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 [...]

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.

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)..

Blue Collar vs White Collar developers

There is an serious and mostly ignored split between Programming as a Trade and Programming as a Science.

Introduction: Apple TV as a Matrix Switch Controller

I’ve run an autopatch matrix switch for a few years in my house. This total overkill solution boils down to one key feature: The ability to send any device (Tivo, DVD, Cable) to 0 or more outputs (Televisions, computers etc) in my house. It does this in a ‘matrix’ fashion so, for example, I can [...]

JARS, Libraries, Runnables and Ant

For various and sundry reasons I wrote a nice little swing app awhile back which immediately sends me down the rabbit hole of ‘Packaging Java Applications’. Apparently the old adage that Java was designed by PhD’s and implemented by interns holds true in regards to the method of deployment for desktop java apps. Let me share my experience.

Untangle + VMWare = Extreme Goodness

A friend and I were experimenting with new network configurations for his Wireless ISP. He runs a lot of services and has a very extensive network and is growing, fast.
Recently he installed an Untangle server so that his users would get less Spam, he could start shaping traffic/dealing better with PeerToPeer traffic and other such [...]