Chris Johnston

I found an excellent blog all about Netbeans 4.1. In it, the author details all of the cool features that he has found while working with the app. Some of these features include how to setup other app servers besides Sun and Tomcat 5/5.5 along with how to work with the Ant build system. If you are using Netbeans 4.1, this site is must. The site is run by one of the technical writers working on the Netbeans project.

The coolest thing happened today. I did a search on Google and my site came up as the number one result. I have never had this happen before. I was doing a search on “critical reviews of java ides” and a post on fuzzylizard.com came up first. I just redid the same search and I am now second (although I may not be remembering the search terms 100 percent perfectly).

As you have probably heard, Adobe has bought, is attempting to buy, will be buying, Macromedia for approximately 3.4 billion dollars. My first thought when I heard the news was RIP Macromedia, you where much loved. As the day has gone on, I am not sure if this thought has changed much. My gut reaction is still that this is not a good thing for Macromedia and definitely not a good thing for web developers, or those of us who use Macromedia products. I think most of all I feel cheated and ripped off by this proposed buy-out, like somehow Macromedia has betrayed its users and sold-out.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Adobe products and I don’t think they are the bad guys here. I just think that the two companies should stay separate and competitors. Merging and creating one huge company in the graphics world is not going to any designers any favours. I firmly believe that the competition between the two over the years helped to create better products for the end user.

In addition, what is going to happen to all the great Macromedia products? I have heard that this will mean great things for Flash, but what about Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Freehand, ColdFusion, Director, Flex, JRun, and all the other products Macromedia develops? I can see them keeping Flash, Dreamweaver, and the server technologies, but I am not so confident about the graphics based apps like Fireworks and Freehand. Hopefully they will kill off ImageReady and integrate Fireworks into Photoshop, but who knows.

In addition, the cultures of the two companies seem to be totally different. Macromedia is a very open company that is very in tune and in touch with what its users are doing with their products. Adobe seems to be a much more closed company. It will be interesting to see which culture is the more influential. I think it would be good for Adobe to open up a little.

Mike Chambers has an interesting post on his thoughts about the merger and some links to further resources.

Here is a quick little tip if you are trying to write tests in JUnit for Hibernate. When you are going to catch exceptions, do not put a generic catch(Exception e) { } block at the end of your code as this will mask any other exceptions that might be thrown with a standard Netbeans/JUnit exception. What this means is that instead of getting anything useful out of the stack trace, you will only get a very generic, non-useful message relating to JUnit and not what you were trying to do. Therefore, catch any specific exceptions like HibernateException and let the rest just fall through and be displayed on screen.

I found this out trying to test the insertion of some objects I had created. The insertions weren’t working and I wasn’t getting any helpful errors. As soon as I added a specific catch block for HibernateException I got all the messages I needed.

Someone must have fixed what I think was a bug in Netbeans 4.0 where, if you set a project up as a web project, you could not run Junit tests from within the IDE. There was simply no way of running them. I even posted a question about this over at Java Ranch and never received an answer.

However, I have been using Netbeans 4.1 for a project I am working on and they seemed to have corrected this little bug. I can now run Junit tests from right within the IDE. WooHoo. I am not sure if I have any reason to go back to Eclipse now. So far I really like what I see with Netbeans 4.1. I can’t wait to see what the final version will be like. I am hoping they release a few RC versions before the final to give everyone a taste and to help work out the last few bugs (of which I have not really found any).

Way to go to the Netbeans team for taking what was an ailing IDE and turning it into a solid, fast, intuitive first rate IDE that can easily compete head-to-head with Eclipse. The only thing really missing is the top notch refactoring found in Eclipse and IDEA.

Here are the tabs that I currently have opened in Firefox right now:

• Jakarta Tapestry — Tapestry is a powerful, open-source, all-Java framework for creating leading edge web applications in Java.
• Wicket — Wicket is a Java web application framework that takes simplicity, separation of concerns and ease of development to a whole new level.
• Echo — Echo is a framework for developing object-oriented, event-driven Web applications.
• Working with the Echo Web framework, Part 1: An introduction to Echo — This two-part series provides an introduction to the Echo framework, an open source, Java technology-based platform for building Web applications that look and act like rich clients.
• Working with the Echo Web framework, Part 2: Creating a practical application — Now that you have the basics of the Echo framework well in hand, we’re going to put your knowledge to practical use. In this article, we’ll walk through the development of a real-world Echo application: a Web-based e-mail client.
• Unit-Testing Hibernate with HSQLDB — I’ve used lots of methods to transform data between databases and object code. From hand-coded SQL to JDO to EJB. I’ve never found a method I liked particularly well. This distaste has become especially acute since adopting test-driven development (TDD) as a guiding philosophy.

I am looking for a framework for a Java web app that I am creating, I just don’t know which one to go with. Here are my requirements:

1. It must be easy to learn and easy to implement—I don’t want to still be learning this thing five months from now
2. It must be a well established framework with good community support—I don’t want to pick some obscure one that will be abandoned in 3 months
3. It must have excellent documentation with real world “Hello World” examples that make it very easy to get up to speed with using it
4. It must integrate with Hibernate as that is what I am using for my backend, database layer
5. It should look good when placed on a resume—This directly relates with the second point

Here are my current choices in order: Tapestry, Spring MVC, Wicket, Struts. Anyone have any other suggestions or thoughts?