Musings of a Trained Monkey

Accessibility of Applets versus Flex RIAs...

Steve Longdo — Sat, 26 May 2007 18:58:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some research into providing support for section 508 accessibility compliance for a simple file browser available inside a web browser. There really is a dearth of information available on the topic from a software implementation stand point.

Java Applets seem to pay lip service to providing support for accessibility by the addition of tons of code labels that would need to be maintained with each release. Certain activities don’t seem to be supported at all for users with accessibility needs (opening tree nodes for example). The most recent documentation I could find on Applets and Accessibility on Sun’s website is called What’s new in Accessibility and is dated October 30, 2000 clearly Sun took their role as an industry leader in web technology very seriously…back in 2000. (As an aside is referring to a user of an applet as a Robot just a little offensive to anyone besides me?)

Adobe Flex, however, seems to view accessibility as a core issue in the design of their product. So much so that they provide a very simple xml attribute for MXML files (<accessibility>true</accessibility>) to turn on a host of accessibility features. This requires almost no extra effort on the part of a software developer. There are a small number of caveats to their support, but they have taken the steps to detail them and best practices for accessibility on their site including a functional understanding of how Flex works with JAWS and Braille screen technologies. Adobe even maintains a current website dedicated to the accessibility of their products.

Jetty and WebLogic JNDI sitting in a tree...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 17 May 2007 04:26:00 +0000

I am a huge fan of Jetty for Java web application development. Love how fast it loads, reloads, and generally kicks the crap out of Tomcat. The Jetty team seems to follow the JEE specifications that they do implement (not all of them) much more strictly than Tomcat. This makes it a very good testbed for developing applications that will be eventually hosted on WebLogic Server .

Until you need to do something like run Message Driven Beans with WLS special performance enhancing sauce. Jetty has it’s jetty-plus configuration which supports JNDI and some other JEE niceties. If you really want to use the full on BEA JMS/MDB combo though you have a problem.

Including the weblogic.jar in Jetty’s classpath is not the answer. This will cause all sorts of confusion about which implementations of java. * and javax. * packages to use. Within the WebLogic Server distribution’s server/lib directory there is a wlclient.jar. Again this won’t work right in your overall classpath, but it will work if you put the wlclient.jar inside of a webapp’s WEB-INF/lib directory. Your code will just need to make a small accommodation for connecting to WLS JNDI constructing the InitialContext with the WebLogic specific properties:


    Properties props = new Properties();
    props.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,"weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");
    props.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "t3://localhost:7001");
    InitialContext ctx = null;
  try{
      InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(props);
       (...Lookup JMS Queues, place Messages, etc...)
  } catch (Exception e) {
     (do something!)
  } finally {
       try{ ctx.close() } catch (Exception e) { (eek! just have to eat this one!)}
  }

This gives you the flexibility of using Jetty configured JNDI objects as well as leveraging WebLogic JNDI objects without having to eat huge WebLogic redeployment startup times for your web application.

Running BEA WebLogic Server on OS X...

Steve Longdo — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:31:00 +0000

People have trying installs of BEA WLS on OS X out for awhile. I remember installing WLS 9.2 back in 2005. I recently ran across a blog entry about installing WLS 10.0. I’m still using a PPC Mac with not nearly enough RAM, so I thought I would try to see how the 10.0 performance would be compared to my 9.2 experience.

Surprisingly 10.0 is much slower to start up. I appreciate that OS X and Apple’s JVM aren’t a supported platform, but still it took almost 7 minutes for the MedRec sample domain to start up! Under 9.2 it was only 2 minutes. Back when I installed 9.2 Apple’s JVM was 1.5 and I have 1.6 running now.

I wanted to do a fair comparison, but apparently installing 10.0 with Apple’s 1.6 JVM overwrites the PointBase configuration such that 9.2 won’t even start up the MedRec sample domain (incompatible serial uids for javax.xml.namespace.QName if anyone cares). Also Apple says that uninstalling their 1.6 beta is a bad idea?!? I’m sure I could probably clean it up and get it running, but that would exceed my ten minute or so attention span for working on Java stuff at home.

Adobe Flex opens up...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:22:00 +0000

This looks to be some exciting news from Adobe about open sourcing Flex. Flex is a developer oriented way of working with Flash. I had the good fortune to work with it back in the Macromedia days when it was still a beta product.

Flex facilitates the creation of a superior user experience on the web. It is my belief the expen$ive licensing terms for the technology was always the barrier to larger adoption. Get ready for a flood of better looking, more functional web applications in the next few months. I know I will be adding Flex into my open source toolbox.

Code Generation STILL in Action

Steve Longdo — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 15:30:00 +0000

— The Past —

Jack Herrington wrote a book Code Generation in Action way back in 2003. It took advantage of the little programming language that could, Ruby. I remember having a discussion with a colleague back then about the value of generated code. We were of the opinion then that it would only apply to simple repetitive cases and wouldn’t make much of an impact.

If only I could go back in time and slap both myself and my colleague in the face! We missed out on being early adopters of time saving technology. In fact almost everyone using Java was already taking advantage of code generation whether they realized it or not , Eclipse would generate getters and setters and had its refactoring capabilities, Spring was beginning to handle externalizing dependencies, and the then fledgling Hibernate Framework was manipulating bytecode to enhance Java methods.

At the same time my colleague and I were hammering out code with the tried and true cut-n-rape technique that had been popular since before we were born.

— Modern Day —

I have the “opportunity” to work on porting some old JSPs which, in true 20^th century Model 1 style, link directly to each other and the database via scriptlets, to a more modern Java MVC framework. Rather than just wade in blindly, manually translating JSP scriptlet page to Java MVC framework code, I decided to make the project interesting and have been writing a Ruby JSP parser/code generator. It can identify scriptlet code and extract it for me. I have been enhancing the parser to handle generation of Spring MVC code and am working on having it generate Spring Web Flow flows from reading the form action attributes in the JSPs to model application flows.

Here is a 2006 appearance by Jack Herrington at Google on the subject of Code Generation that is worth a watch.

Stuffed Cabbage...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:17:00 +0000

Here is a product marketing disaster in the making. Who is the target market for the “Stuffed Cabbage Meal”?

I associate cabbage with the diet of “older people”, we will say people born before 1950, another group that might like cabbage could be Vegetarian and Vegan diet/lifestyle-choosers. The problem with this theory is the “Stuffed” in name of the dish refers to a meat stuffing. The box does not describe or specify what kind of meat this might be, but we’ll assume that it makes unpalatable for the Veggie crowd. I think most people born before 1950 would just assume boil their own cabbage versus pay for a frozen dinner version. Assuming that was the target audience, looks like it is a complete miss. So who does the packaging sell to? Slick graphics with soothing colors, comforting fonts, and a very questionable, unappetizing shot of the entree.

I wonder what other variety of Lean Cuisine was rejected in favor of this unsellable pablum?

Inkscape and X11 issues...

Steve Longdo — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:23:00 +0000

Inkscape is an insanely cool open source vector graphic editor that uses SVG as its native file format. I installed it shortly after reading about it with no problem, except that when it starts up it complains about X11 not being installed.

Apple provides a download, X11User, that will set things up if you haven’t already. The download page says something about a version on the Tiger DVD installation disk, but I assumed the download would work as well. (After the fact I see the System requirement is 10.3.8 – 10.3.9)

Ouch, don’t do it. If you install X11User from Apple’s website it decides your OS X version is 10.3.8 and iTunes and other applications won’t work anymore! I tried to figure out what files I had blindly installed, but the damage was done. I tried several efforts at getting Software Update to work, but it felt my Panther 10.3.8 system was up to date :-(

Long story short, here is a good file to know about: /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist It contains the version of OS X that most of your applications will care about, including Software Update. I altered the 10.3.8 to 10.4, then ran Software Update and Software Update got everything repaired to 10.4.8. As a special bonus the X11 stuff continued to work, so I am now Drawing Freely, with Inkscape.

ActiveMessaging is still alive...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:49:00 +0000

I am happy to see that ActiveMessaging (a13g<-corny) is returning to life. It was announced with a bit of fanfare by Obie in early 2006 and then disappeared.

Jon Tirsen sent out some invites for a new Google Group and introduced Andrew Kuklewicz as the new maintainer of the project. I think this will become the premier way for RoR apps to interact with Java backends in 2007. Take a look at the code and see how you can contribute!

Patterns are dead, Frameworks are for the lazy...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:19:00 +0000

Patrick Logan offers an interesting take on the state of design doctrines in his post Code Shrink Programming Models of particular note was this bit:

By the way, the thought crossed my mind again recently… has “agile” killed “patterns” or did it die on its own? Are “patterns” the best way to present a new programming model? Does anyone really “do” patterns anymore, the way the original movement intended? Or do we just write some text and draw some pictures and call them patterns? Is there any point to the “patterns” idea anymore? I’m not sure either way.

This is a beguiling idea as lots of companies look for architecture documentation that explicitly states which patterns were used, etc. Yet I find myself agreeing with Patrick’s post. Good programmers inherently write good code, other programmers attempt to employ patterns to write mediocre code.

I forwarded this article to David Gifford, a friend of mine to get his perspective since he has been working in the industry as an architect for a long time. His response made me laugh for quite awhile.

Frameworks evolve so “lazy” developers don’t have to give much thought to patterns, instead everyone just thinks about all the multitudes of configuration files and should groovy or xml be used…

Anyone working on the web with Java in the pre-Struts days can remember when they didn’t have to make giant configuration files. Now I am wondering if “multitudes of configuration files” is recognized by the community as a pattern or as an anti-pattern? I know what the answer is for me.

iTunes Gift Bombing for XMas

Steve Longdo — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:21:00 +0000

While contemplating gifts for the family this year an idea for a gag gift hit me, purchase some particularly horrible song for someone on iTunes. Don’t be thoughtless and track down some dreck that would never be listened to by the prospective recipient. Instead be devious and think of a song that would get stuck in someone’s head. A catchy pop song that is now out of date is fun, or a singer they will hate, and bonus points for bad holiday songs.
Simply ‘Gift This Music’ on iTunes to let your friends and loved ones know how much you care/or don’t care :-)

Prospective Torture Top Ten (skewing mostly 80’s here)

Sadly not available for iTunes gift bombing!

Party All the Time – Eddie Murphy
Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time – Paul McCartney
Jingle Bells – Singing Dogs (only as part of an album on iTunes, for shame!)
Sleigh Ride – C3PO and R2-D2 <- That’s not a typo

What songs do you not want for X-Mas?