Category: Development

It’s been a while since he posted this, but Mike Spille is taking a stroll on The Dark Side, he’s doing an app in .NET! 😉 He has good reasons for doing this: doing a realtime Java app is one thing, but this app he is making also needs some low level monitoring and hardware interaction. He’s just using the right tool for the job.

I’d like to do a project in .NET to get some experience with it. Beeing a webapp developer mainly, it would be cool to do a .NET web project to get a basis for comparison. I suspect I would miss Java though. Maybe not the language, but the platform and the community. The experince would probably be made better if I got to use stuff like NHibernate, but I suspect that both the number and maturity of the OpenSource frameworks for .NET is way behind Java.

Know thy enemy. 😉

Matt Raible is doing his first training tour overseas in Norway this week. Beeing the author of Spring Live the topic was of course Spring Framework, but also some of the “competition” (at least to the MVC part) like WebWork, JSF and Tapesty. All of them have problems, but he seemed to like Tapestry the most. The impression left from his comparison was that Struts and Spring MVC were the most mature. Spring MVC is even picking up on job offerings, but as he said that could be because Spring IoC triggers in his search.

We also had a look at AppFuse which I’ll have to look into. There’s a lot of magic going on there that I’m a bit sceptical about, but if it saves time it saves time. 😉

It was a good seminar and left me some pointers as to where to start off with Spring MVC. I got almost everything I expected out of the day. Matt is a smart guy, and a good speaker. He’s even a nice guy. 😉 We had some chats during lunch about the some of the challenges with opensource, different frameworks, his childhood and even some of his professional plans. I’ll leave it to him to announce them. 🙂

Go see him if you get the chance. As far as I know he’s at the Stavanger JUG on wednesday, and Oslo JUG on thursday.

Another addition to the new AJAX-hype is the AjaxTags, a struts tag-lib.

Looks pretty nice, but i don’t know if this is the smoothest way to do it. Perphaps a simple javascript in the jsp is just as easy, an extra taglib, recompiling struts.jar and another xml-config-file is not so tempting. Read this article for another AJAX-approach.