Enum based ComboBoxes in GXT

Working with GXT is interesting. You combine utter frustration and time wasting with incredible breakthroughs that make you say ‘I could have never done that so easily in another framework.’ In a way all frameworks are like this I suppose.
My most recent problem/breakthrough was around enums. The particular app in question uses GXT in the [...]

GXT/GWT, DTOs and Dozer : Managing the Exception rather then the Common Case

For all of its amazing cleverness, GWT has one really difficult area, persistence. There are various projects and attempts to clear this are up but most are very young and have a ways to go. This gets even more complicated if your not, lets face it, using Hibernate. As a Cayenne fan I don’t use [...]

Bond, James Bond : Really Google?

Running some sample translations for a demo I came across this fun one. Type ‘Bond’ (upper case B counts), select English as source, Japanese as result.
Voila : 007
Shaken, not stirred.

GWT

Building GWT apps using GXT. How I love component based development with real callbacks!

Riding The Wave : My Google Wave Impressions

Google Wave has been out for almost a year now and its strengths and weaknesses have been analyzed by every blogger/pundit/opinion maker on the planet at this point.

That said, since this is the Internet, I am going to put my $.02 in. So without further ado here is my Wave experience.

Tabs and the Tivoization of the Web

This week we were discussing web usability here at the office, specifically around Steven Krug’s excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think”. One of the high points was when our product manager pulled in a 3rd party and gave an impromptu usability test, asking this person questions and having them accomplish small tasks starting from Google. [...]

Jira Snark

You know you’ve been working on the same code for too long when you comment snarkily to yourself on tickets YOU FILED….

Ajax Wizards in Wicket

Lately I’ve found that Wicket + Ajax == Very nice. More then nice its turns out its just a lot easier to build sites using Ajax and Wicket then it is to do it otherwise. Last night I found myself wanting to place a wizard into an entirely Ajax driven site. Luckily Google pointed me [...]

"Deployability"

One thing people rarely talk about is key to why after well over 10 years, millions upon millions upon millions of pages served and more lines of code then a room full of monkeys could count I stopped building new apps in perl. Well, mainly they don’t talk about it because I am no one. But if I WAS SOMEONE they would ask ‘Why?’. I’ll tell you why.

Customizing Wicket Wizard Markup

Apache Wicket provides an interesting out of the box component called a ‘Wizard’ that does just what you’d expect it to, create an easy to use Wizard workflow that you can insert into your page. The base markup that comes with the wizard is ‘adequate’ in that ‘it works’ but its complex table based structure is at odds with modern CSS based markup making it difficult to adapt at times. Luckily its totally and completely customizable (as all good Wicket Things are)..