ACEIZE

Whew. It's been a busy week. Workmen have been crawling all over my place for the last week. Generally they were screwing around and spending waay more of my money that I had originally intended. But they finished, and I should be warm this winter -- it will be the first time I've had a bona fide heating system in more than 6 years.
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Where's my coffee?
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I've also decided to undertake the creation of a new web application platform. I spent years and years working with php - but this time I'm going to work it up with java. The reason? Well I started this job and we do some jsp development stuff. The platform runs almost entirely on jsp and it's driving me crazy. All the php projects I made and/or worked on used some form of mvc - now I find myself in a shop that doesn't use it and the pain in my ass is unbearable. I figured it would be a valuable learning experience to create a platform that does things using some of the programming concepts developed over the last 20 years...unlike we do at work.

So far the process has involved more hurdles than I originally imagined. Here are the steps I have taken so far:

1. I couldn't use eclipse at home. I run a slightly older mac at home and eclipse was running dog ass slow. I decided to go back with my beloved vim editor. So the first step was learning how to set up vim to compile and deploy java files. What a fun, but professionally useless skill.

2. Once vim was deploying java and tomcat was showing my nascet project, it was time to put together a templating system for use with java and jsp. The EL, expression language, seemed like a good choice for this work. I put together a front controller that was able to compile and run my templates, sort of...

3. Besides not working too well, the Front Controller is no place for the templating system to live and do it's work. Architecturally it was messy, and would have contributed to a very strange web app. I decided to go with a tag library approach that was outlined in 'Advanced Java Server Pages'. I figure that later on I will put together a Filter servlet that will let me set template variables based on code modules. But first I have to get the tag library working correctly. Primarily I lifted the code from the book in order to get this operation under way. Not shockingly, the code in the book didn't work.

4. Debugging using vim and system.out is a poor use of time and effort. Sooo, I had to get a debugger. I went with jswat. Unfortunately, the current version of jswat wouldn't run on my mac os x 10.3, and the past versions didn't seem to work either. Did I turn tale and run? Hell no. I went ahead and got os x 10.4 - installed jdk 1.5 (which is only available for 10.4), and got the new jswat up and running. Hopefully my next update to this little saga will be about how my template system is running.