Evolutionary Goo

If you been to downtown St. Louis, MO in the last couple of years, you surely would have noticed the amazing revitalization which is underway. Since it has been a couple of years since I have been to Kansas City, MO, I was unaware that they have a tremendous revitalization effort under way as well. Both Missouri cities are finalists for a World Leadership Award in the Urban Renewal category. The other two finalists include Calcutta, India and Manchester, England.

Urban Renewal Award

One such renewal effort I am aware of in downtown St. Louis is the Park Pacific development. The Mopac Building, as Park Pacific was once named, is the former home to the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. I once worked in this building back in the 1990’s. Check out the plans for this development. They are quite amazing. I have a friend whom has purchased a loft in this development, so I am looking forward to receiving an invitation to drop by once the development is complete.

Park Pacific

Craig’s List is potentially worth billions of dollars based on the estimated value of Web sites such as MySpace or YouTube. However, the founder, Craig Newmark, is not interested in selling the company to make a big profit. In today’s world of accounting scandels and corporate corruption, this kind of talk is nice to hear. Now we’ll have to see if Craig sticks to his words.

Newmark Not Interested in Selling Craig’s List

Written off Struts as the popular, but outdated Java Web framework of the past? Well, not so fast. The new and improved Struts2 is due out this fall.

Struts2 may be misleading in that it is actually an enhanced version of WebWork, as opposed to a new version of the existing Struts. WebWork is easy-to-use, high quality and up-to-date, so using it as the basis for the next generation of Struts applications appears to be a good move. Especially, since Struts almost ended without an upgrade path at all. WebWork is action based (as opposed to component/event based), just like Struts, so the move from Struts1 to Struts2 should be straightforward.

I’m particularly excited about Struts2, because it leverages the high quality WebWork framework while leveraging the popularity of Struts. Struts2/WebWork has strong AJAX support (using Dojo and DWR), which is exciting also. It will be interesting to see how Struts2 fares against JSF once it is officially released. Personally, I think JSF should be worried.

For more information about Struts2, see this nice comparison between Struts2 and Struts2.

Comparing Struts1 and Struts2

Tired of paying $0.99 per song on the Internet? One of my favorite new music sites is LaLa. I think this site in ingenious in that it facilitates the trading of CDs through the mail. Each CD you receive costs you only $1.75 and that includes shipping.

I am in the middle of a Tapestry 3 to Tapestry 4 conversion project. Tapestry 4 is not fully backwards compatible with Tapestry 3, but overall the conversion had been pretty smooth. During the conversion, I learned about the new validation framework in Tapestry 4. It is definitely much nicer than the way validation was done previously.

In Tapestry 3, you were required to give a component validation support. So if you had a component named TextField, that you wanted to have validation support for things like being required, or maximum length, you would have to create a second component and give it validation support. Tapestry 3 actually ships with TextField and ValidField components. However, ValidField is the only Tapestry 3 component that comes prewritten, so if you want validation on other components, you have to write the “valid” versions of those components yourself.

That changes in Tapestry 4. In Tapestry 4, you create validator objects that you can hook up to any component on your page (in the HTML template). Of course a validator needs to make sense in context to the component. Tapestry 4 ships with many prewritten validators, such as Required, Min, Max, MinLength, MaxLength, MinDate, MaxDate and Email. You can hook up as many of these validators to your component as you want. If you require a validator that isn’t prewritten, then it is very easy to write your own validator and hook that up to your component also. So far this is the nicest gift the upgrade has given me. Hopefully, I discover some other nice features as I get more familiar with the new version.
Tapestry 4 Input Validation

I have a second open source project, JSorter, that places a layer on top of Java Collections sorting in order to make multi-column sorting simple. It allows for multi-column sorting on Collection objects as well as Swing components. So far it has been downloaded 165 times since it was first placed on SorceForge at the beginning of this year. A few years ago when I actually sold this component under the name JTKSortSuite, it was recognized as IBM developerWorks Component of the Week.

Of all the Java Web frameworks out there today, the new Google Web Toolkit (GWT) interests me the most. Basically, you write a AJAX Web front-end using Java, and GWT generates all of JavaScript and HTML. Very cool.
Google Web Toolkit

Even though the temperatures were in the high 90’s / low 100’s, these baby birds didn’t seem to mind. This photo was taken a couple of weeks ago in the front yard of my house in Chesterfield, MO. The birds have since left their nest and moved on. Anyone know what kind of birds these are?

The new SanDisk Sansa looks awesome. For $250 you get 8GB of storage and as a bonus you get a FM tuner and voice recorder.
SanDisk Sansa