I posted a little while ago about IDE choice based on a developer having to use IntelliJ in secret because his shop mandated all developers must use Eclipse at all times. To avoid this sort of situation I pointed out that you should always have an automated build that has no IDE dependencies. Chances are if you have that no one can argue that you must use one particular IDE.

Then there’s the second option:

Then there’s the shops that believe everything must be standardized. Avoid these standardization-happy shops.

Apparently the developer went with the second option and is looking to be successful elsewhere.

Struts is beating down the JSF challenge at least according to the metrics(comparing downloads can be a spotty exercise) Matt Raible comes up with for downloads:

• Struts: ~340,000 per month
• Spring: ~80,000 per month
• Hibernate: ~80,000 per month
• MyFaces: ~12,000 per month
• Tapesty: ~12,000 per month
• Wicket: ~10,000 per month

Comparing downloads can be a spotty exercise, but Matt summarizes:

Sorry JSF, you appear to be losing. Badly.

I’m still scratching my head a little. I”m not raving fan of JSF, but anecdotal evidence that I’ve seen is that about 30-40% of the shops I hear about in our region are using JSF. JSF backlash is common, but since it’s part of the J2EE spec corporate shops just migrated over to it. JSF promises a shining component castle on the hill to corporate IT.

I’m favoring Wicket in the Java web frameworks, but we’re still a JSF shop in the office with some support for legacy classic Struts projects. The Ruby world is so easy, one major web framework.

In seeing if my post on installing Deploying Rails to Tomcat as a WAR I came across an issue with running rails under JRuby 1.0 and ActiveRecord-JDBC 0.4.

First off you still have to run the following command because the rails script file is still not set to be executable:

chmod 775 $JRUBY_HOME/bin/rails

In addition I had to change the top shebang line of the script after I got this error:

rails --version
/Applications/jruby-1.0/bin/rails: line 9: require: command not found
/Applications/jruby-1.0/bin/rails: line 10: version: command not found
/Applications/jruby-1.0/bin/rails: line 11: syntax error near unexpected token `('
/Applications/jruby-1.0/bin/rails: line 11: `if ARGV.first =~ /^_(.*)_$/ and Gem::Version.correct?

I found the fix here, but you just change the top shebang line from:

#!/Applications/jruby-1.0/bin/jruby

To:

#!/usr/bin/env jruby

Straight from Page 3 of 3 in the Dr. Dobb’s subscription survey:

Please answer the questions below and click submit.

1. Which programming languages do you know/use, or plan to purchase within 12 months? (select all that apply)

• VB 6.0 or earlier
• Visual C++
• .Net(any)
• C/C++(any)
• Cobol(any)
• SQL
• Eclipse
• JAVA(any)
• Modeling/UML
• VB.Net
• Visual Studio
• IBM (any)
• Oracle(any)
• XML
• C#
• J2EE
• J2SE
• J2ME
• PHP
• JSP
• Other

I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a programming language. I suppose some you might have to purchase some Oracle product to use PL/SQL, but is that really relevant. And is Eclipse a language. How do you purchase an open source IDE? Makes you scratch your head. And Dr. Dobb’s is a fairly technical magazine.

Chris Scheuble presented all eight examples in his Java security talk with JUnit tests. A few years ago this would have been surprising since examples are so commonly shown with main() methods. Unit testing is becoming more just an accepted way of doing development. Now if more frameworks and tools could make testing easier by default.