I just finished reading Professional Portal Development With Open Source Tools (Wiley).
The Good:
I enjoyed Chapter 1, it gives a good presentation of Portlets for someone who does not know much about it. It is a chapter one can use as a reference to verify some specific details of how Portlets are working. It is a bit similar to JSR 168 specifications, but I found it more detailed and well written.
Beside Chapter 1, there are here and there useful information:
A presentation of Model 1 and 2(X) Architectures in relation with Portals. It could have been more detailed.
Example use of some Design Patterns in a Portal although the example use is really just one sentence and some Patterns uses are too obvious and not related to Portal (Singleton, Template Method).
Web Services for Remote Portlets
The Bad And Ugly:
I was disappointed by the remaining of the book. While it is good to mention Lucene, Apache James, OJB, Jakarta Slide, as those can be useful in Portal development, the book does not provide any useful information on those products. It would be difficult to put all that in just one book. The author merely gives kind of hello world examples for each technology, which I find quite useless.
A quick presentation of software methodologies is again quite useless, and not what we expect from that kind of book. If I want to learn about software methodologies, I buy a book about it, I don’t buy a Portal Development book.
The rest of the book really looks like a list of disconnected subjects, the important ones are not given more attention to the non-relevant ones. Portal Navigation is a problem you will encounter in any Portal development, but you won’t find much in the book except a short example. The author also writes with way too many words for the content about CVS, Subversion, JUnit, AntHill, Scarab. And then he goes on about Java Web Start, woohoo! Yes, it almost reads as well as a resume full of keywords.
I digged a bit deeper in a current project where they use IBM Websphere Portal Server (WPS) with IBM Web Content Management (WCM). I found out that both products collide and disintegrate.
WCM is like a regular content management system, quite flexible and performant on its own. It has a nice way to separate layout concern from content concern. It has a flexible cache. It has a user repository to set different permissions. Its architecture is even so well done (very modular) that you can tailor it to your needs to do things a content management system is not supposed to do. It could do most of what you would do with a Portal system. And that’s the problem.
WPS is a Porlet server, now compatible with JSR 168. You can again do the layout of your portlets, you have an administrative interface to handle them and one to handle user permissions. There is a caching system although it’s not very clear how that works. Standard administration Portlets seem awfully slow to use any cache. To be integrate WCM content in the Portal Server, they ship a WCM Portlet. While JSR 168 API is recommended by IBM, the WCM Portlet is not a JSR 168 one.
So you have 2 products where you can layout your pages, and have dynamic behaviour in them, locally as components, easily manageable. One can be embedded in the other, but it does not make much sense, because you would then just use a tiny part of its possibilities, and its flexibility will be more a burden (extra abstraction layer) than anything. The integration of the 2 products is very superficial. Although recently they can share a common user repository, the WCM portlet does not do any caching of WCM content, linking between content and portlets is a very cumbersome task. IBM provides tips to build a framework that does just that. All that for not using most of the WCM possibilities and always having difficulties in defining their roles and using them collaboratively.
Now, if you look at how JBoss Portal works, and what features they focused on, you will see a well designed solution whose aim is to build pragmatically a Portal using Portlets. They have a very simple content management system used to administrate HTML snippets. Content is put inside the Portal page using CMS Portlets, the layout is the one you specified in the Portal page. They provide automatic caching of CMS content and easy to use links. Integration with their CMS is already using JSR 170 standard. You can plugin other CMS systems easily. IBM strategy with their WPS+CMS does not look very good, and their version is currently 5.1, soon 6.
Recently, I have had my first encounter with Portlets although Portlets are not very new. IBM had their own Portlet API before the JSR 168 was final in 2003. Unfortunately both approaches are quite different and IBM does not recommend the use of their own API.
Portlets were a needed concept for a long time. I worked in 2000 on a java portal system and it would have been handy at that time. Portals are everywhere since the internet bubble.
But Portlets do not do that much either. Sites designed with strict and intelligent rules can bypass the portlets need for example by using a combination of custom tags and java beans.
What shocks me a bit more is that while not doing much, it looks a bit old fashioned already. With AJAX you could build very flexible and user-friendly Portlets replacement. This AJAX-let is actually probably what Microsoft has already done on their start.com web site. Now with AJAX, I just wish Javascript would evolve (a lot) or die to be more OO friendly.
A friend asked me for a list, here is it. I found those books the most interesting ones among those I have read about software in the past year or two:
Artificial Intelligence through Prolog, by Neil C. Rowe (Prentice-Hall): if you don't remember much about Prolog, it's a good book. It details how Prolog interpreters work.
File Systems Forensic Analysis, by Brian Carrier (Addison Wesley): everything you need to know about disks and file systems, every trick to recover lost data. To go more in depth into file systems theory, you can read the free Practical File System Design with the Be File Systemfrom D. Giampaolo, the creator of BeFS.
Mind Hacks (O'Reilly): you probably already bought that one. Not about software, but excellent.
Practical Issues in Database Management by Fabian Pascal (Addison Wesley): short but concise book on relational database theory. F Pascal is of CJ Date school of thoughts, "null are evil". You don't need to read it if you have read any other similar book (by CJ Date for example).
Inside The Java Virtual Machine, by Bill Venners (McGraw-Hill): there are other books on the same subject. While this book has some bad reviews, I found it an easy read, and it explain well enough for me all the inner details of Java. I found "Programming for the Java Virtual Machine" not better, and with some bad example of a Prolog language for the JVM (1 full chapter for this to present a way too simple thing to be of any use).
Programming Jabber, by O'Reilly: I have read it 2 years ago, I enjoyed how they made you go through building a Jabber server.
Lucene In Action: the only book about Lucene, some of the info is useful to understand how it is designed.
Hibernate In Action: if you have to use hibernate, this is the book to read. It presents different ways of using it.
some Javascript+DHTML(+CSS) book: useful if you have none. They often have good tricks to solve the usual problems. In the AJAX days, it becomes useful again. I find O'Reilly's "Javascript - The Definitive Guide" good to have an API reference (as ebook), and "Javascript and DHTML Cookbook" has the most useful recipes.
Lean Software Development by Poppendieck (Addison Wesley): easy to read, good presentation of software dev management problems and pragmatic solutions. My favorite on the subject. Another good one but very specific is "Requirements Management" (MS Press).
UML Distilled by M Fowler: always useful to have if you need to draw UML diagrams.
I find the mac mini a particularly compelling computer. It is small, noise friendly, relatively cheap. If you want to have a cheap home server (based on Linux or MacOS X), this is quite a good choice as you probably don’t want to hear all the fans of bigger computers the whole day. It’s also a very good candidate for a media box: you can connect a huge hard drive for mp3s, and watch your DVDs, photos on a nice LCD (and MacOS helps here).
Unfortunately it might not be the best moment to buy it now. There are rumors everywhere that the first Mac Intel will be presented in January. And I am quite confident that this Mac Intel will be the Mac Mini. Here are the reasons:
PowerMacs and iMacs use the quite modern G5 processor. It makes sense to update the very old G4 to Intel first.
if iBook was updated, it would be much more attractive than the Powerbook
This leaves us with either powerbook upgrade or mac mini upgrade, but:
XBox 360 has almost arrived. While not a direct competitor, it can be used as media center, it is cheap and powerful. Unfortunately it’s not customizable enough.
Powerbooks got a recent update. They are advertised heavily on apple websites, while the mac mini had just a silent and minor upgrade and is not advertised anymore.
In 1998, a student of my school had a project with Sun about EJBs. This was the beginning of EJBs, they were not public, and there was no J2EE. At that time he found it utterly complicated, and had difficulties to understand why they made it so complicated.
In 2000, I worked for a company who had built in-house most components of a today J2EE application server. For example, they had their own unified messaging system, on the JSP side, they were already using custom tags, etc.. Their problem is that they took lots of time to develop in-house, all what later became standard, and almost freely available.
Today, 7 years later, the big talk, new Java products, be it Spring, or JBoss Seam, are still all about the same ideas as in the first J2EE. Spring has the freedom to include whatever technology, but in the end, their scope closely matches J2EE scope. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the current buzzword, will come out relatively naturally with J2EE, session EJBs being natural candidate to expose functionalities to the outer world. JBoss (or Geronimo) architecture is fully SOA: a small kernel managing services, that are exposed for other to use.
To learn about EJBs, I still find Enterprise JavaBeans by Richard Monson-Haefel, the best book. The chapter (in the 2nd Edition of the book, not in the 4th unfortunately) where he rolls his own distributed objects system is for me a testimony on how well he wants you to understand what's behind EJBs. And if you want to better understand what's behind RMI, Java Distributed Computing (O'Reilly) has a chapter where the author rolls his own RMI.
To conclude, Sun was really clever in defining J2EE scope and branding several Java technologies as J2EE (despite the awful version naming). While the ideas were very good, the developer's life was forgotten. It was too much a pain in the a** and not flexible enough (especially the ORM side). JBoss gets it right, what people need is a way to use pieces of J2EE, without imposing too much unnecessary hurdle on development.
I have been doing interviews those past weeks. Today I had to present my resume for the N time where N is big. It is very boring. In France, it is common to have 5 interviews for a small company (that says a bit about how people trust each other and makes me envy Germany where the practice is to select very strictly on the resume and be more relax about interviews). But all those interviews give a valuable insight on the current market, and on some companies.
0. The Monster Rage
The first 2 days after I put my resume on Monster France, I got more than 15 calls from consulting companies. The following day, I removed my resume from Monster
1. Interviewing People
When I started working, I was very bad at interviews, I had a good academic record and thought companies ringing me would have been interested automatically. I supposed most people were dedicated to their work and did not bother doing a show, I was passive. So I often failed the interview process at the HR level.
Now I am doing the show everybody expects and it always works. Only one person asked me an unusual, clever question: “Do you write?” or
“Do you like to write?”
I am often more stressed by technical interviews as I find technical interviews can more easily be very badly done. Even specialists don’t agree on a good method, cf the artima article on How to Interview a Programmer. If someone asks you about some intricate details he knows lots about and you don’t, or you used to but you don’t remember, then that person can have a bad impression of you. In Java, this can be the supposedly trivial ,“what classes do you have to implement for an EJB ?”. I have done many EJBs in the past, but that was a long time enough that I need to look up somewhere to find the exact and precise answer. It is much better to ask someone about what he recently did, or about someone’s view on general subjects, especially subjects he knows about.
2. Interviewing Companies
As a junior in the business world, I had a very angelic view of companies. I had been lucky enough to do internships around very good people. But nowadays, I am starting to find difficult to pick a good company to work for. I found one question especially useful to find out more about your future mates:
“What do you like in this company?
and try to get to know the answer of “Why did you go there?”
3. The $$$ in Current Market
There seem to be huge disparities in salaries in France. I found consulting companies were very reticent to offer a market salary. More regular companies can either offer a much lower salary than the market one, a market salary, or a much higher one, for the same job!
Slashdot presented a really insightful article on Visual Studio by Charles Petzold called Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind. Interestingly it seems that Eclipse does things better than the future Visual Studio.
Autocomplete in Eclipse is really good and does not suffer of the bottom-up problem M. Petzold mentioned, nor from the forced CTRL-Z.
There is no Form designer, and in Java it has been the practice to lay out forms programmatically. The Java Layouts have always been scalable, and Java programs very rarely rely on pixels.
There is no unnecessary import statements.
His positive feedback on XAML is interesting, especially since he thinks this allows for a better automatic UI.
More importantly, he makes a good point on the exponential increase of method/classes/properties names to use for a regular programmer. This raises a serious question about how viable are the current tools.
I was just having a look at orkut again. As in my last look in the past year, there is not much new or interesting. The technical forums are mostly uninteresting and it almost looks like nothing is going on. Take a look at the orkut java forums, in 1 year, very few messages are good.
Compare that to javablogs.com blogs aggregation, every week there are many interesting posts. The blog model is good because it is targeted at people who want to write. When you blog, you build a history. Forums don’t let you do that. You could have a social model on top of blogs, and I am sure this will be one of their next evolution.
Brasil is number one country with almost 75% of the people from there. I wonder why they find it that much better than alternatives. It’s strange how something can be successful somewhere and not somewhere else.
US represent only 7.8%.
Iran and Pakistan represent 6%, that is almost the equivalent of the US. I was very surprised by that.
Europe does not exist there.
More than 50% of the orkutians are under 25, which probably explains why not much is going on there.
Pro Spring, by Apress: a lengthy book, with some unnecessary information, but good overall. I did not like the Part 1, there is not much content in it. Fortunately, Part 2 is much better, dependency injection is very well described, almost on par, with the Fowler article of reference. Other Spring areas are well covered, in a similar manner as in Wrox book, except Java Server Faces, absent from the book, and nothing on Swing as well
Spring Reference Documentation, from the springframework.org website: I should have started with this one, it is of very good quality, and more up-to-date. There is notably a very good chapter on “Source Level Metadata Support” even if I don’t find particularly compelling that they chose yet another abstraction behind Java 5 annotations, partly to support older JDKs. Another plus is a chapter on JMX support, this was lacking in other books.
Interestingly most other books are very similar to the reference documentation, in their presentation and content. The reference documentation is extremely well written. Each time the author carefully explains what are the advantages of the Spring solution, or what does a particular feature solve. Only dependency injection and swing are not treated properly.
Read O’Reilly’s A Developer Notebook. It is the most appropriate book, because the presentation is a bit different, focusing on quickly understanding Spring and using it in your project, and it is the only one mentioning Swing Spring features.
Read the reference manual to find out about the details you need for a specific feature.
has a chapter where the author rolls his own RMI.