Kind of email-swamped here after my trip... some things that grabbed at least my initial attention (hope to report soon on my actual appreciation):

[1] The SE/EE Executive Committee has approved the Final Approval Ballot of: JSR-000031 XML Data Binding SpecificationView the ballot results here: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=1633

[2] Jesktop (http://jesktop.sourceforge.net/) is written by Apache commiters, Avalon based and could be a good foundation for a GUI project ;-)

[3] OJB provides a plugin to the JDO reference implementation. By using thisplugin you can write JDO compliant applications running against the OJB O/Rmapping.See here for a sample application:http://jakarta.apache.org/ojb/tutorial4.html.

off to bed now...

1:53:27 AM    

I remember this XP seminar I went to ages ago...

Halfway this guy makes a neat statement about software re-use: (paraphrased from memory)

I spent my pre XP professional OO life, chasing the idle hope of writing something re-usable... The chase always led me to writing the overly generic component that would try to serve the universe... my tendency for 'genericity' always led to pulling in possible future aspects that never were needed all together in any project... so the component always got rejected as reuse candidate mainly because it was too big for anyone's use (bringing the other developers into contact with concerns they didn't even want to think about)So now I'm writing stuf that gets the job done: no more re-useable focus, but just plain usable stuff.... Guess what? People are re-using those in their projects.

I had a flash of the same kind while explaining the basics of plugability to the Luxembourg crowd...

Software reuse is not about the one component that is going to be used in each and every project in the world (it is only partially). There is more re-use a lot closer to you, outside of that one component you work on: Re-use, odly enough, is achieved through the component that can be thrown away and replaced easily because you had it correctly hidden behind some interfaces. At the moment you throw away that one component, all the other ones in your project are... reused?

Reuse is not the cause, not the goal; try to enjoy it as a nice bonus from a job well done :-)

1:37:27 AM    

Actually I did this customer-thing already earlier this week ...

Went over to Luxembourg to give a Java-XML training to, well rather utterly clueless people, employed by a very large world-wide consulting firm. And much to my own satisfaction I succeeded in actually getting quite a bit of the (basic) message through. So all in all I guess I met most expectations, how low-demanding they might have been. I wouldn't have called them my most-challenging audience ever, nevertheless it was quite demanding...

Actually most initial astonishment came from my side... In the introduction round I always do they proclaimed:

• to have varying from 2 to 4 years active Java experience.
• to be active in writing EJB's and servlets all the time.

Yet, I had to discover:

• they had never heard from ant.
• nor make, nor the concept of build-management
• they either new about Tomcat OR Catalina, and saw no connection between the two.
• since they were unaware of the Basic Java Code Conventions, they got me very case-sensitive
• were using IBM WSAD since its existence and learned from a recent Eclipse user how to work with it...
• could not place Java RMI...

Basically I.m still trying to figure out which planet they actually fell off right into the classroom, since the term 'webservices'was never heard before.

Probably all of this is just proove that we all live in some modern tribe that self-confirms the members in certain frameworks | ways of working | ...

1:16:39 AM    

I learned a valuable lesson today...

Dialogue:

• (some frustration) Ah, I can't get this computer to do what I want
• [You go over and do it]
• (more frustration) No, no, not so fast! I want to be able to do this myself. Now, do it again, but slowly and explain me what you are doing (and why)

My typical wrong approach would of have been to exactly do that: "explain" and go by at the real message "I want to be able to do this"... so today I just setup a stupid shortcut and told to just double click :-)

I even succeeded in not explaining what a shortcut is.Customer focus! I'm finally learning it :-)

(Q: is this obviously about me and my wife?)

1:14:21 AM