development

I came across this nice collection of web service frameworks, tools, and resources for Java.

My hosting service, DreamHost, finally upgraded their Ruby installation from 1.6.x to 1.8.2. This should allow me to play with all the recent Ruby software, including the Ruby on Rails web framework, which I’ve heard great things about. I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby, and Ruby on Rails may be a good opportunity to finally do this (I wrote a few simple one-off scripts a couple of years ago, but not enough for the language syntax to really stick)....

The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project has released WTP Milestone M4 yesterday. It was built against the Eclipse SDK 3.1M6 release, which was released about a month ago. A few months ago, I tested WTP M3 in conjunction with Eclipse SDK 3.1M5, but it wasn’t quite there yet… Two weeks or so ago I installed the latest nightly build of WTP M4 on Eclipse 3.1M6 on my home machine, and this already looked very promising, although I haven’t had much of a chance to really exercise it, and I didn’t quite dare to install it on my PC at work....

I’ve been reading up a little on the Spring Framework, which seems very impressive. It can be used in several tiers of a typical web application, and depending on where it is used it either cooperates or competes with other established frameworks. For example, Spring comes with its own MVC imlementation that competes with Apache Struts and addresses several of Struts’ shortcomings. On the other hand, Spring’s container framework can be used to build a business tier in conjunction with another front-end technology, such as Struts (for example as an alternative to more heavyweight J2EE solutions such as EJB)....

I just moved the Subversion repository that I created on my Windows box some time ago over to my Gentoo box (actually the same box, just a different dual-boot OS, now that I’m phasing out Windows in favor of Gentoo Linux). This was a very smooth operation, and I’m pretty impressed with the way Gentoo’s Apache configuration already accounts for Subversion (which is generally exposed as a WebDAV repository using an extension of the Apache mod_dav module)....