I had some very nice three weeks in Sachsen, Germany. The weather was great and we had a lot of sun. I had a lot of fun riding on my race bike through the beatiful landscape of Sachsen.

Meanwhile Don Brown contacted me and we talked about integrating my IoC stuff into struts.sf.net. Before we can add the sources we must tune them a little bit first, e.g. package renaming, code style and moving from log4j to commons-logging. Fortunately there are only a handful of files to touch so I think we can add the sources very soon.

Unfortunately it is a little bit tricky to get the default welcome file index.do working with Struts and Jetty. Suppose you have th following web.xml:

...
<welcome-file-list>
  <welcome-file>index.do</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>
...

and you have configured the ActionServlet to listen on *.do requests. Then you would assume that

http://some.url.com/index.do

would work? Right? No! I guess the problem is that the default servlet (which handles the welcome-file stuff) looks for the file index.do on the filesystem. Unless there is no such file the ActionSerlvet will never be called.
The trick is to simply add an empty index.do file in the root directory of your WAR. That's it =)

After some weeks of hacking I finally replaced the backend of my little website. The new version is based on 100% pure Java technologie. Actually I wanted to learn about all those new cool frameworks such as Jakarta Struts, Hibernate, Jakarta-Commons, JSTL, EJB and so on. I ended up with an entire rewrite of the old backend. In fact my new backend has a lot of more features such as news, weblogs, comments, private messages and profiles. This page, however, only uses the weblog feature currently. I am working with some friends on a new project which will be based on my new system. You may ask which project? Well, stay tuned =) I will release the source under an open source license and perhaps even host it on sourceforge.net. Currently we are searching for a nice name. Suggestions?

Some people might wonder why I worked on IoC and interceptor support for Struts. Though I really like WW2 for it is very well designed it is sometimes not possible for me to use WW2 in production enviroments. Decision makers are seldom interesseted in "technical well designed" but rather in "well known". Struts is nowadays a well known framework. Even IBM has a hole chapter about Struts in one of its WebSphere 4.0 RedBooks. But I really hope that WW2 gets more publicity so that it is easier for me to convince those decision makers :-)

Many of you may wonder if an Apple notebook for Java development may be worth a switch. Since MacOS X Apple provides an interesting platform for developers thanks to its BSD roots. Many usefull tools from the BSD and Linux comunities are available and easy to install. Apple even has ported JDK 1.4.1 to its operating system. So from the point of software availability everthing looks bright. Right. But software needs a hardware platfrom to run on. And that's the point where dark clouds are hiding the blue sky. Their fastest portable today are the 15" and 17" PowerBooks running at 1GHz. The flagship the 17" PowerBook features a 1GHz G4, 1MB L3 cache and 512MB RAM. Although Steve told us that this machine is very fast I can tell you it does not. At least for Java development. Here's how I found out:
A friend of mine owns the 15" PowerBook running at 1GHz with 1MB L3 cache. Therefore these machines are mostly identical from the speed view. The 17", however, features DDR333 memory. But many of us know that this is more or less a marketing gag because the current G4 cannot take full advantage of DDR RAM. But back to my story. Together my friend and my installed JDK 1.4.1 and JBoss on the PowerBook. "Booting" JBoss takes around 20-25 seconds. On my little iBook 800 it takes around 35 seconds. Yesterday another friend of mine bought the new Acer TravelMate 800 for 2200 Euros. It features the new Centrino technologie from Intel. Although it is clocked at 1.6GHz only the performance correspondes to a 2.4 GHz desktop CPU. Our little tests proved that, e.g. compiling a very large C++ project on both the Acer notebook and an Intel based desktop PC. Now you may wonder how fast JBoss boots on this peace of hardware?
Around 7 seconds.
Boom. That's a noticeable difference for sure! Everything feels very fluid and sleek. IDEA feels like a native app and so does Eclipse.
Apple fans may say now: But PeeCee notebooks are noisy and running out of battery very fast. Wrong! This Acer is comfortable quiet. The fan seldom activates. And the runtime is nice as well: 3.5 ours are no problem.
Although I am not a great fan of the operating system running on the Acer (WinXP Pro) I am still convinced that a Centrino based notebook is the best what you can get for you bucks if your main focus is on Java software development. Compiling debugging and running Java apps needs pure CPU power which Apple has poorly failed to deliver. I really hope that Apple will switch to the new PPC970 processor as soon as possible and replace the outdated G4.