meanderingjourney

My three-month break from paid programming work was largely spent dealing with various Real Life issues. I did get to try a few things, however, mostly in September in preparation for various interviews. Here's an overview of those experiences for posterity:

• I started on my first Android app. I was surprised by how rich my own testing feedback was - it substantially changed the whole proposition I'd had in mind. Touch UIs really are a completely different ballgame. That's why I can't see myself developing with emulated devices. I don't worry too much about fragmentation, testing on one specimen of each feasible screen size (say 4.5", 7" and 10"). For a modest app that doesn't use any esoteric hardware features, it seems to be working out OK.

• I took a look at JSF 2, CDI and the rest of the JEE 5 stack (or at least the web profile). I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to deploy a toy application into the various containsers. I tried GlassFish, TomEE and JBoss. Especially the latter surprised me as a well-thought-out, approachable piece of software. I even ventured to create a FrankenContainer by mashing up JBoss Weld with Mojarra, Apache OpenEJB, Hibernate JPA etc. That didn't quite work but the few hours of debugging proved amusing.
  
  I also used the JEE web profile to implement a basic version of a web app idea I'd had for some time. I deployed to all three containers and there wasn't any issue. I do have to say, though, that I didn't find the experience all that enjoyable. The templating approach taken by JSF 2 is about equally powerful as other mature approaches yet it makes you suffer its baroque verbosity. This became even more apparent when I re-implemented the app in Python (using the Pylons framework and Mako templating) to keep my OpenBSD home server free of Java. The Python version is much more compact and has much easier URL manipulation. I suppose JEE comes into its own with really big projects.

• I was fortunate to play a little with Apache Wicket, as well. It feels incredibly fresh compared to JEE. I found the binding between the Java and HTML incarnations of a page to be slightly tighter than I'd expected (the component trees have to match pretty much exactly) and I missed an expression language a bit (not wanting to muck around with Velocity integration) but I found myself doing a lot of work very quickly and fluently. Unless the heavy sessions are a deal-breaker, I find Wicket a pretty obvious choice for writing web apps.
  
  Regarding Wicket, I was amused by how varied the Spring integration examples I found turned out to be. One had the standard Wicket servlet with a Spring context starting in the init method of the Application class. Another used a special Spring dispatcher servlet with the Application class as its init parameter. It goes to show that both technologies are well suited for working with other components (in case of Spring that's the whole point, of course). Having multiple ways of doing the same thing is a mixed blessing but what I saw was pretty easy to follow.

• I wrote a plug-in for the QStarDict desktop dictionary. QStarDict has a really nice Qt-based UI and perfect KDE integration but I found its German-Czech dataset quite useless. I did found a great German-English dataset that ships with another tool, though, so I taught QStarDict to parse it. This was my first "major" C++ undertaking since my high-scool project in 1995 so I spent some time scratching my head over things such as namespaces, references and nested template parameters. In the end it all worked out OK. I have to find the time to polish it a bit and talk to the QStarDict folks to see if it's interesting for them.
  
  Working with Qt was a pleasure as always, it all looked rather civilized despite the C++. It even made me feel a bit uneasy the way C++11 does. On the one hand, improved safety and readability are generally worthy goals. On the other, the language should signal its fundamentally unsafe nature. Hiding it too well gives a false sense of safety and it somehow feels hypocritical. I do suppose experienced C++ folks working on large projects simply appreciate all the help they can get.

• Finally, for the current project I needed to look into the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. It's not trivial and I'm sure I'll keep discovering new facets for a while. It's really nice to interact with the underlying UI libraries (SWT and JFace) simply due to their contrast vis-a-vis Swing. Exploring a different way of thinking is always useful as well as fascinating.
  
  While investigating Eclipse RCP I stumbled upon SWTBot, a functional testing tool for SWT applications. It's not perfect but it seems to be usable. It fits neatly into my toolbox alongside FEST and Selenium.

Now that I look at it, the summer wasn't completely wasted after all! I wish I could've delved into some of the topics a little deeper but so is life. I don't like how I've been neglecting the JavaScript/HTML/CSS universe. I hope I'll make good use of my commute time to fill this void.