The Javacabecedarian

So, whats all this tom foolery between Apple and Google? As it has been pointed out by many in the blogosphere, they used to be the best of buddies, teamed up to combat the dark forces of Darth Gates, and the Death Star in Redmond (no offence intended to any Star-Wars fans). I am a lover of both Apple and Google, and for a while it was easy to separate the affair, one was for home computing needs (inc. all the cool graphics,photos movies etc) and the other tottered along quite nicely for the web experience. But then things got a little Gaussain blurred.

Following the success of the coolest piece of kit on the planet the iPod, Apple raised the bar even further with the iPhone, and the world seemed to fall to its knees in awe, Jobs achieved near Christlike status from Apple-heads and could do no wrong. Touch screen (ok so that tech was already there, Apple just beat all to the gate), with its cool yuppie Apple styling, it was like a mac-book for the pocket, and a now accompanied with a  biblical like tome of applications, plugged right into the holy grail of iTunes. Apple pulled out all the stops for this one and in the US, the awestruck leigions joined the homeless of New York for the night, to be one of the chosen few to get their hands on the first stocks of Apples shiny precious. Dubbed by Mr. J as the best iPod ever made, the iPhone has gone through several iterations (mainly to catch up with the more advanced networks carried  over here in Europe), and to enable some of the more simpler functions, such as MMS, cut and Paste etc, long enjoyed by competitors like Symbian on Nokia. It was such a steamroller for Apple that the minions blindly postulated to the whim of the chosen service provider AT & T paying extortionate costs, for data transfers and calls (after all what is the iPhone without a data connection, a uPhone[me]?!). Yes yes, we have moved on now and whilst the costs are high, the choice is broader, and now its reached the shores of the European continent, there seems to be enough provider choice to suit even the most frugal of consumers.

Now is the time to put on the tech / developer hat I have hidden up behind my old Nokia, and usher the dark recantation of reality for Apple… J, A, V, A…..as I usher this occult line of prose,  the dark clouds are already gathering over the Apple HQ and the lightning begins to strike, iTunes freezes and MMS, cut and paste are lost once more on the iPhone. A scary an sad tale of woe, for the Apple iPhone, the OS is empty, it’s soulless, for it fails to welcome the widest available and practical piece of software known to the technological world, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Its not just in the quantum sized  technologies of the iPhone that have been at odds with the Java world,, Apple has been slow to adopt, even its regular OS 10, it has been a step behind everyone else with the latest java SDK. What does this mean you say, so what? Well it means Apple apps are locked into the official Apple garden, and must pay homage to the iPhone alone, forget about distribution outside of the Jobs ranch, to which is taken a substantial tail of the profit. Next if you are like me a staunch advocate of all that is Open Source, then, follow ye not the path of the Apple, for what is done on the iPhone stays in iPhone. No easy app building with familiar Java code, no my dear reader, its API is as locked as secure as a Medieval virgin princesses chastity belt. What about the browsing then? yup you guessed it please avoid any sites which may run java (oh and Flash, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish), but don’t fret that’s only about a third of the net.

You see what makes most enteprise and data driven sites tick, is things like Java and Flash, the kind of b2b setup that Microsoft struggles to keep up with even with .NET and Silverlight, were talking Flex, and Air, and JavaFX,  and persistence models such as Struts, Spring and Hibernate, these and more are some of the Java things that enables the web 2.0 experience to be what it is and to facilitate web 3.0, and an enriched browsing experience and beyond. OK, I may be biased as a Java lover and developer, but it remains the only technology today that can run almost anywhere, on any system, and on any hardware (oh apart from the iPhone, but that’s only a choice, not an incompatibility bye the way). I cant see the reign of the iPhone continuing as the incumbent, unchallenged without welcoming the boys at Oracle(Sun), and their coffee named weapon of mass instruction.

Things in Apple have taken an unusual turn lately with the release of the iPad, which seems to me like a giant iPod touch, and guess what, it runs the iPhone OS, so no Java there either, meaning its a fully functional computer without Java, I bet Ballamer, is resting a little easier up in Washington. Sorry Apple fans I love my Mac-Book-pro, my iPod touch, and even my iPod classic and I have even had an Apple LCII back in the 1990s,  but the iPad simply doesn’t cut the mustard, sure the masses will flock to buy it as it smarts the fruity logo, but after a while, like the mac book air, it will just exist in the range of ‘odd ones out’ for apple (whatever happened to the  Apple TV? Maybe they should have called it the iTV, and done battle with the UK Broadcasting industry!).

For me these gems of gadgetry, remain purely form over function, well a little less overbearing, than that, but I certainly wont be eschewing the purchase of an iPhone anytime soon, nor an iPad if ever. Which leads me on the the counter side to this long post, to the offering and stirrings of the dawn of a new age from the crowd at mountain view, introducing, the new and improving Google!

I’m still waiting for a movie about the origins of this technological behemoth, Apple and MS have had it with Noah Riley and Co. in the Pirates of Silicon Valley, but what about Sergey and Larry, two Stanford PhD nerds (in the nicest possible sense) its a fairytale that came true unexpectedly to say the very least. The direction of Google has always seemed to be up, and since its inception in 1996, has always managed to find the right tack, and have the wind behind them. I won’t delve into the Google history here, most of you reading this have more than enough information, suffice to say, it is there latest movements which have put them in the firing line of Apple.

So without further ado may I now present, our new comrade in arms, the little green robot, Android! Yes this latest OS cum SDK cum framework, was initially released as a new direction for google, more a structured OS for platforms, than google desktop which was more of a widget factory for windows before vista reared its ugly head. Yes there was murmurings of Google OS and early attempts resembled an over-sized google Desktop OS running on a Linux kernel (latest is on 2.6.29) , it wasn’t bad it was google, but they needed more of a face, and what they gave was a golden mask.

Following the purchase of Android inc, Its fully open source (its a member of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA)), (AND yes it includes the telephony API stack) , it runs over a modified Linux kernel , its develop-able’, download-able’, and scalable and my word, its… its.. its built on Java, you write apps for it in Java  and it ships with the Dalvik Virtual Machine, so its a full member of the Java World, and yes some of the browsers available, even run Flash!

At present its offerings come largely on smart-phones, though there is an OS available on netbooks as an alternative to Windows. However, that is not to belittle it in any form, it has a rich full featured API for application building and telephony, including support for Touch screen technology, this leads us now to the new realm of Android and its troop build up in an Apple like defence. The SDK contains a myriad of tools, including a debugger, an emulator,  and even some samples to get us neophytes up and running. It can be uses smoothly within Eclipse as a plugin, using Apache Ant and and Python 2.2 (two other bastions of the Open Source movement. As its open source, the community is strong, and if you want customizable firmware, and features, such as various Audio support (e.g. FLAC lossless) theres no end of choice (though check your handset warranty for this hacking).

Until recently this year, the phones running android were from third party manufacturers, HTC, and Samsung, being amongst the biggest players, and, according to Google, there are 18 separate phone models running Android OS, I myself have the HTC Hero, running Android 1.5, but waiting for the 2.1 update due next month. Whilst several operators offer Android phones, its also available provider free and unlocked as standard (I bought mine from Amazon UK). There are those who commented that the distribution of the OS to the various manufacturers, could never pose a serious threat to the iPhone, as the Hardware was limited to those phones. However, I disagree the iPhone is sleek, but there is no choice (well except for the memory size and 2 colour selection). In the Android world, the phone scope allows consumer a better choice, colour, screen size, memory and even the ability in nearly all its phones to change the battery by yourself (Apple take note iPhone and iPod included) without entailing sending the device, off excessive costs or a voiding of the warranty. Ok so my HTC Hero, may not be as sexy as the iPhone, but its practical touch screen, and no nonsense ergonomics its a great  wifi enabled phone, (rather than a wifi, app laden expensive pocket pc with a phone) oh yes, and because of the JVM I have a whole range of apps iPhone users lack, including for example, VOIP with skype, so I can make those free calls iPhone users can’t! However, to stir the waters even more, this year Google released its own stylish piece of hardware, the Nexus Google Smart Phone. Built by HTC it runs the latest super-duper version of Android, and in my eyes, is certainly an iPhone killer, (well providing the world can shake the stigma of the Apple logo, and look a little deeper)

So its no wonder Apple is getting a little uneasy, but its all fair in love and competition, and Apple will have to wake up and smell the Coffee (Java flavor if you please), and tone down the rhetoric and whole aggressiveness thing as they will be left in the backseats eventually as the competition moves into the Open Source arena. Sure their hardware would probably survive a beating, but its OS has an uncertain future on its mini devices if it doesn’t step up. Google is in this authors opinion, very much in the driving seat, its bed fellow Sun is now consumed wholly by Oracle, who are now responsible for managing Java, with Java 7 is on its way. So this is all good news for Google, and following Chrome Android and the Nexus, one wonders what offerings come next. I do think however,  they should keep focus on the web, as that is there raison d’etre,  take for example. gears, gwt, appEngine and the rest, these undoubtedly  ensure its position as a powerhouse in web tech is unchallenged, where Yahoo-Microsoft and Apple can only feed off the left overs. I think Google should avoid too much furor over Hardware offerings, the Android and OHA partnership is good business acumen for Google’s dabbling in the smart-phone world, and keeping it that way means it wont have to draw resources away from its software arm, to try to catch up with apples 30 year head start. To be quaint, Google is to the web, what Microsoft was to the PC in the early 90’s, but where MS failed is to try to adopt too much of the competition direction, and as we saw Internet Explorer, is beginning to show signs of falling from its horse, with recent EU  rulings, and with poor support for new web standards. Ok so IE is still the widest browser, but not from choice of the net-savvy, only because until recently with Mozilla foundation reinventing themselves with Firefox, Apple pushing with Safari and Google with Chrome it was the only option for browsing the web for Windows users, who became so comfortable that any switch was hard. But  now that security has gone, and there is a void that needs filling, and Google, is in the lead. The further blurring of the line between phone and computer with the advent of the smart-phone, means that this void is also opening up here, and with Android, Google is once again, the lead candidate, now taking on Nokia and Symbian (which has also recently been Open Sourced, AND has had a JVM since its inception) for a bigger share of the pie. This leaves Apple, running largely under its own steam, and so far there’s enough coal for stoking, to maintain a degree of momentum, but one day not to far away, the coal will run out, as the hardware becomes more advanced, cheaper and available to more, and the software adapts to make the optimum use of such hardware, here my dear friends the Apple may fall from the tree, as the little green robot, finds its place amongst the giants.

For now, your very own Javacabecedarian

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Javacabecedarian

Happy New year readers (who ever you are)!

I’m back for a brief post this month, lots on you know, moving house and all that nonsense. Hope your Xmas was a good one, I had a break from the lines of Java coding for a while, and now back to business.

As you my or may not have been aware, I was attempting to build a java powered site at the address http://www.enableassertions.com. Despite even the finest intentions, the folks at Mocha Hosting http://www.mochahost.com/webhosting.php who were providing me with an expensive private JVM / Tomcat Hosting service, failed to show any particular nouse in the Java world, and even in my eyes failed to make the grade in the hosting provider field at all. The failures in my opinion fall into several notable categories

Live 24H support. A lovely concept by which you can open a chat window and talk to what appears to be a human being(though I have my doubts). However, what has failed to be made aware is the fact that the entity on the other side of the chat (the so called support representative) knows diddly-squat about anything apart from what direction to point you in. A whiff of anything marginally technical, and its off to the ticket system for you, (..what a naughty customer you are, asking technical questions from customer support!). Try to keep them talking and get all customer orientated they will either sign off with not a word or act like a robot by repeating can I help you enough times to your questions so you get to fed up and sign off! If you (like me) are actually not living in the USA (Oh my word really?!) Then be prepared for the usual bulltachen (Zohan quote there) the concept of outside the US, seems to infer further blankness and ignorance from the bot (sorry support representative). Occasionally they actually can give somewhere near a comprehensive advice, but even account type questions result in a link rather than any professional courtesy! The 24H live support (gets less live the later it is) is more akin to one of those information booths at a museum who’s representative simply points people in the apparent right direction, this way for the toilets, that way for the shop, open a service ticket, this way for the toilet! So forget any ideas of ’support’ you would get more information from an unused artists sketchpad!

The there is the FAQ, which is more like some form of idiots guide to what you already know. In this area forget it, I suspect it was written by the 24H live support team, with perhaps the tiniest bit of input from a very reluctant teccie (well someone who can say server downtime, and know what it means). If you want to be treated like an infant or your elderly relative learning how to use a computer for the first time (well that may be an insult to the relative, and even the infant for that matter) then the FAQ is for you, useless!  If you managed to get to the FAQ site and found a topic within your ballpark (or small country) then you already know more than what the FAQ can offer, so a twitter #fail for that people!

And then there is the ticketing system. OK, so perhaps the miserable bastard in me is a bit strict here, its OK, for what it does, but my problem is that it can take 24 hours for a pretty simple question to be answered, which, additionally can only be followed on-line, you only get an email to tell you that the ticket is being dealt with (AKA lost in cyberspace) or it has been answered (well standard set replied to, by some low level it support slave). If you wish to open, reply or generally peeve about any ticket you have to log in to your account at mocha host and get to the ticketing site, enter the ticket number if you have it, and then you’re in the poker game, let hope you have the Aces! Its a bit of a cat and mouse analogy, and it takes the support out of support, plus in the end, often even the FAQ would have been more useful!

Finally theres the technical stuff itself. A nice old age tested juicy PHP driven C-panel is the main control center for your site, with its near minions of folders and options. OK, is your just running a plain old HTML site C-panel is more than satisfactory, however, with myself and private  JVM / Tomcat Hosting its a bit more quantum mechanical! Apart from having way to many links and items to useless stuff that no individual would really use if they are halfway knowledgeable about web development, (things like Google Add-words, visitor statistics and other third party semi-spam sign-ups), the additional features for Java support, are a bit out in space for a hosting provider which has such poor technical support. There are many rants in this area I could effuse, but I will tame myself t a few main offenders. First the folder structure for a JSP / Java hosted tomcat site, is the default Tomcat setup, which is fine in itself but buried within another folder structure designed for normal website development, its a real humdinger of a kick in the arse for any professional Java site design. At the very least you can forget your favorite IDE’s for development, despite the ability to FTP your site into your Mocha account when ready, the folder structures API libraries and so forth, which you create for a site in your IDE,  cant be replicated in your Mocha Host account. Think of it as your production environment in your IDE of choice being warm at home in your own Town and country (in my case Turku, Finland). Then you want to travel with your setup intact to your deployment environment, however your destination would be something geographically detached from your home town for example in my case Australia, so trying to fit in a Finnish cultured setup into an Aussie based hometown, just doesn’t cut the mustard, your folders, your libraries, your scripts all have to be manipulated and hybridized into some mutant barely unrecognizable structure, which destroys any workflow productivity!

But wait, I spy a SVN repository service in my C-Panel perhaps were saved, well think again the offered so called User friendly SVN http://www.usvn.info/, an open source SVN client and server is a great little tool in normal circumstances easier to use than Git or SVN, but in the Mocha World, its far out of place. As I discovered from a ticketing debate with ignoramuses at Mocha there is absolutely  no connection between your site and the SVN repo, (you know the usual SVN things like committing to your production trunk!) So pop went that bubble, USVN is nowt more than a nice piece of developer candy to help Mocha charge more for their services.

If however, by the grace of the IT gods, you manage to fiddle, poke and prod enough to get some form of working JSP / Java site manifestation, trying to do the compulsory tomcat restart to take up any source code changes for the servlet container to recognize, its a 10 mile hike to some dreadful little 3rd party application, which tries also to void the WEB.xml file setup in your site, and is prone to crashes, slow starts and even strange behavior at times. Apparently here the FAQ and ticket support say you must register your servlet paths also (which is in fact, the role of WEB.xml). However despite numerous attempts at registering my servlets here, fortunately WEB.xml still prevailed, (see what I mean about the support, and their knowledge of JVM  / Tomcat?). Additionally to this app,  there is a Tomcat restart button, which I discovered and was later told should be avoided at all costs, use the App (so another bit of fluff to decorate C-Panel with, hurrah for the Mocha Accountants!).

There is a lot more nonsense in Mocha and on C-panel, which is too frustrating and lengthy to go into in more detail, suffice to say its not all to positive! The bottom line here is that Mocha Hosting is a poor solution to Java / JSP /JVM hosting despite being in the minority of providers offering dedicated JVM instances. It does offer Shared JVMs but I suspect these are not any better. Perhaps the development world today only a few players can offer a top notch service for Java support at a cost, but Mocha ain’t one of those I can say in all honesty.

I am currently in a ticketing system to cancel my account ( yes proudly directed by the 24h live museum information robot) and apparently it will take up to 5 days (10 days in USA terms) to cancel my account and refund me the remainder of my poorly invested money. That is if no discrepancies are found in my account, which is possible as they are giving money back to the customer, of course no problems when taking money (took 24 hours to set up my account and go live), I wait with nervous trepidation.

So Bye Bye, Mocha, your New Years resolution? Well check yourself, before you wreck yourself, and as for me? Well I think Go-Daddy beckons with a plain old HTML / JavaScript / Ajax / PHP setup, I’ll leave the Java Web Stuff to my day job!

Your very own Information bot, the Javacabecedarian!

Greetings wiley readers,

This is just a simple heads up to say, Im still around and on my way to rejuvenating this blog. Much has happened in the Java World and in my life that has kept me from the keyboard. Rest assured ill be up an attem’ soon enough.

Clam yourselves me dears.

Still your overt own, Javacabecedarian

I have always been a little impetuous, its my nature, coming from a large family where you got what you needed if you were first to the mark. However, Id like to think that at least to some extent, this has faded a little with my growing age. Thus, when I decided, to seek out a second hosting solution to set my self up with a website, to compliment this blog, I imagined that a little research via the net, would be sufficient to find what i was after.

The thing is I have a specific requirement, which, as most who read this blog will probably notice is my affinity to all things Java. So in this guise, I set about looking for a potential Java / JSP / Servlet hosting solution, plus a nice shiny new domain name. Java solutions aint’ that common, and if they are there then, they are usually not to affordable to someone in my financial environment. Suffice to say, I found myself, coming full circle and arriving back at my current host, happily surprised to discover that they offer JSP and Servlet hosting on a shared JVM, and for the same reasonable prices I manage to maintain this blog.

To me the search was over, what an ideal situation, the same provider, a centralized management of both domains, what could be easier? I went ahead and made the order with goDaddy for Linux hosting.

And then the fun started, well I say fun, but after the first 24 hours, I cannot honestly label it such, for it devolved into a frustratingly laborious and exhaustive process. At the outset, all confirmation e-mails arrived, “yes we have your money, you get the name, and the site, but please wait 24 hours for it to be enabled etc etc” . Ok no problems, quite usual for hosting to take a day to set up a new account, you know, wait for the server guys to get in, have their coffee, read the ticket, fix the bugs, have more coffee, check there emails that kind of thing. The following day, another email, all is fine and dandy you may log in to the control panel, ftp your files off you go, welcome (again) to goDaddy.

So off my impetuous little self went, and logged in to setup all the techie stuff one needs to set up before creating a custom “site under construction page”. This also included making sure JSP files were recognized, which by default they are not, interesting to note that .rb (ruby) extensions are setup by default, for rails lovers, but our good old java jsp. Ok no worries there is a tab to set up additional languages, here it is, ah yes would you like to enable JSP and Servlets? — certainly thats the spot, click!

I would like to depart to you dear reader, at this conjecture that all went swimmingly following this but, sadly I cannot. For no sooner had I selected this option, a confirmation box displayed itself to me and stated that I had chosen to upgrade / downgrade my account and that it could take between 1 – 72 hours for the changes to take effect. Yes your eyes do not fail you 1- 72, this in addition to my 24 hours of waiting for the site to be ready puts a potential 96 hour time between payment and account setup, must at least hit a web watcher somewhere as a record (though not to be proud of). In the mean time, I am slapped with an account update pending, and cannot do anything with my account, save for ftp upload, which at this point is useless without jsp support.

Ho Ho, I thought, it probably wont be that long, i’ll go off and browse the help section for info on setting up my WEB-INF and all things servlet related. Well goDaddy, it must be said, that the help pages are among some of the worst I have ever encountered! Aside from being almost entirely related to supporting goDaddy store registration, the Hosting help appears limited to a paragraph per language on how to set, up and let me tell you, the JSP setup instructions, looks like they had been written by someone who a, didn’t really care about those java customers, 2, had absolutely no idea what they were writing or c, written by a trained monkey, take your pick. No doubt, such lack of even basic factual info led me back to google, and what I discovered from there about goDaddy and Java support, was no cause to celebrate my recent purchase.

The main issue with GoDaddy and Java appears to be the setup. Ok you get one WEB-INF folder, but on a shared JVM they only restart the server once a day at 1 am Utah time, so most of us are forced to compile on our local boxes and upload to the site. See problem here is that a Tomcat properly and individually setup for Servlets on a local box, isn’t going to match the folder structure on GoDaddy hosting, ignoring the fact that goDaddy uses java 1.4 and Tomcat 5.5.27. This according to many forums and chatrooms has resulted in a massive infestation of 404 errors (page not found) when customers have uploaded compiled classes from their local machines to goDaddy’s servers. Many of these poor souls have in vain tried to explain this to the CS as GoDaddy, yet for reasons imparted amongst the choices given above, the common answer appears to be. ” oh it must be a scripting error in your code!”

Please, please please goDaddy get some CS people who actually know and understand the Java Web, not just people who can read from a cheat-sheet, but maybe real java people (if they have the time and patience that is). Firstly, NO it is probably not a ‘code’ error and it is certainly not a ‘Script’ error as it is Java NOT javascript, don’t let the “<% %>” tags confuse you, and last time i checked Java was a fully functional Object Orientated programming language NOT a script! Anyways because of jsp tagging i will give you the benefit of your ignorance in this area. However, what is inexcusable is the sheer ignorance to even the most basic facets of the Tomcat Servlet container. Perhaps you are misled by your own inadequate information, but Tomcat compiles its servlets into classes runtime, so there is bound to be some issues of customers have compiled on another JVM yes java is multi-platform code, but Tomcat is not, and with a shared JVM, well its not the scripting thats the problem. I will save goDaddy further pain by not going into their whole WAR file understanding, that discussion is best left be to be safe!

In all this I became concerned with the ease of use and ability to host my future java site on such in such an unqualified and unstable support environment, so I decided to remove my order post-haste in lieu of more greener climes for my solution. Even this effort was too much for goDaddy, first my password stopped working, i had only used it a mere hour before, then I was locked out of my account for trying the correct password too many times, and then…bang the site failed! No not a script error, this time it actually WAS goDaddy and there 0.1% downtime, which lasted well 10 minutes, then 15 minutes, though it was blamed on a minor mail server glitch later, yes hmm i can certainly see how a mails server glitch can bring down all the other hosts!

Ok enough ranting, now, is not all of goDaddy, which I herby claim to rebuke, for know I not of all these things. I will certainly give credit where credits due, and in relation to the hosting of this blog, merit is certainly short of value, here goDaddy, has excelled profusely, this rant imparted above, is aimed solely at their supposed Java support, to which yes I am admittedly bias, and in particular to their ‘customer support’ and help files, here I am sad to say, is the defining factor in my rant.

Thus fair fellow neophytes of Java’s embraces, be steady, be wary and take heed if one is to seek out a warm and safe home, for those web skills we wish to publish to the world, and as this tale has told, at this particular point in space-time, goDaddy is perhaps not sufficiently poised to offer, the greatest aid to your quest. Yet fret not those who seek not the realms of Java, but of the other halls of the the static and dynamic web, for certainly here goDaddy may provide exactly that to which you seek.

Worry not my friends, however, for a new day approaches, and there is much positivism in the air, I have found another home, to which my code has found refuge. However, that is a story yet to be told, so hold tight and keep appraised of this space, for herein there will certainly be a tale to tell!

Sincerely yours as always,

your Javacabecedarian

My new position, as a code monkey is now fully underway, and in addition to trawling the lines of Java and JSP pages, I have been introduced to some pretty awesome JavaScript Libraries. Yes, I thought I would never admit it but it appears as though good old JS has come along way since flashing cursors and ticker test, along way. The library of choice to which I am being introduced is Ext JS (www.extjs.com) and it is indeed a veritable toolbox of wonders.

It literally takes the effort out of writing Dom driven javascript, and enables JSON usage, easy to apply, yes it has all the eye-candy, I have messed about with before with the other frameworks such as Protaculuos (Scriptaculous and Prototype), JQuery and even Dojo. However for me the power of Ext lies in its flexibility and customizability, Sure its a little more bloated than some of the others, but hey, I prefer static over dynamic languages when it comes to extensibility so, a little boilerplate in this case, doesn’t matter to me.

Im still only a bern when it comes to this stuff, but so far the kind of forms windows, grids and other such wonders, really add a certain pizazz, and are technically welcome addition to a website. Further Ext interacts really well when wrapped up in JSP taglibs, reducing page clutter and improving extensibility even more, you gotta love it.

In the fear of plagiarism or some such copyright crime, all rights love, kudos and other stuff for this following snippet goes to Ext. This little piece is all the code needed (of course once your library is set up and declared in your head script) to get at a div with the id ‘mydiv’.

old way:

document.getElemenById(‘mydiv’);

ExtJS way:

Ext.get(‘mydiv’);

Ok, Ok, so boring stuff for you JS geeks, but a real swashbuckler for a Java programmer, moving also into JS. Im even planning to update my authored site to stick in a bit of JS functionality. Obviously there is WAY more Ex the t can do , head over to www.extjs.com and play with some of the examples, great stuff indeed. Additionally, the API is bloody brilliant, a standard all languages should adhere to (yes even Sun, should take notice, say bye bye to all those dam frames, and make a REAL search function).

The configuration settings for things such as forms, provides a scripting structure similar to CSS, which makes it really simple to code and drop in as well as customize. Also dare I say it but it is similar also to the new JavaFX language, which I am waiting so much to be able to write on OSX and Linux (Come on Jobs give us Java 6!).

In addition to ExtJS I am touching on Greybox, orangoo.com/labs/GreyBox/  coolest popup window ever, say bye bye to; javascript:WindowOpen(); really simple stuff.

Setting aside the wonders for a moment, there are a few drawbacks. With all the libraries I would like to include including greybox, the header can get a little flooded, even if I stick them all in a separate .js file, there is can be still a small novel of calls. Next one has to remember to put the calls in a certain order or things wont work, firebug will cough up all your errors, including as I have found, a dislike of Ext’s prototyping JSON call to new, which works fine if you have the right order, but if you don’t realize this, you’ll be trying to swat firebug for ever!

I won’t go into the pros and cons of Ext in comparison to other libraries, for example JQuery, needless to say, there is loads of blogs out there willing to do an extensive coverage. For my mind, it seems to always boil down to preference, and there are of course, no requirements to use just Ext or just #Library, mix and match is the name of the game. ExtJS is MIT Open Source license, so download and enjoy, but if you need commercial support, there are a wide range of options to choose from.

So a nice little toolbox here, I shall see about adding some functionality here some stage if my host goDaddy allows it, should do Im paying for the privilege of my own controlled site and URL!

Take a look and send me some thoughts, id be interested in what you think.

Javacabecedarian

Right, in my continued drive to update this site now I am well on Wordpress, I have added the twitter plugin that allows a tweet on my twitter account whenever i send a blog positing, so here again is another test in the name of testing, after which I hope my following blogs can be more informative than just setting up and testing things!

Javacabecedarian

Sleep has found its way to me now and my typing is labored. So one final check here is that my tool of choice fro blogging from my Mac is Ecto, and here now I use it to ensure that this new WordPress site indeed receives Ecto’s superb blogging attention.

If you can read this, then wherever you are in the world, good reader, I wish you from Finland, a good night..

Javacabecedarian

If you are reading this then you can probably see we are now not only on Wordpress, but thanks to GoDaddy webhosting, we have are very own site here at thejavacabecedarian.com. You can still use the old address but it will take you here. Check back regularly to see how the new site is evovling.

Your Very own

Javacabecedarian,