Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday October 21, 2004

NetBeans 4.0 Refactoring is Cool!

Okay, we don't all stick to software development processes and planning when writing quick little utilities, do we. When we're writing little bits of code that aren't likely to touch much else, we don't really think through things like variable names, class names and method names.

Still, we want it to make some sense, right?

Well, what do you do when you're 4-5 classes into a program and you realize you want to change a method name and a variable name to go with the rest of it. Hats off the the open source NetBeans project-- in 4.0 you can just right click and say "Refactor -> Rename [method | class | variable]". It took little more than a few seconds to do something that historically would have been a lot of effort.

Too bad this project doesn't even care about the performance profiler-- if it did I could open the shrinkwrap on that new toy...

Great job guys!

Sunday October 10, 2004

Craig McClanahan and JSF at LA-JUG

This month we had quite a special presentation. Craig McClanahan came in to talk with us about JavaServer Faces and the product team he's the chief architect for at Sun that heavily uses this JSR.

First about the presentation:

Craig has an excellent presentation that walks through JSF, what's it's goals are, the ever popular how it relates to Struts and then goes into a description of Java Studio Creator along with a few demos. The Creator demo was very, very cool. It really does show the power of Creator. They'd had a graphic artist put together some very cool css. Afterall, we code hackers aren't often very good at the graphics side of things.

Slides wise, Craig used what he'd used at Java One. I tried to poke around to find them, but didn't find them in a few searches. If you'd like the slides, post a comment to me and I'll try to dig 'em up.

Thanks to all who braved LA traffic and came in, and thanks very much to Craig for giving up his time for this meeting. This came together because I sent Craig an email based on a request from the JUG. Then we were able to work it out that the LA and OC JUGs would be close to back-to-back, so we could make Craig's overall trip worthwhile. It wasn't Sun marketing or his product team trying to steal him away from home. It was just Craig taking the time out to talk to the JUGs. Thanks Craig!

Secondly, I had the opportunity (requirement?) to chauffeur Craig around to a few other customer meetings. This gave me somewhat exclusive access to him for questioning. Great guy-- really knows this web tier stuff. :) (like you needed me to tell you that!). The driving was mostly without incident-- I don't think I scared him too much, and we only had to cut off one minivan at a freeway onramp. (kidding!)

Friday October 01, 2004

When no virus scanner is okay....

Funny but true conversation from the other day:

Customer: We expect that you'll be using your laptop when working here on site. You'll be sitting over here in this cube or in the room down the hall; do you have a virus scanner installed?
Me: Sort of, it's a unix system.
Customer: Ah, then that's fine with our security policy...

I don't know which one I'll use, as I have both JDS/Linux and JDS/Solaris installed on the machine. But I guess both are good enough out of the box for their security policy. :)