Best Answer is There is Not Always One...

...Best answer, that is. Which is the gist of my response on the recent LinkedIn question "Adobe Flex vs Java Swing - Looks most similar way of architecture. Any points form your side?". My best answer being:

While I agree in part with the comment about neither being the best choice, the decision should be based on the application audience and the development team skills. If the application is to be a public facing Internet application, Flex support is ubiquitous, making it the superior option (IMHO).

If the application audience is only internal or partner users, the pure Java implementations have some advantages that appeal to some development and/or maintenance teams. OTOH, if the skills and experience don't already exist in-house, Flex is a lower risk path.

Bottom line is usability and ROI, and the ability to deliver those key values depends on your available skill set and distribution channel.

As Dennis Miller often said: "...that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."

Hopefully Much More Next Week

I'm in a training class all week, leaving little time for blogging about the things I'm learning as I learn them. For my reader, please check back next week, in time for the holiday ;)

Oracle JDeveloper 11g: RTFM

After so many years of finding better answers through Google or Dev2Dev (moment of silence), I rarely use the help menu of applications anymore. Yesterday I was having trouble with one of the JDeveloper wizards. I searched Google, I searched OTN, I posted to discussion lists. No answer. Desperate to get past this issue, I opened the Help menu. I still didn't find what I was looking for (I solved that by experimentation and guess work), but I did find all of the training material listed right there.



This would have saved me days of navigating around OTN, where I did not find the training I needed that was right in the IDE all the time.

Interesting lesson learned, and the first application of the alternative definition of RTFM I read recently: Read The Fancy Manual

Is There a Prize with That?

I just started answering questions on LinkedIn lately, and got a Best Answer yesterday on a question about Doubt in handling Exceptions in Java*. Before the Internet, everyone had 15 minutes of fame. Now it is more like 15 nanoseconds :)

*Requires LinkedIn account to view

WLP Sessions and Porlets in Shared Libraries

Awhile back, I ran into an issue where session data was being lost between requests in a WebLogic Portal project. As it only occurred in a clustered environment, it was obvious that the value was not being persisted, even though persistence was set properly with

<wls:session-descriptor>
<wls:persistent-store-type>replicated_if_clustered</wls:persistent-store-type>
</wls:session-descriptor>

After much frustration, someone on the team ran across an additional setting for the session-descriptor node: sharing-enabled. In the case where a portlet is from a shared library, the persistence does not work unless sharing-enabled is set to true.

<wls:session-descriptor>
<wls:persistent-store-type>replicated_if_clustered</wls:persistent-store-type>
<wls:sharing-enabled>true</wls:sharing-enabled>
</wls:session-descriptor>

In hindsight, this behavior makes some sense, in that most portlets that are distributed as shared libraries by vendors do not require session values. However, in the case where a shared library is created by an application team to reuse portlets across portals where WSRP is not practical, the need to share sessions may arise, and now you know how to fix it.

For other deployment descriptor options, see http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12840_01/wls/docs103/webapp/weblogic_xml.html

Good Thread on White Space in JSPs

While it is tempting to quickly skim an blog entry for the information I'm seeking at the time, a recent find on dealing with white space with JSPs reminded me that there is a darn good reason most blogs have a comment feature.

The thread I'm talking about is Trim Spaces in Your JSP at Raible Designs. Fortunately, my paranoia paid off, and I did not try this setting blindly on the project where I was looking for such an answer (and have since rolled off). I almost did, but decided not to because I knew I would not be around to support the change, and that whoever I told about it may forget it. As it is a performance enhancement and the application had some peformance issues (too many cooks in the presentation layer kitchen IMHO), it was not as easy of a call as it may seem.

The con that comes up in the comments on that post is that it wipes all white space between tags. If I were the only person developing on the project, or if was a small team where I knew for certain that only experience JSP developers were working on the JSPs, I'd still feel safe. This is because if a space has to be in a page between two dynamic parameters, the experienced JSP developer will use an entity code rather than just a blank space.

There is also a comment in the thread about how to cut down white space in a build file. That was actually the type of solution I was seeking at the time (and missed at the time).  I would have to experiment with the solution before I suggested it, but it looks like what I wanted.

My New 1000 GB (1TB) Drive

I've been wanting a 1 TB drive since Seagate started selling them at a reasonable price. Besides being budget conscious in the current economy, I also got paranoid with all the reports of problems. I trusted Seagate to fix them eventually, but it still left me with some hesitation. I finally got to the point where every time I looked at my main and back up drive free space, I was getting concerned (I like to have 50% free).  Then New Egg had a sale. I hemmed and hawed for a couple of days and finally bought the Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB. It is cheaper than the Caviar Black, though not by much. Reading the reviews, the price difference has to do with speed. I also read the reviews of unhappy customers to see what the complaints were, and the only problem with the Green was speed. The other drives had issues with noise, or failing within a short period of time. I'm in agreement with most reviewers, in that a drive that big is only for storage, so speed is not as important. Good thing, too, because the drive is not fast. It is quite, though, which is appreciated in my home office where there are two towers and one laptop running all the time with a combined 6 to 7 drives running (depending on if the portable is plugged into the laptop) and 14 fans running. I look forward to summer just so my window A/C will drown out the noise.

Installation was a breeze, which is good because the OEM one comes with no instructions.  No I just have to stay patient and test the drive for a couple of weeks before I wipe the 500 GB Seagate it is replacing and move it up to my main drive.

A Tutorial by Any Other Name...

It may be just because they are really good at SEO, but everytime I'm looking for a quick (free) tutorial on something I want to learn about or need a refresher, RoseIndia usually comes up. I think the reason for the quality of most of their tutorials is that they don't create them all themselves. This is not immediatly obvious, unless you keep looking at other search results for tutorials and find the same one posted in 20 other places. Still, they are good aggregtor for technical tutorials, and for that I definitly recommend bookmarking them.

Quick Cookie Click

Any browser that supports JavaScript will pop an alert with the current cookies from the domain currently displayed if you enter this in the location bar:

javascript:alert(document.cookie)

Handy if you don't work with JavaScript or cookies enough to have a web developer tool bar installed.

The Best Web Developer Extension for FireFox

The only thing this tool lacks is an IE version. If you know of a better (free) one,  please, please, please tell me.

Web Developer

Catch a Wave

Reading The enterprise implications of Google Wave over on ZDNet, I find the article really well done. I do have a nit to pick with one comment:

"With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses."

My observation has been that most computing technology innovations start in the business market and flounder around until consumers catch on to it.  Then again, he may just be saying that for his set up, as his next sentence is:

"Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look."

Latest Developer.com Article

When my articles appear on Developer.com, they have 120 days exclusive rights. Rather than have readers wait four months,  I post a link to the article here (when I remember to).

The latest is 10 Things You Should Know About WebLogic Server 10.3, handy if you are considering a move to the latest version of WLS.