Always

This one has been in my to-post queue for awhile.....classic.

Posted by Brian Levay at 5:00 PM | Permalink

Dave pointed me to this interesting movie comparing J2EE against some high powered web frameworks, specifically Ruby on Rails, Zope, Turbo Gears, and django. I think it is well known that J2EE will lose against just about any web framework. Try teaching simple jsp/servlets to community college students and you'll quickly understnd why. I spent more time on the nuances of the framework than actually building web apps.

I'm not sure when the video was created but I think if you threw the other Java based web development frameworks into the mix (e.g. Grails and Lift) ruby and zope would still win but I can guarantee the results would have been closer.

The author interestingly enough selects Zope as the winner. Try a few Google searches on Sean Kelly and you'll probably see why. A see a little bias....hmmmmm.

Posted by Brian Levay at 8:00 PM | Permalink

I'm trying to catch up on reading this weekend and ran across this James Govenor gem:

"Big SOA with reg/rep and so on- who needs it? Who is using it? Remember UDDI? It was designed to handle WSDL complexity. But very few organisations needed it. UDDI was designed to offer extreme configurability. Who most likes extreme configurability? Consultants."

Being a consultant I couldn't agree with him more. As long as the standards world keeps on publishing inch-thick standards there will be plenty of money to be made.

Posted by Brian Levay at 7:00 AM | Permalink

The Software Security Institute (SANS) has recently launched a security certification for Software Developers. The Global Information Assurance Certification Security Software Programmer Certification verifies that a developer knows the common security flows in either Java or C.

This exam looks to be challenging and worthwhile. The Java Handbook covers the details and includes sample test questions. There is a link to their portal (requires login) to take a free 10 question practice test but it was the same questions contained in the handbook. The questions cover standard java (thread synchronization, inner classes, prepared statements) as well as the web-tier (session ids, parameter scrubbing, filters).

If you are looking for a Java certification that isn't your standard programmer/api type exam, then this one appears to answer the mail. I'd be interested in feedback if anyone attempts it.

Posted by Brian Levay at 1:30 PM | Permalink

There is a very good article today on DevX on Converting a Java Application into a Windows Service. Several packages exist to help with this (Java Service Wrapper is the first one that comes to mind). I still think it is way too complicated. Who wants to install Visual Studio to fire up the C++ compiler to get this to work? Native windows integration is still killing Java. And most of us just want simple things. I want to double click a .java file and have just one eclipse start versus a separate eclipse process for each file.

Posted by Brian Levay at 11:00 PM | Permalink

Are there any projects out there that aren't like this?

Posted by Brian Levay at 8:00 PM | Permalink