Obviously, I’m not writing enough out here… part of the reason being even though wordpress’s web editor is great, I really like not having to type gobs of text in a text area.
So eventually, looked around and found Windows Live Writer. Its going out on its customary spin :).
So what’s been cooking? Actually a bunch of things over the last several months:
Stuff – on which I mean to put up individual posts
Had a fun exercise benchmarking lighttpd with python wsgi
Been doing some stuff on mysql cluster – mostly around seeing how it compares with the mysql master-master replication setup I had in place.
Dipping my toes into Amazon EC2 finally – though Linode or Rackspace is way easier if you want to just spin up a VM. Amazon’s EC2 does have some interesting stuff (reliability of back ups, CDN etc). However, it comes at the cost of having a model that initially is hard to understand.
Resin server – heard good things about it, had to see if it would fit at some stuff at work. Disappointed that the free version is really hamstrung.
Apache Wicket: I’ve always hated web UI and somehow the action oriented frameworks (Struts and their ilk) never appealed from a coupling/cohesion standpoint. In that respect, seemed like ASP.net got a lot of things right going the component oriented way. However, it seems fatally flawed with stuff like viewstate and postback and so on. On the Java end, tried Tapestry out, but, it comes with too much baggage for my taste. Had been reading of Wicket for sometime now and decided to take the plunge and was pleasantly surprised doing my contrived example:
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Took much less to get off the ground compared to Tapestry
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Mentally, a lot easier to understand
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Managed to realize my goal of exploiting OO techniques to DWIM – even on a simple contrived example.
Books:
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Steve Souders excellent "High performance websites” book: if you’re doing anything near a high performance website, then grab this book today!
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Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices by Robert C Martin: read about the SOLID principles first and then buy this. This is a book to own if you aspire to become a good Agile/OO practitioner. Don’t worry about the C# in the title – it applies universally.
