http://www.khaaan.com/

trevor.conn — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 18:19:46 -0800

Reading your post just now Rob, I get a sense that the best of what I've seen from the Open Source community is exactly what you say -- guys trying to design the best of some niche app which may become a standard or simply a point of pride. It seems like there must be also some drive to do it for the fun of it. Could be, I suppose, that alot of us know there's a better way to design software than what is evidenced in the spaghetti we look at every day. If some of these projects were born out of a desire to work on something better, that's great. If not payment there's at least some achievement in that the person doing it becomes a better coder/architect by virtue of their personal exploration.

I'm excited to get this first site up that's done in JSP. I'm enjoying the experience of learning Java so far, but I'm passing by alot of the stuff I hear about in terms of frameworks for implementing JSP -- Struts, ServerFaces, Hibernate. I feel like I know how to implement a solid web infrastructure just from the OO and internet work I've done. Man, I know I'm gonna make some mistakes though. Struts sounds like the coolest thing of any of the above options from what I've read. If I had to, I could probably get into that. My hosting provider runs Resin though, so it isn't even an option I don't think. Tht's one of the big things I've struggled with is the separation of logic from presentation. The ability in ASP.NET to control your UI elements in the code-behind via the runat="server" attribute is just genious, and I'm SO used to it. JSP feels annoyingly like ASP in many ways. But the MVC pattern (and thus something like Struts) mitigate alot of that.

But like you say, what I'm working on is definitely born in part out of an urge to keep learning and stay creative. Building the toolbox as they say. If money follows, that'd be nice too.

Cheap as Free

Rob MacGrogan — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:09:57 -0800

[Note: The WO series goes on hold while I work on other stuff for a while.]

It was at a Christmas party in Atlanta last year that my good friend Trevor Conn (I always want to spell it Kahn. Kaaaaahhhhhnnnnnnn!) started telling me about a new software development project he was working on. It was to be a web-based application developed using Java/JSP. Ahh. My bread and butter.

Trevor's background is more on the Microsoft side of the fence, so there was a bit of a paradigm shift for him. I'm not talking about syntax or event models or software frameworks. That stuff is pretty easy to figure out, and genereally there's an equilivent concept somewhere under the hood, only with a different name. In fact, there is a much deeper division that separates the Microsoft world from the Java world.

I'm talking about money.

developer.* Blogs - Cheap as Free - Comments

http://www.khaaan.com/

Cheap as Free