Dmitriy's blog - Software category

Spring, Ruby, Grails, Hibernate.. do we really need them?

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:59:00 GMT

Perhaps nobody will argue against using frameworks. They improve code quality, take care of many routine tasks and suppose to speed up development time. However is it really faster and cheaper do development using popular web application development frameworks. Here are my thoughts. Most of frameworks, especially created on top of some language like Java, F# or C++ will require not only knowledge of the language, but also good knowledge of framework capabilities, API and so on. Using Hibernate isn’t eliminating a requirement of knowledge of SQL. A developer is still not isolated from knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other web technologies even when GWT is used. However pushing on certain framework, you immediately get tied to a specific skill set and you need a developer with several years experience with certain framework or development tool. So far, only WebBee building blocks are complete web application development stack requiring only knowledge of Java, SQL and basic web technologies. So if you are passionate about just being used base technologies and interested in helping making WebBee better, then do not hesitate to contact e.

TJWS as virtual hosting solution

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:04:00 GMT

I am really pleasant with result of using TJWS for hosting multiple web sites. I was originally skeptical and tried to use Apache-Tomcat, however ended by Tomcat crashing every 8 hours which was unacceptable for site with really low load I can’t monitor 24/7. So I decided to give a try TJWS and magic happened. All problems were gone. It looks solid rock. More important, some packets loss I observe for Apache-Tomcat were magically eliminated, so I do not suffer from incomplete page load anymore. So if you host some websites in virtual environment and face some instability problem, then you can try TJWS, however use only version 1.80, since previous version has security problem.

Try this site. Yes, the Doopper is just a virtual host.

Programmatic web browsing

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:59:00 GMT

Unfortunately all web interfaced programs give us some webservices APi to use their nice features in different desktop or other web programs. In most cases the problem can be resolved just using some proxy software to discover data exchange protocol and then wrap it in few nicely designed classes. Since not all vendors aware of using their software in strictly REST protocols, you need to deal with some data residing in JavaScript of web page to continue using product functionality. I found myself doing the same work as maintaining cookies, finding certain patterns and so on again and again. So I decided to create some utility package helping to break web application for programmatic use. I would like to hear other person experience in breaking different web applications. My library is here.