You’ll have to excuse the lack of posting or other productivity lately… I’ve been programming Java.

*buh-dum-dum*

This is for work, as I’m not usually so masochistic. Right now we’re crunching to push out a uPortal based student portal (to replace the stopgap I wrote).

Now before I rant, there are some good things about Java. Mainly that Eclipse is a pretty stupendous IDE. Having advanced code-insight, library exploration, and a real live debugger are great things (oh, and try out that refactoring functionality – really slick). But then actually writing Java, there are the things that in theory make it good, but in practice don’t.

Oh, it starts innocently enough. Some patterns, interfaces, oh, and factories for everything, and then some property files… my God, the property files… And then all of a sudden, you’re on the other side of the line. You’ve just spent 20 minutes boxing/unboxing primitives, creating new Long objects just so you can increment (all those convenient data structures that require Objects, you know), or you’ve spent another half an hour chasing down wrappers and managers and inherited classes when all you want is to write out a simple parameter (ugh, I don’t even want to start bitching about XSLT right now)… Is this supposed to be easier?

Anyway, I can see who David is selling Rails to when he talks about build[ing] real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files. (On the other hand, I’ve been running into code scaling problems of my own w/ PHP, especially wrt handling complex front-end code. Obviously I don’t have the answers, but I’ve started playing w/ Rails, and I’m not sure that it’s the answer, especially on the JS integration end).

Well, that wasn’t much of a rant. Too tired to care that much. Some links of some tools I’ve been using lately:

• TestXSLT – I wouldn’t go as far as saying it makes playing around and learning XSLT fun, but it’s definitely the best OS X XSLT tool I’ve found so far
• skEdit – I’ve been trying this out, decent but not really astounding. I’d rather have a Mac port of TopStyle
• DbVisualizer – a tad slow, but good for digging around
• iSQL-Viewer – another useful JDBC DB tool