The Developer Wing Gone Mad!

My business partner and brother introduced me to an interesting new WEB 2.0 application a couple weeks ago.  The name Krugle.  At first I was skeptical when I went and looked at the beta version that stated “Welcome to krugle - your place to find code and technical content”

It seemed to good to be true for a developer like myself who is searching for examples and resources many times a day (as posted earlier).  Krugle wasn’t quite released when my brother mentioned for me to check it out a few weeks ago (you can read his blog here if you are interested in business ideas, cool software, etc).  I looked around and it sounded like a “neat” idea.  I decided to go back and take a look a couple days…. WOW, does this thing appear to be useful!  The application is nice and easy to use (which is sometimes rare these days).  You have 3 main options for searching:

1. Code
2. Tech Pages
3. Projects

I’ve been testing it out for a day or 2 now and it seems very interesting so far.  I’ve mostly been looking at the Code and Tech Page tabs and it’s bringing back some very accurate search results.  Another great feature of Krugle is that you can do multiple searches and it opens a new tab for you each time so you don’t lose your previous searches (unlike Google, hint hint).

I thought for sure that Google was the best tool for searching for code on such technologies as AJAX, Java, Web Services, etc… but Krugle may be above and beyond Google (appears to be at this point to me, but time will tell I guess).  I would recommend anyone that searches for code on a regular basis give Krugle a Test Drive.  Even just test it out a couple times and you might be surprised.  When you find results for code, it displays the code properly formatted in a special window (that is easy to copy and paste from) and also gives you the option to “Save As…” so you can save the file to your desktop.

Very impressive Krugle! Great start to what will hopefully be a great breakthrough in the future… and oh yeah, thanks for sending it on brother!

Cheers,

Adrian

Hey Everyone,

As I wrote in an earlier post about JSTL tag libraries and how nice it was to learn and start using them, I've also began using another custom JSP tag library that is provided as part of the Apache Jakarta Project. If you aren't familiar with it and you are a Java Developer, I would highly recommend getting used to it. Lots of open source projects that are very useful and "usually" easy to setup and use within your applications. One example from there is the Jakarta Mailer Tag library. It's a very easy to implement tag library that you can use to send emails from within your application in a few simple steps. All documentation is located here if you would like to read more about the tags.

Here are the 3 main steps to setting up the Jakarta Mailer Tag Library on a JSP page to simply send an email:

• Add the following Tag Library line to the top of your JSP:

• Add the following information to your web.xml file so your application can use the Tag Library:

• And last but not least, use the tags in your JSP content like so to send a simple email:

And that is it! 3 simple steps... If you would like more documentation visit the documentation link for more on this and all the options for sending email using the Jakarta Mailer Tag Library! I hope this information helps, I know for me it used to be a lot more difficult to send emails within our applications before I was introduced to this Custom Tag Library from Jakarta. Best of luck.

Cheers,

Adrian

Hello  Developers and Amigos!

Tonight I'm going to blog about one of the hottest topics out there... AJAX. I know most are probably sick of hearing about it, but I've been working on a new AJAX application (a shopping cart) for the past 5 hours and I'm still questioning a few things here...

1. What the heck am I doing and how did I get here?
2. Is this really a better solution?
3. Where should I use it and where should I not use it?

I am still relatively knew to the whole AJAX world. I have my text book that I bought for 40 bucks (Canadian Dollars - I'll put a link at the bottom for the same book). I won't go into to many details on how AJAX works, but basically it the acronym stands for

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

So as you can guess it mostly involves JavaScript, Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you have an understanding of these technologies I think it's pretty straight forward to learn AJAX. For me the hardest part has been putting it all together and trying to decide where to use and where not to. I guess (and I am hoping) that this will improve over time. I found myself debating a few different ways to build my shopping cart and because AJAX is so new it's very hard to find a lot of valuable information on it, besides the odd helloworld application.

As the technologies evolve, I think it will become easier to use. There are already some JSP Tag Libraries out there just for AJAX. Here is a link to one that looks pretty impressive although I didn't have the time to check it out too much:

http://ajaxpatterns.org/Java_Ajax_Frameworks#AJAX_JSP_Tag_Library

If anyone has tried it or has any suggestions please share.

I won't go into too much more detail about AJAX right now. I guess for me it's been a bit of a learning curve to figure out how everything interacts, but it's coming along... I promise you that work with me So... if you have the patience to try it out, I would definitely recommend it since it's a very hot technology and I don't think it's going away anytime soon! Wish me luck on my shopping cart journey, all the best to you that decide to test it out. Here are some useful links that might help you get going (I'm throwing in a WEB 2.0 wiki link because it has a lot of good examples of AJAX applications):

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-ajax1/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Also, as promised a link to the book that I started with (below). I find it great because there's really not much for theory, just a lot of examples to get you going quickly (I see it's cheaper now to, bonus).

AJAX Hacks - Bruce Perry

Simple post tonight: A product that could possibly save you and your development teams life. SourceJammer is the name, get to know it. Our team was looking for a Source Code Version Control system (sharing files, checkin-checkout files, etc) for months and for some reason there just isn't much out there -- Or at least what we could find. We tried setting up some but had a lot of difficulty in getting them up and running. Then we came across SourceJammer (www.sourcejammer.org). For a Java Development team, this product is a dream come true (and it's OPEN SOURCE also!). It's basically a Java Webapp that can run on any Application Server (ie: Tomcat). It can be setup fairly easy also and there is a small client application that users have to install on their machines to connect to it. Once setup, it's easy to backup, version, share files within your development team.

Thank you SourceJammer -- thank you Rob MacGrogan and your team! Rob MacGrogan is the lead and primary developer of SourceJammer. He came up with the original idea, wrote most of the code, did most of the maintenance, has served as team lead, and has basically kept the project going.

-- Adrian

Sitting back this Father's Day morning, sipping on a nice Mexican Java thinking about a small application I worked on last week. I recently started using Java's JSTL tag libraries for most of our applications. Basically they are a set of tags that make your life easier as a developer. The homepage from sun is located here: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/ A short description from that Sun page describes the tags:

"JSTL has support for common, structural tasks such as iteration and conditionals, tags for manipulating XML documents, internationalization tags, and SQL tags."

Anyway familiar with Java Tag Libraries for JSP's will likely find these packages interesting and useful. For me, I find it's nice and eliminates some of the code that is sometimes used for building a webapp that connects to a Database, display information, has forms, etc. I've included a couple links to some examples of how the tags can be used below. Once you get familiar with how to set them up and get them running, it's best just to start playing around with them and looking at other examples. Here are some links, I hope this is useful for some.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/java-standard-tag-library
http://www.developer.com/java/ejb/article.php/1447551

Cheers!

-- Adrian

Hello Everyone,

I was sitting back today as I setup my new blog trying to think about what to write about first. Thought about recommending some sites that have links to open source projects. Not real exciting. I'll probably talk about many of them listed in the future so that would kinda defeat the purpose of the blog also. Then I realized the perfect opening post... must talk about Word Press!

Word Press is the blogging software application that this blog is installed on. It was recommended by a friend a few weeks ago and he said it was "very easy to setup". He wasn't joking. It honestly took about 5 minutes to setup! It's written in PHP and the instructions are very easy to set it up. You basically need a database (MySQL recommended) and a webserver that can host PHP applications. Basically it's very easy to setup 1 or multiple blogs off the same system/database. I won't explain too much more about, but feel free to visit their site: http://www.wordpress.com/ a must read for anyone interested in setting up a blog and they actually will even host your own domain if you aren't capable of setting one up on your own. For people interested in reading more of the technical jargon or downloading the application you'll want to visit the following link: http://www.wordpress.org Much information on how to install, plugins, support, examples, etc.

Word Press makes blogging easy and exciting. It's open source, so you can use it for free with no obligations. Thank you Word Press, and we'll see you in the blogging world!

--Adrian