Shay’s Blog

We are lucky in Dallas to have several published technical authors in the area.  One of the better authors, Craig Walls is very generous with his time by speaking at the Dallas Java Users Group and the Spring Users Group.  Last night was the release of the second edition of his book, Spring In Action.  His talk was very good covering some of the basic uses of The Spring Framework which is a very large framework.Craig did point something that I had not thought about before.  Spring has a lot of subprojects to it which do a lot of things (Boilerplate code for JDBC and JMS, remoting, MVC framework, etc), but its core functionality is dependency injection and aspects (AOP).  Then everything else is an extension of these two core functionality.  That was a very eye opening statement.  I very much enjoyed his talk last night as I did with his two session at the Dallas No Fluff Just Stuff symposium.  I was lucky enough to win a free ecopy of his book.  I look forward to reading it.

We got this news today; Adobe is pulling the plug on the Send To FedEx Kinkos.  I worked a bunch of hours on it over late winter and early spring.  It is a bummer, but life does goes on.  It is funny since we just added two new app servers to the cluster for it. On a lighter note, I am taking next week off.  It has been quite a while since I have had this much time off.  I do not typically take a lot of vacation.  It is always nice to get it paid out when you leave a job.  Even with the bad news, I do not have happy feet yet. 

I finished an AJAX class today at work.  A lot of it was basic that I already knew, it was nice to see the toolkits and javascript techniques.  The class was scheduled to run for four days, but we finished a day earlier.  I had suggested that we cover in detail the Google Web Kit (GWT) and the dojo toolkit, but the class consensus came to covering the Spring Framework which was fine with me.
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I went through the article. The Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) is nice. It supports dojo, rico, and zimbra. The code snippets are a nice feature. I built the tree view example which uses dojo in the example. I am going to try it ATF more.

The installation was a bit tedious. I installed using these steps, but ensure you have the eclipse and web project toolkit (WTP) plug-in installed. If you do not you can download it here.

• Download and extract XULRunner into its own directory.
• Open dos window
• Change to the directory you put XULRunner in
• Run xulrunner –register-global
• Run xulrunner –register-user
• Download and extract Tomcat 5.5 into its own directory
• Download Sysdeo 3.2 beta 3 plug-in
• Extract it to the your eclipse plug-in directory
• Start eclipse
• Then open window, preferences, tomcat
• Select tomcat 5.5
• Put the tomcat directory in the tomcat home field
• Hit apply and okay
• Download ATF
• In eclipse Select Help, Software Updates, Find and Install…
• Select Search for new features to install
• Select Next
• Select New Archived Site
• Select the directory that you downloaded ATF into
• Select Finish
• Ensure all ATF features are selected
• Follow the remaining prompts to install ATF
• Stop eclipse
• Then follow the final steps here
• Start eclipse using the –clean option

Congrats you are now good to go using ATF.

Alicia and I are going to have a Texas music filled weekend.  It starts tonight with Lyle Lovett.  He is playing at Bass Concert Hall in Fort Worth which is a great venue.  We are meeting Alicia’s sister and brother-in-law to go to the show.  Then on Saturday, we are driving down to Waxahachie to do see Ray Wylie Hubbard.  I am looking forward to both shows a lot.  It’s been over two years since I have Lyle.  This will make the 3rd time seeing him.  It’s been around four months since I have seen Ray Wylie Hubbard though the last time I saw him, he was with a band.  This time he is just him playing which I prefer.  (more…)