I was messing with the Google Web Toolkit yesterday. My friend Jeff is a big fan of it, and he is actually using it for a Navy system that I once worked on. He’s gotten a couple of his coworkers on the bandwagon, so I started messing with it.
If you don’t know, GWT is a tool for creating AJAX applications. You write code in Java, and the GWT compiler translates it into Javascript instead of byte code. Separating the client side from the server side is built in, and they have done things to simplify RPC calls back to the server from the client.
First thing I liked is that the installation is dead easy. Download a zip file, explode it somewhere, and to make things simple, add it to your execution path. There is nice eclipse integration too. Adding and removing widgets (UI elements) from the page was also dead easy, and hooking up listeners to react when things are messed with was a breeze.
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Lately I have started messing with Apache’s CXF Web Services framework. Now I must admit, I have held a bias for a long time for market share. Products, frameworks, packages, etc. that have the highest market adoption usually (not always) do for a reason. Working with a niche product is fine, but in my opinion the benefits of the product should significantly outweigh the risks and effort of swimming against the current. Maybe that makes me sound like a lemming, but I find that there are relatively few cases where the special benefits of a fringe product can really be brought to bear.
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I’ve been spending some time working with the JPDA - Java Platform Debugger Architecture - and it’s pretty darn cool. Using this framework, which is shipped with the basic Java SE JDK, basically allows you to write debuggers.
I hear you ask: Why on earth would you want to do this when there are so many good debuggers already? Eclipse does everything I need!
True. But what if you need one process to monitor the execution of another? And I don’t mean to have interprocess communication, I mean for one process to MONITOR THE EXECUTION of the other. Sounds like a debugger to me. Why should Eclipse have all the fun?
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