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Comment Re:do their own then... (Score 2, Insightful) 186

by wawannem (#27563955) Attached to: Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support
You're right... I guess I didn't really think about where the money would come from. But, if anyone has any really expensive hardware sitting around that isn't flying off the shelf the way it used to, I would think it would be Sun. So, maybe they could put some of it to use building a cloud of their own. I've just always been of the school of thought that if you don't like how something is built, build your own.

Comment Re:JEE 6? (Score 4, Informative) 74

by wawannem (#26680275) Attached to: Java EE 6 Platform Draft Published
The answer is "no," but for a different reason than what you may be thinking. Certain language features have been introduced recently that are used in these draft specs. For instance, for Servlet 3.0, one can configure a servlet with annotations (rather than configuring in the web.xml). Annotations weren't introduced until JDK 1.5. So, the JEE spec isn't tied to a specific JDK, but the JDK you choose at least needs to be able to support all the constructs referred to.

Comment Re:Other notable contribution (Score 4, Insightful) 184

by wawannem (#26554099) Attached to: Microsoft Donates Code To Apache's "Stonehenge" Project
I guess that's one way to look at it, but IMO, as one of the struts developers, I was happy to get easy access to copies of their OS so that I can virtualize them and test across browsers, etc. You can say it improves their product, but I say it improves mine... TOE-MAY-TOE / TOE-MAH-TOE however you want to look at it, I appreciated it.
Books

Submission + - Self-publishing? Worthwhile or waste of time

Submitted by wawannem
wawannem writes: For the few of you that know me, you probably also know that I have been working on a book recently for a prestigious publisher. For the other 99.9999999% of you, I don't want to come off as making a last ditch effort to generate buzz for my book, so no links. Anyhow, as a developer on a popular open source project, I began working with a publisher to write a book about incorporating the project into real-world development projects. To be fair to the publishers, there is a narrow market for tech books in general, and this particular topic is not guaranteed to sell as many copies as a book on a more popular topic such as JQuery, Rails or PHP. My first motivation for writing the book had little to do with the money and more to do with the fact that there is often complaints about the available documentation. Since the economy is heading down the toilet, and it is a new year, I have heard that the publisher is considering dropping my project (as well as 30%-40% of their in-progress titles). I would like to think that I could do something to change that, but the reality is that the topic of the book may not be popular enough, regardless of the quality of the book. Another author that I have worked with thinks that we can probably do pretty well publishing the book on our own. There is also the possibility of trying to strike up a deal with another publisher. My gut feeling is to incorporate what I've written into the existing documentation for the project. At this point, nothing has been decided, so I am wondering if anyone on here has had experience self-publishing. Given the choice between titles from major publishers and self-published books, I would, personally, most likely choose the book from the major publisher. My thought is that if I make the content available freely, I could improve the popularity of the project (due to the better documentation) and work on maybe being published later. At the same time, if there is a chance at a decent profit, then I don't want to turn it down. One advantage to self-publishing would be the easing of deadlines which I could translate into better content. So, I'm sort of torn on what I should do if I find out tomorrow that I own some possibly valuable content without a publisher.
Businesses

Submission + - Government Contract Mining?

Submitted by
DiZNoG
DiZNoG writes: "I work for a small manufacturing company and have been charged with assisting the sales department in mining a database from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) for possible contracts we could bid on. As you can imagine the interface is cumbersome and the data a labyrinth. Are there good technology or service-based solutions to help in searching for government procurement opportunities? Or possible matching solutions? The service we are subscribed to (see above) might not be accomplishing our needs and since I'm no sales guy I'd like to explore other technology-based options to assist our sales force."
Privacy

Submission + - Publicly available voter registration data

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "I went to my local Ohio county website to find out when the polls open tomorrow and was presented with a link to a page to search for voter registration data — http://www.wcoil.com/vote2008/ of course, I searched for myself and found my home address. What surprised me was that it was searchable. For example, putting in 'w' as the last name lists all voter registered in my county who's last name begins with the letter 'w,' and their home addresses. I have a few friends and family members in law enforcement that were pretty upset to find out how easily someone can find their home address using this tool. I thought for sure that it was a terrible oversight in privacy (it happens when you live in BFE). But, I did a search and found another — http://www.tax.co.harris.tx.us/voter/pctdatadownload/ . This was only the second link on google. Did I miss something somewhere along the line? I know that certain exposures of home address data are unavoidable (such as when you mortgage a home), but this seems to make it too easy. Does registering to vote mean that my home address becomes a matter of public record?"
Java

Submission + - Struts 2 In Action from Manning (wantii.com)

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "One of my favorite recurring topics on /. is the debate over Java. So many hard-core geeks hate it, and before I started getting paid to use it, I was very apprehensive. Although many /.'ers and even some editors aren't Java fans, there are a few items that provide a good argument for Java —
  1. Java is a popular language.
  2. Java has good commercial support from big players (IBM, Oracle, Sun)
  3. I've made a good living since I picked it up as a skill.


Even if you aren't a Java developer, if you are a web developer, you have at least heard of the Struts framework. It seems like a new Java framework is born as often as a topic gets rejected on /. Despite that, Struts has remained extremely popular. The 1.x series of Struts was a difficult framework to learn and heavily constrained developers to following it's notion of MVC. Even with its drawbacks, Struts has remained the most popular framework. Since the inception of Struts, programming web-apps has changed quite a bit. Many of the drawbacks of Struts have led to the creation of many competing open source MVC implementations. One of the competitors was a little project called WebWork from opensymphony. Anyone who has used WebWork/XWork can tell you that it is architecturally solid and quite easy to pick up. At some point, the Struts devs hooked up with the WebWork devs and they decided to merge for the next iteration of Struts. This led to Struts 2 being released. Struts 2 has moved along quite nicely and gained some popularity, but a lack of documentation and the expectation that it would be similar to Struts 1 has led to quite a bit of confusion for developers.

Struts 2 In Action from Manning attempts to fill in the blanks as both an introduction to Struts 2 and a partial reference. Struts 2 is a comprehensive framework that provides a lot of functionality, so it would be impossible for a single volume to thoroughly cover all aspects of Struts 2 development. If you are looking for a reference on Struts 2 AJAX tags, this book will not work. If you are working with Struts 2 on a regular basis or are curious about adopting it for a future project this book is definitely a good fit.

Struts 2 In Action walks developers through many common use-cases where Struts 2 will help. The example content and easy-to-read text make the book readable from cover-to-cover. This book will work for many levels of reader. Due to the lack of online documentation on certain topics, experienced Struts 2 developers will likely find clarification on topics like OGNL, new developers will find a thorough introduction that will lead to productive development. The authors did a very good job of creating creating examples that covered the material. This is a bit of a difficult task considering the size of the framework, but I was very impressed with each chapter. Each chapter could nearly stand alone because the authors were able to cover the topic without delving too far into side topics.

All-in-all, this is a good book, and likely to be the only book necessary if your goal is to learn to use Struts 2 or hone your skills on Struts 2. Although I hate book reviews that fill space by telling you what's in the book, Amazon doesn't have a Table of Contents, so I feel a bit obligated to say what's covered. The book is broken into 5 main parts — Part 1 is a quick introduction into JSP development and a small Struts 2 example. Part 2 covers core components, writing actions, using and configuring interceptors, type conversion and OGNL. Part 3 moves into the View of the MVC, it covers results and tags. Part 4 covers more advanced topics — Spring/Hibernate integration, input validation and i18n. Part 5 wraps it up with struts 2 plugins, best practices, and migration from Struts 1.

There are many topics the authors chose not to cover (AJAX, Sitemesh, and JSF to name a few). I was a bit disappointed not to find some of these topics at first, but to create a book covering everything that Struts 2 can do and all the ways to integrate it with popular technology is not a reasonable expectation. I would expect that if Struts 2 continues gaining popularity, more volumes will be released covering these topics. This book concentrates on the fundamentals and delivers a thorough explanation which will serve it's readers much better than a light intro into everything.

For the sake of full-disclosure, I will say that I am one of the Struts developers, and I want people to read the book because it does a great job of answering many questions that would otherwise make their way to the mailing lists."
Security

Ohio Official Docked Vacation Time For Stolen Tape 218

Posted by samzenpus from the no-beach-for-you dept.
Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."

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