So I'll be blogging much more now that I figured out I could blog from my desktop, even though my Radio install is on my laptop. Basically, I can open up the local webserver on my laptop to be accessed by my desktop. As much as I've bitched about Radio, it's actually pretty sweet...

9:57:20 AM    comment []

Why stateful session beans suck....

An interesting article by Tyler Jewel on why stateful session beans should typically be avoided if you're using a Servlet engine. Here's another article that shows that using them is more trouble than its worth and typically have zero performance benefit.

So if entity beans suck, and stateful session beans suck, all thats left of EJB thats of any real value is stateless session beans. Which is kinda like RMI with a simple transactional interceptor.

Its no suprise to see that all the EJB vendors have been quietly de-emphasizing EJB and talking up web servies instead for quite some time.

9:41:34 AM    comment []

Another Blogger, Another EJB naysayer.

Listen to the EJB's go Pop.

My friends who still work in the J2EE group at Sun that are charged with telling people how to write enterprise applications are now muttering about how there's a sudden demphasis on EJB's. Everyone is talking about other solutions now. Servlets (and tech built on top of them) and JDBC. Hell of a combo. Hey, I think I said that about 5 years ago while wandering the halls of CUP02. Course, not many people were listening back then. But a few were...

[James Duncan Davidson]

Hmmm. Cool. Another RSS feed subscribed. And another person making me really ponder the truth usefulness of EJBs. Having had a wonderful run down today by Mike on Sitemesh/Webwork/OFBiz EE I can honestly say that I can't see EJB's value proposition. Apart from buzzword compliance.

Which, from my understanding, is still about 80% of most funding decisions ... ;-)

[Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]

Well, I haven't been saying it for five years, but I did give a talk on why EJBs aren't exactly needed to my local San Diego Java Users Group early this year. I haven't been back to another JUG meeting since, maybe I should and try to stir up more controversy. Although it appears that it isn't controversy anymore, it's actually starting to be somewhat widely accepted. Anyway, my JUG talk was turned in to an article by Mike of rebelutionary and can be found here.

9:41:01 AM    comment []

Look at Nanning. Nice one!

[Joe's Jelly]

OK, I guess it's time I too hop on the AOP bandwagon. Basically, I know nothing about AOP save a few of Rickard's ramblings I've read and a couple web pages I read back when AspectJ was being heavily promoted (I hear AspectJ is dead now, is that right? A professor of mine worked on AspectJ when he was at Xerox Parc, maybe I should talk to him about all this AOP magic).

9:37:08 AM    comment []

Petri Net Reading. The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management - van der Aalst (ResearchIndex) is probably what I'd call the starting-point in your journey through CiteSeer to accumulate knowledge of Petri nets. Brett Morgan had asked that I produce references to the papers I read to go from zero to Petri in 2 days. Overall, W.M.P. van der Aalst seems to be the shinig light in the world of Petri nets for workflow systems. For what it's worth, petridish supports coloured petrinets, but werkflow does not take advantage of them. Werkflow has exactly one colour of token flowing through the network:... [bob mcwhirter]

Man, I really should go read up on this stuff when I get a chance, though I'm sure most of it will be well over my head :)

9:33:40 AM    comment []

commons-beanutils comes with a ConverterUtils helper class for performing type conversions if you need it, which can work both directions.

However  it sounds like what you really want to do is to use internationalization to convert the value into a localised String representation? If its any help, there's various JSP custom tags in JSTL for doing this kinda thing.

[James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

Well I gave commons-beanutils another shot (I looked at it about 6 months ago) and I'm still running in to two major problems:

            ConvertUtils.register(new DateConverter(), Date.class);
            BeanUtils.copyProperty(o, "blah", "02/12/1982");
            System.out.println(o.getBlah());
            System.out.println(PropertyUtils.getProperty(o, "blah"));
            System.out.println(BeanUtils.getProperty(o, "blah"));

1) I don't see any way for conversion to work the other way around. I want the String value of the the date to come back as "MM/dd/yyyy" and currently the above code seems to just be calling Date.toString() on the Date object being returned, so the output for all three lines is: "Fri Feb 12 00:00:00 PST 1982", which is not what I want.

2) Converters need to be registered globally. I believe converters should be registered globally (for defaults), but also be allowed to be specified per bean as well as per property.

So, still no dice... I'd rather not write my own stuff since 90% of what I need is already here or in OSCore's BeanUtils or in Ognl. But without solutions to the above two issues, sticking with WebWork's BeanUtil class would offer the same benefit.

12:47:41 AM    comment []