i prefer not to
Archive of published articles on January, 2010
Back home
I made pretzels for last week’s Vikings Saints game. We had a bunch of people over and ate wings and drank beer and had an all american family afternoon. My (almost) two year old daughter calls these events “sissaball parties.” I have know idea why she does this, but the name is a strangely appropriate way to describe a sport that features so many towering, corpulent hulks. So it stuck and now we feature regular sissaball parties.
What would you do if you were given three months off to do whatever it was you wanted to do? What if you were allowed to hit the pause button on your career, take a break from work during your prime earning years, and just do whatever it was you wanted to do?
Well, I can’t really answer that truthfully as I didn’t write up a list of priorities and then hit the pause button and start checking things off. But, I am wrapping up three months away from work and I thought it would be a good time to list what it was I did, why I did it and why I think it was important.
First, a little context. As I mentioned earlier (apologies in advance for the recapitulation, but it bears repeating), the primary impetus for hitting the pause button in the first place was that my daughter (my four year old) fractured both her tibias in a very halloween appropriate accident in the fantastic Evergreen Cemetery near our house. Long story short, she scurried away from her mother (who was occupied chasing down our one year old) and tried to climb a tombstone. It toppled on her legs and fractured both her tibias and she spent a night in the hospital and seven weeks in casts. Though it was mortifying (pun intended and only possible in light of her full recovery…read on) and horrifying for her and us, she was chipper throughout and handled the ordeal with grace and is now %100 recuperated and back in pre-school and running and jumping like never before.
So, I never really made a decision to pause my career. The decision was made for me by her accident. And because of that, I am grateful for the accident. This sounds weird I know. But I assure you, I wish the accident never happened and I would go back and undo it if I could. But I can’t. I have no choice but to consider it in conjunction with all of its effects and repercussions and process it and asses it thus.
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I’ve built three or four JSF applications over the last couple years. I’ve used JSF with Seam and Spring. I’ve used both RichFaces and ICEfaces JSF component libs. After all that what do I have to say about the technology? I’m not going to go so far as to say JSF sucks (but if I were, I’d certainly try to do it with as fine a collection of resources on the topic as that fellow). I’d say that JSF is powerful and flexible. I’d also say that it’s complex. Ultimately, in the context of an AJAX laden rich client application, I’d say it’s too complex.
I dabbled only a bit in JSF 2. Not enough to know how well it has addressed the AJAX issues with JSF. Take a look here if you want a taste of how those rich component libraries synchronize view state with the server through all those AJAX requests. As an architect and developer, I shudder to consider the implications of managing “customized partial processing and partial rendering on the server.” It’s no wonder that the complexity of JSF proved too difficult for some of the developers I’ve worked with, especially those who did a lot of Servlet development or Struts development and never managed to get their heads wrapped around the JSF lifecycle.
In the end, it’s not the complexity of JSF that turns me off of it. From an architecture standpoint, if I’m building a rich client application, I don’t really want to resort to a server managed view component/interface technology. That’s what JSF is and that’s not the right approach to RIA. It’s been retrofitted to operate with rich clients. Yes, RichFaces and ICEfaces do an admirable job implementing client components despite the complexity. But, if I’m going to build a rich client, then the client should be managing view components. Yes, the server still needs to do some view related processing (namely validation). But view components should be managed by the client. Flex does that. So does EXT JS and other Javascript component libs (I’m going to refrain from mentioning GWT and save that for another post. Preview: I’m not super excited to write Javascript UI components in Java).
I’m sure I’ll work with JSF again and I’ll try to keep an open mind to the changes in the 2.* specs. But given the choice, I’m going to turn to technologies that are built right to fit RIA, not retrofitted to do so.
This is not a list of my top three songs of last year (they weren’t even released last year). They are not my favorite three songs of the year. They aren’t even the songs I listened to the most. They are the songs I remember the most.
Karl Blau’s Slow Down Joe droned on endlessly throughout the summer. For me it was like the cool salt air coming off Casco Bay, pleasant and comforting.
(all three songs are embedded below the fold)