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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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19 May 2006 - 10:25 pm
Google has released a Java library that you can use to write ajax-y stuff for your website. What's cool is that you don't write the javascript you need for normal ajax. You write Java and the toolkit will convert your Java calls into the appropriate HTML and javascript. As google says, it is "for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language."
I'm hoping that this framework -- or one similar -- gains quick acceptance. Too much of software engineering is spent redoing what others -- or even you -- have done before. For example, I've written two different javascript calendar controls since I started working. And two of my co-workers have also written some calendar controls. Pretty much every one who has done any bit of web development has at some time. I think this is because software engineers are bad about leveraging systems that can make their lives easier. I can't tell you how many times, when discussing an open-source solution for doing something at work, that someone has proposed that, because it isn't that complicated, we just go ahead and implement a home-grown version of our own. Such a waste of time. But it comes up all the time. Until we start taking advantage of frameworks that make our lives easier, software engineering will be a bit more buggy and and time-consuming than it needs to be.
Posted by on 19 May 2006 at 10:01 PM
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