Brennan’s Blog

There is good deal of speculation about Google hiring as many top Java developers they can get to sign on the dotted line. One can only wonder what they could have in store. If I had a top notch Java development team and all that Google power at my disposal I would...
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At work we run Cruise Control to continually build and test an application we are building for a client. It takes a long time because it is a complex client/server application which involves multiple databases (remote and local) and lots of funny business logic managed by the Drools rules engine and our own home-grown Concepts System. The project is broken up into various components and has many, many unit tests in place to validate lots of things. But we are learning a few things about the build processes...
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No Fluff, Just Stuff was a great conference. Thanks to Jay Zimmerman for putting on a great show. It was great because of the critical and sometimes negative comments that came from the expert panel. I have seen other conferences where it is just a lovefest which tends to generate a reality distortion field which causes everyone to ignore the issues that need to be addressed. The expert panel openly discussed them and coverered practical workarounds and solutions. An overriding concern seems to be the ever expanding bloat that is J2EE. Bruce Tate was the harshest critic about the monolithic nature of this massive beast and provided great stategies for reducing bloat. The symposium lasted all weekend and I attended many sessions, such as...

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I work for SpiderLogic and we proudly sponsored the event. We also prepared many whitepapers which are now available online.
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Today the NFJS Java Symposium begins which by all respects is an excellent event. All of the topics look very good and I am looking forward to it, but I really could do without JavaServer Faces which I feel is already a failed technology created due to the increasing trend of catching up with ASP.NET. We already had JavaServer Pages which has improved through various revisions Initially the JSP implementation had some issues due to the fact that you could put scriplets right into the HTML, which defeated the purpose of minimizing the mixure of Java code and HTML markup. Then the JSTL showed a powerful way to greatly minimize the need to put scriptlets into the JSP document in order to provide dynamic results. The JSTL is very elegant and more importantly, it provides a shining example of how we should also create our custom tag libraries and all of the issues that plagued JSPs in the early days now seem like a distance memory. But wait, now JSF promises to be the future of Java web application development and it is a huge mistake...
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I work for SpiderLogic and internally for outsourcing jobs we use a framework that we have built over time called Arch4J. It is made up of various components which address common techniques used in past projects which attempt to enforce best practices. The bulk of my experience has been limited to server-side software development, like Perl/CGI, mod_perl, JSP and Servlets. But in the last week I have been thrown onto a project for a desktop Java application written using the Swing API. And that can be intimidating.
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