Much of the benefit of J2EE for me comes from the out of the box support the app server provides me – big ones being declarative transactions and security. In theory I can focus on the business logic and the app server can handle those things (hmm). Are we talking about building an app server that provides these services as standard aspects that I can apply to my business logic?

I’ve been following Rickard’s discussion of AOP (J2EE Thoughts Redux), and I think I’m *starting* to get it. Combining aspects and using interceptors to reuse functionality (and separate responsibilities) sounds very promising. I was concerned at first about the performance of the Rickard’s ‘dynamic proxy’ class and the cost of loading multiple aspect objects for each composite object. Then I thought about the cost of having similar objects as EJBs and shuddered….

I need to look at AspectJ as well (amongst others), and get a better picture.

My bus to work this morning smelled like a wet dog. London weather in October 😐

“Your baby is now weighing about 2 pounds and measuring about 32cm. As the blood vessels in the lungs began last week, the air sacs in the lungs begin this week. The lungs begin to secrete surfactant which covers the inner lining of the air sacs which then allows the lungs to expand normally during breathing. Your baby will also begin to have brain wave activity, and will start to hear and respond to noises, both internally and externally.”

Having resisted paying for the seemingly-bloated XMLSpy for a long time, I’ve finally found an editor that I like, and it’s a plugin for Eclipse. I love it! DTD-based code-completion makes my life (which seems to involve far too much time working with XML configuration files) so much more pleasant. To put the icing on the cake I had a couple of suggestions and the developer got straight back to me – leaving me with warm community feel. Gush.

An interesting idea – add the URL of your favorite RSS feeds to FeedReader and it maintains a mailbox style view, notifying you of new blog postings. The UI needs just a little work, but I’m going to give it a try. Double click on an entry and it opens the link URL in an integrated browser. Link thanks to Peter.

I’ll start off the hitlist with my current tool of the moment. I’ve used Araxis Merge on trial a number of times in the last couple of years but never QUITE needed it enough to pay the £94 for the basic edition. I tried WinMerge a while ago, but it was flakey as hell. It’s spot-on now, and works really nicely with CVS. Having just started some serious team development with CVS for the first time in ages it is so totally necessary.

Hello? Is there anybody out there? I discovered just recently a number of my lost colleagues and friends have started logging, and I don’t want to feel left out. I’m going to mainly log links of interest to me and my work (broadly app development in Java and J2EE), tools of choice, and the odd bit of BS. Should be interesting to look back on.