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I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright” The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling. What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’. My biggest issue with Java web development is that not enough attention is paid to modern web basics. The very first thing that I noticed on the SpringSource website was the 15 year old style url. ...

A coworker whipped up a generic REST interface for any Ruby on Rails activerecord (data model). What he described (in 5 minutes) was a nice implementation. I wanted see how the generic django REST interface was coded. http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/ I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they Python developers simply used the normal form processing to handle rest and didn’t invent a new paradigm. On an early project we tried to implement RESTlet for a java based REST application. Under load we saw some strange problems and the code was reverted to normal servlets without too much pain. ...

So today started out great. Temperatures in the 80’s, so I took the kiddies outside. I put my cellphone on the trunk of my sisters’s car, put the kids on their bikes, put skates on my feet and rolled out to enjoy the day. Things were going well with my littlest one making turns at each end of the block. My sister pulled up and shouted some encouragement as she drove past. I waved and noticed my black cell phone on the white trunk of her car! ...

Today at work our main Flash developer asked me about expanding his skills and learning either Ruby or Python. My personal preference is towards python but ruby has its place. Flash is really doing well in the Java/Enterprise space lately so I went that way. Most of the Flash backend in our work is xml based so XML was on my mind anyway. Recently we needed to mock up a xml data data file for a project while the real APIs are being completed. We had the data in a csv file so we asked some developers to whip up a xml file. ...

I watched Michael Clayton today A decent legal / espionage plot. Predictive enough. The lawyer is defending an international chemical company for years. One day he goes off his anti-depressants and decides to champion the farmers being killed by the chemical additives. Drama ensues when the ‘fixer’ Michael Clayton is set on the case. But the lawyer who had the breakdown was Michael’s friend, and since Mr. Clayton has a good relationship with his son, so we assume he is not wholly evil. Its a good thing we don’t live in a world with people that would allow this to happen. A quick googling shows that our government recently decided to immediately phase out a harmful pesticide (that has been in use since 1950s) by 2012. ...