Among today’s fashionable buzzwords in web development is Ajax. Fortunately, when you’re using the BEA WebLogic Portal framework, it’s easy to add a bit of this hot new technology to your application. For a project I did this year, we used the JSON-RPC-Java Ajax implementation. To use JSONRPC(JavaScript Object Notation remote procedure call protocol), you drop the downloaded jsonrpc.jar in your application’s APP-INF/lib directory. This library contains a servlet that will catch and process your Ajax actions. You’ll have to configure the servlet in the web.xml (see the detailed instructions). Then it’s up to you to do some JavaScript coding.
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Last Friday I finally managed (been too busy lately) to visit Rotterdam’s super bookstore, Donner, to pick up a copy of Programming Ruby. I will easily spend an hour or two roaming Donner’s eight or nine floors, browsing through all their new books, discovering old ones I hadn’t seen before, sitting down for a while to read through the contents of some books to see if I should really spend the small fortune they sometimes cost these days… Usually I start by going straight to the third floor (computer books), then slowly all the way up (passing the cd department, books on art, design, movies, music etc.; top floor has books on sale); and finally I go back down again (law, economics, philosophy, magazines, gardening, food, photography, and the huge basement with fiction, Dutch & English). Anyway, there I was on the third floor, only one copy of Programming Ruby left (is it that popular or doesn’t it sell at all?)… and I didn’t buy it! Instead I took home Agile Web Development with Rails, in the true Ruby spirit: I want to create something right away, build a web site now, with Ruby. I know myself, eventually I will buy the other book and meticulously read about all the language intricacies. But for now, it’s Rails.

Today I was talking with my co-worker Ravan about the various web frameworks there are now in the Java world. There’s Struts, of course, Spring MVC, Spring Webflow, Tapestry, Beehive/Netui, JSF, Shale… and undoubtedly many more. One or two years ago it was obvious which one you were going to use (Struts); right now it’s hard to tell where to put your money. Chances are, the framework you’re building your enterprise application with today, will be out of fashion (or worse, out of existence) next year. Three years from now, who’s going to maintain all that code written with, by then, outdated frameworks?

By coincidence I came across some half-hidden postings later today, about a newly proposed framework called Clarity–the one framework to replace them all. Representatives from several of the existing frameworks (Spring, WebWork, Struts Ti and Beehive) have joined the initiative. Clarity’s goal is “to unify WebWork, Struts, Spring MVC, Beehive, and Spring WebFlow in to a single project that establishes clear leadership in the web development space.” Right now there seems to be little more than a mailing list and a mission statement. It does sound promising though. Think of it: the best of Spring, Struts and Beehive united. If it’s done well (easy to use, easy to code) it could well be the Java answer to Ruby on Rails. (No, let’s not go there; Rails and J2EE are for different kinds of applications, that won’t change).

I see only one potential problem: that Clarity will fail to replace the existing frameworks, and will become just another framework coexisting with the others. If that happens, we’re all doomed. This initiative might be more important for Java than these few cautious postings seem to suggest…

Yesterday, a familiar Ruby coder showed me a piece of Ruby code that used Ruby’s programmer-friendly if-construct, where you can place the if clause after the conditional block of code. It was something like this:
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Last Friday, Holland was surprised by heavy snowfall. The result was chaos on the roads, people being stuck in their car until late in the evening, people stuck in train stations… And all this because of 10 centimeters of snow. I shot (in my car, hands-free of course!) this rather dramatic-looking photo yesterday, on my way over from the office (which is located directly in the heart of the snow area), when it was still snowing continuously:

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if this first snow of the season will also be the last. I’m sure I was born for a warmer climate than this. Snow is great–for one week a year maximum, and provided I’m in a little hotel somewhere in France or Switzerland, sitting by the fire, with a book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, knowing there’ll be a good meal on the table later on… in that scenario, I don’t mind looking out the window seeing some snow flakes falling.
Our last winter vacation came close to this perfection. M. and I and some friends drove down to the tiny village of Bois Barbu, in the French Vercors region. We stayed in the Ferme du Bois Barbu, a small hotel with friendly owners. We made some great walks through the snowy landscape, and we even tried cross-country skiing (which was fun… for a day). This is a picture (actually two photos combined) from one of our walks: