Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

More on Misusing Dynamic Binding

Brad Cox: Misusing Dynamic Binding When Static Binding Would Do, Part 1

A while ago Brad Cox was asking questions about WO on the lists. Either he wrote the article above before learning about WebObjects, or he didn't dig very deep... with WebObjects, pages reference other pages as objects, not by filename! It's great!

With WebObjects, hyperlinks and submit buttons typically target the CURRENT page, and are bound (dynamically, mind you, in a declarations file that belongs to the view of the component) to action methods on that (current) page's object instance. The action methods return a new page instance (the page to be shown to the user).

The action method can configure the target page between instanciating it and returning it. ie: nextPage.setSelectedObject(objectChosen()); This is a very cool way to program web apps, because it means you can pass things between pages UNDER THE COVERS, instead of... er, over the covers, ie: in HTTP=URL&Param=eters.

Here's an example action method in a WO page (pages are WOComponents, and the java code of a WOComponent is the controller in the MVC triad):

public WOComponent showDetails() {
    DetailPage nextPage = (DetailPage)pageWithName("DetailPage");
    nextPage.setObjectToShow(selectedObject());
    // maybe you want to tell the next page where it came from
    nextPage.setPreviousPage(this);
    return nextPage;
}

BTW, showDetails, setObjectToShow, selectedObject and setPreviousPage are all method names I made up. pageWithName(String) is authentic.

You must be kidding

Scobleizer: A Tale of Two Tech Industry "Leaders"

You know that acronym "LOL", right? Laugh out loud. Well, it's overused. Most of the time when people use it in emails or in IM conversations, I highly doubt they are actually lauging out loud.

Well let me assure you, when I read the quote above, I was LOL. I wasn't quite ROTFLMAO, but close.

FrontPage? OMG. You must be kidding me. _vti_ugh If FrontPage is one of the best publishing tools, then I'm worried about UserLand.

Matrix Revisited

I just finished watching The Matrix Revisited. 15 bucks, I thought that was pretty good for a DVD. I didn't even know what was on it... it said The Matrix on it so that was good enough for me!

Turns out it's a 2 hour making-of and philosophy-of the Matrix, plus extras. I really enjoyed it. And thankfully, there were no spoilers about the new movies in the 2 hour bit, that I saw. There's a "Go Further" item in the main menu, with a "What's to Come?" selection in it... the reviews on Amazon say it's related to the sequels, so I avoided that.

The stuff about the Animatrix is super cool. Anyway, Revisited is basically a $15 commercial for the Matrix, the sequels, and the animated shorts, but I don't care.

I'm so jealous of the Wachowski brothers!!!

New SNAX offered for Mac OS X

MacCentral: New SNAX offered for Mac OS X

And does it ever! I downloaded it and have been playing with it. I've seen other so-called Finder replacements, and nothing I've tried yet comes close to this. It's totally great.

If you consider yourself an OS X power user, you should check out SNAX.

Brad Cox: Misusing Dynamic Binding…

Brad Cox: Misusing Dynamic Binding When Static Binding Would Do, Part 2

Brad Cox, the father of Objective-C, which ironically is a superset of the C language that adds dynamic binding, has a lot of good points to make about the benefits of static binding and why the use of dynamic binding needs to be rationalized.

I especially loved the way he trashed the blatant over-use of XML files for configuring just about everything these days. You can't run a servlet or a JSP page or just about anything from the mainstream open-source-java-world without drowning yourself in XML-ized config files.

Editing forum messages

Uh boy. Here we go!

Slashdot: When Should a Website Edit Its Users?

There's a lot of interesting information in that thread already, including references to the DMCA.

So far my favourite post in the thread is this one.