reposted from my lj.

Making lists sure helps me put things in perspective, so I thought I should make a list of technologies I’ve been working or playing with lately so I can sort of make a stamp in the sand for the end of the year. I doubt many people will care, but here is what I’ve been doing technology wise:

Java:

JBoss Seam: It’s a bit of a shift going from request based applications to conversation based applications, and bijection is tough to wrap your head around mentally, but I’ve been liking Seam a lot. I am able to get the robustness and enterprise features of J2EE with the speed of development frameworks like Ruby on Rails offer.

GlassFish: As much as I’ve been liking Seam, I still sort of hate JBoss — it is hard to configure and the default settings aren’t what I think they should be. GlassFish works the first time out of the box and is a dream to configure.

JPA: I can’t say JPA is any better than Hibernate Annotations (I think it is a little lacking compared to HA), but it seems to be where the industry is going and I think it is still way better than most persistence frameworks that have come out and it is nice to finally have a good standard.

Hudson: Hudson is a very nice easy to use continuous integration server. that is all you need to know.

Maven: Hate it. I spend more time trying to configure maven than actually writing code.

Javascript:

YUI: There are a ton of javascript libraries out there and I have traditionally gone the prototype/scriptalicious route, but lately I’ve been using the Yahoo User Interface. It is very easy to use, looks nice, and has a ton of widgets.

Cappuccino: this is very new and somewhat limited right now. What I like about this framework is: first that they made it look and act a lot like Objective-C. For someone who has done any Objective-C work it is very easy to get up and running writing code. The second thing that they have done, and I think this is more important, is to build a front end framework that starts and stops a browser application in a similar way to how a desktop application is started and stopped. Cappuccino works a lot like GWT or Flex and frees you a lot from thinking about web apps in terms of request and response. It lets you just get down and write an application. I think it’s still a little lacking in features and widgets, but I’m sure those will come soon.

Rich Faces: Ships with Seam but is developed independently and not required to go with seam. Their widget library is robust and works very smooth. Still missing a few widgets and doesn’t integrate well with other frameworks but it seems promising.

Flash:

MDM Zinc: I started working with Zinc because Adobe AIR can’t be bundled with a distributed application. I’ve been very into it and done a few very cool simple applications. The brick walls I have been hitting that prevent me from using this a ton more are mostly Flash limitations, most noticeably the inability to build a multi-threaded application. With a heavy networked app, I can get it to run 20 times faster with a threaded Java application than with straight actionscript. MDM allows you to thread through custom extenstions but the extensions have to be written in C++, easy in Windows but annoyingly difficult in OSX.

Five 3D: I’ve been playing around with a lot of 3D frameworks. I like Five 3d the most for the type of stuff I’ve been doing because it treats all text as vector, rather than raterising like Sandy or PaperVision do. I have some disagreements the the way the core of the framework is written and changed a few things to be more Object Oriented and streamlined, but performance is still killing me. Supposedly Adobe is adding similar 3d stuff to Flash 10, but I haven’t tried it yet to see.

Mobile:

IPhone - Cocoa Touch: I started a few demo applications that I was very excited about for a few weeks. Since then I have been waiting for Apple for approval (permission) to test my applications on my phone. It’s totally annoying that I can’t even check the status of my application or have an expectation as to when I will get approved.

Android: I like android’s platform and SDK slightly better than IPhone but there are a few things that I think will keep me from being serious about it for a while:
1. I don’t own an android phone and am not anxious to shell out for another new phone
2. The G1 sucks hardware wise compared to an iPhone, it looks similar on paper but needs a hard drive, better form factor, and generally a bump in the numbers.
3. MultiTouch missing and probably not coming anytime soon.

Software:

Nagios: I set up Nagios for monitoring the 10+ servers I am responsible for. I was resisting for a long time because I don’t like that it has a single point of failure — it assumes the server running nagios has 100% uptime — but I finally gave in and it has been working fairly well.

Komodo Edit: After 10 years, Komodo edit is finally slowly replacing my default general text editor on Windows. I still like textmate on OSX better, but Komodo is working pretty awesome and performs identical on all platforms.

Enterprise Architect: I’ve struggled for years with a mix of modeling software. I’ve used everything including Rational Rose, Visio, AggroUML, and OmniGraffle; often times using more than one program for a single project. I dove in early this year and tried using Enterprise Architect for everything and for once I have a tool that I feel is 90% of the way there. The other 10% is probably just me being stubborn. At just over $200, it is a total bargain and offers a very similar feature set to Rational Rose. If you do any UML, system, or database design, it is worth a try.

Databases:

MySQL: I bought all marketing over the past few years and thought MySQL was totally up to speed with SQL Server and Oracle in terms of speed and reliability. For the most part MySQL has performed very well for me and any new projects I do in MySQL. My beef lately is that the engine still isn’t nearly as awesome as Sql Server or Oracle in terms of parallelism, online indexing, and preventing locks. Once you get up to 100,000,000 rows or so you start to have to do all sorts of hacks to operate on large sets of rows within a single query - otherwise it locks the entire database. I am not that far into my first major MySQL project and maybe I will learn some easy tricks to get past the limitations, but I haven’t seen any magic bullets yet.

Stuff to hopefully try soon:

Cocoa Touch on Actual Hardware: Hopefully I will get approval from apple soon and be able to finally test some apps on my phone.

Granite Data Services: JBoss Seam + Adobe Flex = Free alternative to Adobe LifeCycle Data Services. looks pretty rad.

JMaki: More Ajax stuff with some interesting demos.

Django: This shit is all the hype so I gotta see what it is about. Looks like RoR without the annoying community. Plus you can deploy to Google AppEngine.

I spend most of my days lately doing enterprise-ish type stuff in Java. Way back in the day though, my first paying programming job was writing Cold Fusion during the first dot-com upsurge. Since then I have always had a bit of a soft spot for CFML. I still think it is one of the best languages for non-pro programmers to write pages in and for professionals to do quick mock-ups with. When compared to PHP I think it is generally a better framework for prototyping and simple applications.

The one thing that has always kept me, and I’m sure many others, from choosing CFM for anything was the fact that the license costs over $1000 and not many web-hosts support it.

I sort of always thought Macromedia would open source Cold Fusion and I’m somewhat surprised Adobe hasn’t made moves in this direction. Over the past few years several projects have made some front is building an open source alternative. The smith project looked like it was the best option until it seemed to fizzle out earlier this year. Now, after clicking around I noticed a press release that Railo has joined Jboss and will be open sourced!

This is huge news if you are a fan of CFM. Jboss has a lot of clout and resources to get things done. I expect that they will release something that is solid and eventually compete on par with the offerings from Adobe itself.

This combined with the progress people have made running other languages on the JVM - Groovy, Scala, Ruby, PHP, and Python - makes java application servers a clear choice for running all sorts of scripted sites on true application servers.

Now, will someone please open source a port of ASP classic so I can host all my legacy apps on linux? (Sun, I’m looking at you. who is paying for Sun Java System ASP anyway?).

I’ve been working on an image gallery and needed a way to do nice fade/morphs between a list of images for a slideshow. I used prototype and scriptalicious. Here is how I did it:

See the Demo Here

Download Entire Source of Example

Javascript to do the work:

//preload the images and load them into an array
imageArray = new Array(); 
 
var image01 = new Image();
image01.src = 'photo_01.jpg';
imageArray[imageArray.length] = image01;
 
var image02 = new Image();
image02.src = 'photo_02.jpg';
imageArray[imageArray.length] = image02;
 
var image03 = new Image();
image03.src = 'photo_03.jpg';
imageArray[imageArray.length] = image03;
 
var image04 = new Image();
image04.src = 'photo_04.jpg';
imageArray[imageArray.length] = image04;
 
var image05 = new Image();
image05.src = 'photo_05.jpg';
imageArray[imageArray.length] = image05;
 
// imageIndex is going to be the index of the next image to display.  
// images 0 and 1 are already loaded into the html
var imageIndex = 1;
 
function switchImage() {
	// place the next image to be displayed to the front
	$('imageFront').src = imageArray[imageIndex].src;
 
	// make the image in front appear, when it is done swap it with the image in the back
	new Effect.Appear('imageFront', {
		afterFinish: function() { 
			// make the image in the back the same src as the image in the front
			$('imageBehind').src = $('imageFront').src;
			
			//hide the image in the front
			$('imageFront').style.display = 'none';
			
			// increment the index
			imageIndex++;
			// if we have indexed past the end of the array, go back to zero
			if (imageIndex == imageArray.length) { 
				imageIndex = 0;
			}
		}
	});
}

Within the HTML, the only tricky thing here is that you need to position the two IMG tags so they are on top of each other. For my purpose absolute positioning was okay. It may take alittle more work for relative positioning.

<html>
<head>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects"></script>
	<script language="javascript">
             /* code from above goes here */
	</script>
</head>
<body onload="setInterval('switchImage()', 3000);">
	<img id="imageBehind" src="photo_01.jpg" style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0;" />
	<img id="imageFront" src="photo_02.jpg" style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0; display:none;" />
</body>
</html>

** update. thanks to Star for letting me know that the morph blinked in Firefox 2.0. I fixed the post and the example so it doesn’t do that anymore. **

Here is some handy code for if you have a bunch of .swf files and you need to get some XML to load them into flash. It should also totally be easy to change the script to list any file type you need enumerated.

<%@ Page ContentType="text/xml" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Xml" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.IO" %>
<script language="C#" runat="server">
	void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {
		XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(Response.OutputStream);
		
		writer.WriteStartElement("scenes");
		DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(Server.MapPath(""));
		FileInfo[] files = di.GetFiles("*.swf");
		foreach(FileInfo fi in files) {
			
			writer.WriteStartElement("movie");
			writer.WriteAttributeString("name", fi.Name);
			writer.WriteEndElement();
 
		}
		writer.WriteEndElement();
 
		writer.Close();
	}
</script>

This will output something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<scenes>
    <movie name="scene_001.swf"/>
    <movie name="scene_002.swf"/>
    <movie name="scene_003.swf"/>
    <movie name="scene_004.swf"/>
    <movie name="scene_005.swf"/>
    <movie name="scene_006.swf"/>
</scenes>