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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Oh lordy...

The uk gvt wants to store details of every phone call made, email sent and minute spent on the internet by the public.


Let's hope they sign a contract with Microsoft for an improved version of Access.

Who on earth (or in the UK) could honestly think that this is a good idea?

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Great spam subject lines...

I just received a spam email (rarely happens these days) with the following subject line.

Set your wife on fire

Now, perhaps it's just me but I thought bloody hell that's a bit harsh.

On further reading it appears that I will be more 'manly' if I do...

Monday, May 19, 2008

Things to think about...

I've been using restlet on a couple of client projects recently and you could say that it's piqued my interest in Java web frameworks and more.

I had been using 'proper' J2EE frameworks for what seems like forever now and this came up as a refreshing change, I loved the whole 'non-app serverness' of it all :)

So my explorations have taken me to Wicket, probably most pure 'java' web framework I've looked at. It's kind of neat, but takes a bit of getting your head around the way it models certain components. I very much liked the way the templates are pure xhtml and contain no crazy scripting or embedded markup (and therefore can be edited by designers with no knowledge of strange JSF components). Like Restlet, Wicket uses Jetty as the webserver by default (although it's not mandatory) and means I can bundle up my apps into a single .jar file for distribution.

However, my most surprising find (as a die hard EJB user - yeah, even since back when it really sucked) has been Active Objects. Ok, this wasn't really a 'find' I've known about it for a while and I know the guy who wrote it, but I've never played with it. But playing with new frameworks made me want to find a quick and simple persistence mechanism that didn't really involve setting anything up.

Again, Active Objects seems very Java-y. It doesn't require any configuration (other than the datasource) and unlike JPA/Hibernate it uses Interfaces rather than POJOs. However, I found that despite the lack of documentation I had everything I needed up and running for a simple data model within the first hour of playing with it - including the databse.

I'm aware that there are a few bits of esoteric stuff Active Objects won't do (distributed transactions, for example) but it covers most bases more than adequately, including cacheing. It's strength, however, is it's simplicy and light weight approach. The API makes a kind of immediate sense, especially if you've used other ORM solutions and I've found it a pleasure to work with.

I'm looking forward to using it on some 'real' projects in the near-future.

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