Jeremy Rayner on java and other stuff.

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xwork: visualising flow of control with XSLT and SVG
Posted on 17 Dec 2003
 I've been fiddling around trying to visualize the xwork flow of control, and have come up with an XSLT based stylesheet which will transform your xwork.xml into a SVG graphic.

i.e.
xwork.xml
 XLST>  SVG

  • here is the XSLT stylesheet - xwork2svg.xslt
  • to use with Xalan: java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -in xwork.xml -xsl xwork2svg.xslt -out xwork.svg

I think lots of things could be improved with the stylesheet, such as:

  • arrows to indicate chained actions
  • standard order for success/error/input etc...
  • other transformations such as HTML

I think it is quite useful, as it allows the flow of control to be quickly groked, and can be generated as part of the build, for documentation purposes.
Let me know what you think...

17 Dec 2003 |

London Java Meetup - Xmas review
Posted on 16 Dec 2003
The LondonXMeetup.xmasParty was an entertaining night in the murky depths of the Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms.

It was great to see so many enthusiastic developers there, with a wide diversity being represented, java, perl, python, groovy etc...

Thanks especially to James who was mobbed by wannabe groovers and parrot hackers...

Anyways as my recollections are hazy, I'll let the pictures do the talking...

perl mongers meet java bloggers - yes that is a GPL tshirt! sam discusses his new book rohan is interrupted by pratik simon and pratik find out what it is like to be groovy from james small values of cool - captured in time - Simon Brunning and Steve

Thanks for the groovy get together guys, see you all in 2004.

P.S. Thanks to Sam and Simon for the book, I'll get your autographs later, yeah ;-)

16 Dec 2003 |

jsig - java user interfaces - seminar review
Posted on 12 Dec 2003
Popped along to the jsig seminar today:

The talk about Java Server Faces turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, with it essentially being a discussion of .net clients talking to J2EE servers using Janeva.

However the ILOG Jviews talk was fun and informative. To see how fun, have a quick play with this demo

The most interesting thing about this talk was their use of CSS jammed between your model (represented in xml) and their graphical rendering software (JViews). Being able to 'intercept' the model prior to reaching the view allowed all sorts of funky changes to be made in a very loosely coupled way. (reminds me of interceptor stack in xwork)

Thanks to jsig, borland and ilog for a fun lunch...

12 Dec 2003 |

Play with Groovy today
Posted on 12 Dec 2003
With the exciting announcement of groovy reaching its first release, I suggest you have a play. And what better way to get started than have megg generate a groovy project for you...

[i.e. I've just added a groovy template project to megg - go play ;-) ]

12 Dec 2003 |

The Great Fire of London
Posted on 10 Dec 2003
Andi and I enjoyed a stroll down to the monument at lunch today, hope you enjoy the pictures below...

10 Dec 2003 |

human metadata about british telly
Posted on 08 Dec 2003
Cool programme on (british) Sky TV - ch.277, called Flipside, basically four or so pundits on a sofa watching and gabblin about what's on TV at that moment.

So much more 'human' than rolling through the EPG, recommend you try and catch a couple of minutes, but after that you might just watch the other channel that they're chattin about...

cool concept, well executed...

08 Dec 2003 |

bloogmark: code in many ways
Posted on 08 Dec 2003
As a form of language cookbook, these are all handy examples of code: I'm sure there was a repository of HelloWorlds for Java technologies, i.e. simplistic implementations of MessageBeans, Servlets, JNI etc... any ideas where that was...?
08 Dec 2003 |

xwork/webwork2 logo contest
Posted on 03 Dec 2003
My initial entries into the logo contest are as follows:


I'll attach these to main competition page, when users such as myself get permission to attach pictures ;-)

03 Dec 2003 |

Lasers can be fun...
Posted on 03 Dec 2003
This is a really fun puzzle game

thanks to cal for the link.

cool game with lasers
03 Dec 2003 |

A day in the life of... jez
Posted on 01 Dec 2003
As an experiment I thought I'd keep a note of my normal working day, to see where time is being spent, and what my current 'process' is. This isn't an exhaustive list, as during the day, too many other things take precedence, but there should be enough for you to get the idea. Also blogging it is a great way to preserve this for future comparison and maybe seeing what you lot get up to...

0520 - alarm goes off
0530 - leave house and drive to the station, listening to the news headlines on Radio 4, but as soon as the shipping forecast comes on switch over to Radio 1 for some wake up tunes, this morning it appears to be Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
0544 - arrive at station, parking car in an impossibly tight gap.
0549 - board the train to London, getting usual seat, with a table, so that my laptop can be used. My laptop is currently the oldest java development environment on the planet, with specs of (pII,300Mhz,4Gb,64Mb,SuSe8.2)
0552 - laptop booted, pink floyd - the wall on my walkman, ready to start the day.
- run 'ant test' to see where I got to the night before, five compilation errors come up.
- fix errors quickly (using microemacs'02)
- assertion failure during junit tests, turns out to be a null pointer exposed by a simple mock.
- build successful, yay.
- with that small victory, I change over and start blogging about the next java meetup.
- back to code, add another test checking what happens if not enough properties are set on my webwork2 action.
- add ability to my mock delegate, to simulate failure of data retrieval and add a test case that uses it.
0659 - arrive in London, walk to work listening to 99 code red
0727 - arrive at desk
- check my work email
- check for the latest EAP of IntelliJ, my preferred java development environment
- go to bloglines, to see what friends have been up to.
 - simon has added some more stuff to pebble (his blogging software)
 - joe is putting the finishing touches to xstream.
 - hani is discussing jboss and senior architects :)
- get the laptop connected, publish the earlier blog entry that I made on the train.
- cvs update/commit my laptop to the company cvs repository.
- cvs update on my desktop machine
- ant test on desktop, everything looks good.
- cvs repository maintanence, another branch needed.
- create more tests.
- with tests in place start to refactor, using such thing as extract method, this seems easy with IntelliJ.
- suddenly things become harder as the refactorings get more complicated, for instance, blocks of code to be extracted altering more than one variable, IntelliJ breaks down, and some hand refactoring comes into play.
- lots of meetings, code and other stuff which is too hard to log in an interesting way...
- preparing to go home again, cvs update/commit my desktop to the company cvs repository, and nag my work collegues to do the same.
- cvs update my laptop, with a quick ant test to ensure that all the new classes have been added to cvs during the day.
1600- squeeze onto the tube, not a good way to travel, I try to walk both ways to work, but sometimes catching the tube seems like a good idea...
1624- squeeze onto train, ever since they altered the timetable, this train has been a nightmare, so I usually spend the first twenty minutes home in the guards van, with my laptop keeping me company.
1630- start to write a website for megg, as people have begun to nag me that this tool should have a proper home, not just the project pages at sourceforge.
1731- arrive back at station car park.
1751- arrive back home.
family time- as a dad, husband and dog walker, I try never to code/work of an evening, life is too important to fritter away...
2230- set alarm, go to sleep.

Thanks for listening, I'll try and upgrade my life to something more interesting soon :)

01 Dec 2003 |

 

 
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