External constructors

A nice trick from Brian Slesinsky: put your factory methods anywhere.

Wedding cake

A great discussion started by Rober Martin on layering in web applications.

LambdaMOO

During the past week I rediscovered my enjoyment of LambdaMOO. Porting to Cygwin was straight-forward, and cygrunsrv makes it a snap to run a MOO on my laptop as a service (I'm using JHCore). I've not programmed an object in ages, but it'll be a relaxing task to take up when I'm back in the hotel needing a break from client code. I'm looking forward to making a duck.

Immortality at a price

A nice article in the current Overload (issue 59, February 2004) on the bogosity of garbage collection in Java. Memory is just one resource; the lack of destructors in Java is a large hurdle to managing other resources such as network and database connections. And finalize() is just plain broken. All is not lost, but there's more work to managing resources (including memory) than just "code and forget", the most common practice I see in Java.

The next project

The next J2EE which comes around, I am definitely looking hard into an alternative to Struts and JSPs. Reasonable alternatives (to read the accounts of others) seem to exist such as WebWork and Velocity. Getting away from compiling JSPs and the difficulty of maintaining a Struts/Tiles configuration (althought @xdoclet does help) will be worth the transistion costs.

Good programming day

I must have coded around -600 LOC today. A good day, to be sure.

The right way to sell software

<1060> Research sells software the right way: open-source if you are open-source, commercial if you are commercial, fixed-rate schedules. Beautiful! It feeds the open-source world and encourages novel uses, it feeds the developers and keeps the revenues coming, it removes the risk of negotiating the wrong price. I wish more companies understood all of this. I quote from the products page:

Licenses

NetKernel may be used at no charge under an obligatory open source model, see license - this license requires that all applications developed and executed on 1060 NetKernel be released as open-source. We offer commercial licenses that permit the use of closed source applications. Commercial licenses start from 450 UKP.

Please contact license@1060research.com for commercial licensing terms.

1060 NetKernel embeddable REST microkernel

The 1060 NetKernel microkernel is suitable as an embeddable Internet server. We are happy to offer embedded licensing terms and to customize bespoke system configurations for embedded systems.

Please contact sales@1060research.com to discuss your requirements.

Support

We offer a flexible selection of support options which range from one-off packages ideal for installation/getting-started assistance through to multiple incident packages suitable for production applications.

All support tiers include a dedicated support email address direct to the 1060 NetKernel development team and dedicated support telephone number. For ongoing support incidents we can provide direct email-to-SMS to a support contact.

Tier	Priority Units	Support Hours	Price
Install	1	1	350 UKP
Bronze	2	4	950 UKP
Silver	4	16	2950 UKP
Gold	8	40	4950 UKP

Support usage is calculated from a combination of Priority Units and Support Hours as follows

• A Priority Unit is a single support incident requiring a guaranteed 48hr response. The response will give an analysis of the issue and all reasonable efforts to provide a fix. Time taken solving the issue will be debited from the support hours credits.
• Any number of non-urgent support requests may be raised. A first response is guaranteed within 5 working days and demand permitting we endeavour to provide a more rapid turnaround. The time required to handle a support request will be debited from the support time allocation. Support hours may be used in any way you wish,for example you could ask our developers a specific question, get assistance architecting solutions, have our developers debug your code or even ask a developer to produce custom code. For larger projects or custom solutions you may prefer to contract with our professional services team.

Notes:

• Code developed as part of a support package will be open-sourced. To have our developers work on closed source you may require a commercial 1060 NetKernel license.
• Telephone support may be directed to voicemail during non-office hours. Voicemail is checked at regular intervals.

Please contact sales@1060research.com to purchase support packages.

For Jetty specific support please contact our friends at Mortbay.

Bringing down the haus

I haven't met Joe Walnes yet, but I'd like to: QDox rocks. I'm glad the new version of XDoclet uses it.

The web in Java

An interesting project on SourceForge: JXWB and WWE. WWE is an HTML4/CSS2-compliant HTML renderer kit for Java. The description of WWE:

This is the final release of WWE 1.0. It is an implementation of an HTML editor pane and kit providing Java Swing developers with an HTML renderer/editor that supports W3C's latest specifications for HTML and CSS. This release is slightly premature in that it has been repackaged from a commerical project and as such isn't as clean as can be expected. Another release will be forth coming addressing this issue as well as providing documentation.

Found here.

WARS pattern

The guys at Shocks have an interesting article: The WARS Architectural Style. In my current project we wind up doing something that is not horribly far away, but is much more informed by the Service Locator model.