already submitted a couple of bug descriptions which you can find on sourceforge. (if i can find the time, i’ll also try to create patches…)

After running infoglue for a couple of days i had to restart tomcat, as the application was getting really slow. This won’t be a problem in production because I’m going to use wget to create a static site.

Infoglue looks very promissing, and i think it deserves more attention than it’s currently getting.