ryan headley

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since Jun 28, 2000
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Recent posts by ryan headley

I guess that In my mind, that's part of the problem. I feel that much of the "kitchen sink" in the java world is and was unnecessary in the first place. Perhaps a more direct question of industry equivalents/what in JEE maps to what in Python, if that's what you are after.

The reason I left Java was that the problems we were solving never really changed much, but we kept coming up with more and more complex ways to solve them. I found myself sifting through so many layers of abstraction and XML and some developers academic excercise in "elegance" that I found myself often too far removed from the original problem domain to be able to accomplish anything at all.

I feel the same way about Zend PHP. Someone took a simple tool and tried to turn it into Java when a light framework like CodeIgniter would be more than most would need. I've rambled enough...
12 years ago
apparently attempts at light humor no longer work on the java crowd either -- man i'm glad I got outta there when I did...
12 years ago
I really don't see why enterprise versus non-enterprise matters...Python can do it all. Hell, PHP can do it all...

For me Java seems to almost "encourage" -- for lack of a better term -- developers to throw the kitchen sink at a problem and seems to over complicate things for the sake of academics. (Again, it just seems that way and you can do that with any language, but in my experience thus far, these issues run rampant in Java).
12 years ago
What sold me was its simplicity, elegantly formatted code, and its explicitness...very easy follow.
12 years ago
It will show you that programming can be fun again...
12 years ago
Personally I've been using gedit under linux and I'm loving it. Create some custom snippets and its a beautiful thing!

I blogged about how to set it all up, but if you want that info, ask me...I don't want to post the URL in hear for fear of "spamming" ya'll.
16 years ago
Java and Ajax is really not going to be any different than PHP and Ajax...
sure JSP and PHP files are different, as well as backend .java and .php code, but Ajax is independant of the two.

What IS different are the different libraries that can assist you. Have a look at AjaxTags. Its a library for use with Java applications and makes it pretty simple to do some basic Ajax stuff...(i.e. pre-populating drop down lists, etc).

Other than than, its just javascript...javascript doesn't plug into Java any different that it does PHP, ASP, .Net, etc...

Suggestions: google, google, google, and more google. Read up, download and play with prototype.js and scriptaculous.js which are both frameworks that make working with ajax technologies a bit easier.

The head first book is great, and really doesn't cover much PHP...they only use PHP to describe whats happening on the server side.
The validator is your best tool, HOWEVER I want to warn you. If this is a corporate type environment where IE is the mandated standard everyone needs to use, don't spend too much time on it.

IE is notorious for not following standards so you may spend some time fixing in to run in Firefox only to find out that you've messed it up in IE. It takes alot of time and patience to get it write, ESPECIALLY if your going all CSS and not tables, etc. Once you get it right its worth it, unless your bosses see it as a waste of time and see a reduction in your productivity.
Most certainly learn PHP first. At the very least, you can start writing an application and not even worry about Ajax, and when you're done still have a fully working app with no Ajax whatsoever.

Like the poster above mentioned. Ajax needs something to talk to on the other side, without that, its just javascript doing nothing. One thing I'm seeing alot of, and it concerns me, is using Ajax/JS just because "we can."

We really need to think about what makes sense when it comes to using these technologies. If there is a need for it in your application use it. It all comes down to what you want your application to do. Do page refreshes bother you? Are the page refreshes taking a long time? Or do you just wanna say, "yeah, my app uses some ajax", etc.

Ajax is a great tool, but don't over engineer to use it simply because its "cool." Learn the server side language first, then learn the other ways to enhance the application you've written with things like Ajax.

Just my 2 Mhz
I second that. Definitely go with PHP if you are familiar with it. Using .Net would take you quite some time since it's learning curve is a bit steep in my opinion. Plus, the whole .Net suite is huge and pretty much locks you into a Microsoft solution. Vendor lock-in is bad...(IMHO)

I would use PHP with a bit of Ajax to enhance portions of the page.

I would avoid writing the entire front-end in JS/Ajax. That is a nightmare. I am currently working on a project where the client decided that it'd be a good idea to write the entire front end in Javascript and make Ajax calls back to a java/hibernate backend. Basically the entire application is one page and they are using DOM objects/manipulation to "appendChild"ren and remove them etc. Its pretty nasty, a pain to troubleshoot, and LOTS of code.
I've already had the opportunity to work a bit with Ajax on some production applications. Lemme tell ya, its slicker than bull snot. (Sorry...javaranch, bulls, etc...)

Anyway, we used the tag-library called Ajaxtags and it made it really simple and totally worth checking out: http://ajaxtags.sourceforge.net.

I only wish they had a similar tag library like this for PHP.
I know this is WAY WAY late, but I wrote a Java IM from scratch using sockets that sent messages of UDP. (I never did get the file transfer part going) but since this app was actually used, (and still in use) in a corporate environment, they really only needed IM and not file transfer...

I am now looking into writing a client for jabber, but that'd just be for the fun of it.
20 years ago
Does anyone out there know if there is a function for java that basically does the same the as the php function strtr()?
For those of you that don't know what that is it takes 3 strings.
Compares each letter of the first string and based on the other two strings, substitues the appropriate character.
(i.e. first string is "cat", second string may have any number of characters, so we'll say abz54ewt, and the third string would have l32ngcpa. Therefore cat would be turned into cla.
Get what I am saying?? I know I could write this myself, but sticking with the spirit of java, there's no sense reinventing the wheel here if something exists.
20 years ago
I am getting tons of messages as follows:
[16:28:47,321,XAPoolDataSource] Creating XA Pool
Can anyone tell me exactly what that means and whehter its normal to see your server.log full of those messages??
The reason I ask is we are hosting an application for someone that has suddenly started to slow down. They have added more people to their staff but I don't think the issue is the number of users.
We are running on solaris 9 with apache 2.0.40 and JBoss-2.4.6_Tomcat-4.0.3.
Sitting behind that is a Postgresql-7.2.1 database.
After running "sar" I noticed that there have been several times throughout the day that the processor was at 0% idle. There seems to be a large number of httpd instances...(37 sounds high to me but I suppose it could take alot more) and 25 postmaster instances.
During the many of the times where jboss is hogging the cpu, I am getting some exeptions in the log file such as:
[16:34:29,524,XAPoolDataSource] Creating XA Pool
[16:34:29,539,STDERR] Attempt to find failed.
[16:34:29,542,STDERR] Finder exception: javax.ejb.ObjectNotFoundException: invalid primary key supplied
Which to me seems like some sort of invalid query, but I could be mistaken here as I didn't write this app, but have now been told I need to support it...you know how it goes...
Any info would be great.
Thanks
21 years ago
I got it...about an hour or so after I posted.
I can post the code later if someone wants to see it....