Tesco

It is a comfort to know that in 10 years we will all be working at Tesco. Bags the fish counter.

"Herrings madam? but of course ...."

Just a thought ...

If you listen to you mp3 collection on you headphones in an open plan office and fart - does the fart make a sound?

I am assuming not.

Also if you walk onto a bus listening to your mp3 collection really loudly .. . .

and then ask the bus driver,

"One to Shepherds bush green"

Do you really go: "ONE TO SHEPHERDS BUSH GREEN" - really loudly.

and if you fart at the same time, do you sound like a really ignorant bastard who farts and shouts?

I am assuming not.

Just a thought.

Appfuse

The thing about J2EE development is that it is all such a bloody complicated hodge podge of standards, frameworks and tools - and these are moving targets too. For instance:

EJB, Hibernate, Spring, JSF, Stuts, JDBC, JUNIT, DBUNIT, Eclipse, ANT, Cactus, any and many many more (in ronco ad voice ;-0).

Most of us have been on some servlet/JSP courrse and to honest these are completely useless in the real world. It is sort of the same as going on a gearbox course and expecting to know how the internal combustion engine works.

So it was rather fab to discover Appfuse.

So what is Appfuse:

At its very core, AppFuse is a web application that you can package into a .war and deploy to a J2EE 1.3-compliant app server. It's designed to help you create new web applications using a new target in its build.xml file. The new target allows you to specify a name for your project and a name for the database it will talk to. Once you've created a project, you can instantly create a MySQL database and deploy it to Tomcat using ant setup. Furthermore, you can verify that the basic functionality of your new application works by running ant test-all. At this point, you might sneer and say, "What's the big deal? Anyone can create a .war file and deploy it to Tomcat." I agree, but do you have a setup-tomcat target that will configure Tomcat with JNDI resources for connections pooling and mail services? Most of what AppFuse does is not rocket science. In reality, it's nothing more than a directory structure, a build file, and a bunch of base classes -- with a few features thrown in. However, it has vastly accelerated my ability to start projects and develop high-quality, well-tested web applications.

For me appfuse has provided the "Oh I See" moment for real world J2EE development. I have understood how all the bits have worked for ages, but this has really helped.

Try it my Domino Brothers.

Spreadin' the Uke message

Evangelising the uke at the Off the Tracks festival, accompanied by m'daughter in Festival Ukes T-Shirt.