Willie Mouton's Java Technology Blog

Java CMS?

2005-11-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

Occasionaly I will use a CMS ( content management system ) for a new site I am working on. It cuts alot of the fuss out of the process and it takes less time. Typically I use PHP, but I have noticed some Java CMSes lately, and being more of a Java guy than PHP I am investigating some of them.

Here is a good run-down page of Java CMSes:

http://java-source.net/open-source/content-managment-systems

An Interesting new Java Project Book

2005-11-16T06:10:00.001-08:00

"Java™ After Hours: 10 Projects You'll Never Do at Work" looks like a very good distraction from the normal hustle and bustle of monkey type, wrote coding. Has anyone checked this out yet? Learning new ways of looking at an issue seems to have exponential benefit: It allows you to xolv problems that superficiall seem unrelated.

Java going all the way on CMSes

2005-11-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

Java CMS systems - Magnolia

There seems now to be a plethora of CMS (Content Management Systems) available built atop many application frameworks, earlier on the Open Source community brought us Plone built atop the wonderful Zope content management framework. To this day Plone is arguably the most popular CMS on the market.

However in my search for a decent cross platform CMS I recently stumbled across a Java based product released under the Lesser GPL called Magnolia. Magnolia looks to me to be a truly amazing product that is fully JEE compliant and able to sit atop any JEE server whether it comes from Sun, IBM, JBoss or Apache.

The whole application server front has been heating up with the competition between the Java and .NET camps, whilst the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) still hold the mind share.

The Magnolia CMS is showing a bright future with tentacles reaching out into business process navigation (working with OpenWFE, I think?), document management and potentially digital media in the future.

I have only just stumbled across Magnolia myself, I encourage anyone with the faintest of interest to go and have a look at the Obinary site for themselves.

Courtesy of jroller.com

CMS - Really stands for Can't Manage Sh**.

Female Programmers and what about before Blogspot mangled my last post...

2005-11-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

...The jist I was getting at, is that it is better to make short methods and short classes, that way they are easier to understand and self documenting. The names of classes and methods will tend to indicate the exact flow of the code without need for additional comments.

I was having a chat with a female java programmer the other day and maybe this is just a one-off, but she seemed to indicate that female programmers seem to almost prefer long drawn out, all over the place code...Like it was somehow closer to the way her mind worked that tightly organized, segmented code.

At any rate I definitely enjoy female programmers. A shop full of male ultra l33t, hax0r type duded can become quite tedious. Myself I was more of a jock/nerd throuhgout high school and college, playing sports and kicking butt in the classroom. After being a professional coder for 5 years I still don't think I'll ever get used to some of the people I meet.

The women are indeed a nice thing to have.

Attn: Java Users!

2005-11-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

Hello Java enthusiasts! This is a place that will be dynamic, interesting, hopefully fun, and educational in an effort to teach some java, learn from others, and generally just take our skills to another level.

I found it interesting that the other day as I was coding I noticed that I can now code around 400 or 500 lines of java without having to check for errors, and when I compile it, its ERROR FREE:) After a while the idoms and patterns become second nature. It's no longer programming line-by-line, it's pattern-by-pattern.

One thing that has helped me tremendously lately is coding methods no longer than 40 or so statements, if I can help it. This way the code becomes somewhat self-documenting, so instead of:

private void foo(){

resizeScreen();
for( int i = 0; i < rs =" statement.executeQuery(" d =" coef">

DAMN IT....Blogger editting ruined my post...Well hey, check the cool pic below:)
}

Too many things going on there...I might do something more like:

private void foo(){
doThisIteration( size );
initWidgets( i );
calculateCoolNumber();
populateTable();

}

See? Documents itself and each of those four methods would also delegate, if the need arises, for the sake of clarity.

As you can see my post has been mangled by blogger. I suppose I will need to download the Word plug in so this crap doesn't happen again:) At least you get to see the SEXY alien below:)