Facing new challenges everyday

Sometimes I remeber to visit TSS site to check some news about Java world, one of the threads that catch my attention was the article about use Raven to build Java projects, Raven allows to use your DSLs to write build files on top of Java language, with these DSLs you can do much more than any other build system like Ant but with less code.

You can define your own DSL to solve a specific problem, Raven uses a DSL to write builds scripts, but you can use DSLs to generate XML content, RSS content, HTML pages, SQL statements, create swing applications and to perform unit conversions.

But what about Gracelets? What’s it for?

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ActiveRecord has proven to be a easy to learn and productive ORM solution, you can define your application model with few lines of code, the syntax is much more concise than any other ORM solution.

But, in other hand, rails doesn’t have a elegant way to work with views, with a lot of loops and conditional expressions in the middle of code, this kind of approach remembers me the PHP coding 8 years ago, where after several lines your code become very hard to understand an maintain.
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If you use Maven and your project requires tagHandlers and chartcreator libraries from jsf-comp you can now find then in jsf-comp maven repository, the path for this repository is:

http://jsf-comp.sourceforge.net/maven2/repository/

Right now we have tagHandlers 0.0.1 and chartcreator 1.2.0 there, I’ll try to keep this repository updated.

Today I downloaded the first public version of Google Chrome, a brand new browser from Google, at first moment Google Chrome looks really good, with a very clean user interface, google usability and a organized interface, I could use GMail and iGoogle without any problems, Chrome can render several other websites and gracefully pass acid2 test,but only passed 79 of 100 of acid3 tests, is it a WebKit limitation?

The only html element that did’t worked as expected was the form input file, I cound’t see the text box of this input element anywhere on the page, only a label that is rendered after the button used to open the dialog window to select the file to upload.

For my JSF applications Chrome worked like a charm, I couldn’t find anything wrong, the autocomplete feature that uses scriptaculous worked without any problems.

In the next weeks I’ll try to take a closer look on this framework, it has a lot of nice features, one of then is your O/R mapper, very easy to work with, you can create your database using the model classes by running few commands, giving an idea about how much productive this framework can be for database driven applications.

Here’s a example of django model classes:

models.py

You can generate the application database containing “friend” table by just running the command python manage.py sql appname and python manage.py syncdb.

But the model layer isn’t enougth on a web application framework, we still still need consider the controller and view layers.
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