Dangosaur.us

Locomotive looks pretty interesting. If I wasn’t already up and running well with most of what it contains, I’d give it a go. I might anyway.

I accidentally discovered TM’s integration with Subversion a few minutes ago. Very cool. “CTRL-SHIFT-A” pops up a menu with a list of Subversion actions. The more I dig into this power-editor, the more I like it.

I’m writing some Selenium tests today and I felt like giving TextMate a whirl at my HTML writing. (I’ve generally used Dreamweaver or NVu in wysiwyg mode for this.) I decided a little automation was in order, so I created a simple snippet that generates a table row after I type “str” and press the tab key. So I get:

<tr>
  <td></td>
  <td></td>
  <td></td>
</tr>

By giving my snippet $n placeholders, the cursor starts in the first cell and by using tab I’m placed in the next cell and then on the next line after the closing row tag when I’m done.

<tr>
  <td>$1</td>
  <td>$2</td>
  <td>$3</td>
</tr>

I’ve got a pet peeve about Tapestry-no distro I have yet used builds right from download and setting properties. Invariably, I have to hack my way through numerous build failures to track down the various problems. On my Mac, It’s taken me over an hour just to get install to work, and that only after disabling tests, finally realizing that run-tests called compile for the non-test files, and putting that in as a dependency for war. Apparently some of the tests have some line-ending issues for non-Windows machines. There are 700+ tests, so I haven’t started looking. I also had to hack some of the Hivemind build files as well. I think the only distro that’s built from source right out of the box for me has been the one Erik Hatcher and I put together for 3.0.2 (I haven’t tried 3.0.3-hopefully it still works out of the box). What I want to do is download the source, compile it, and use that code so that I can make up-to-date bug reports and patches. Instead, I spend several hours of headache, wonder why I’m spending my weekend doing this and putting it away in frustration.

That sucks, because I really like developing in Tapestry.

I’m so glad to be working in Tapestry again-it’s fun! I can’t say that about any other Java Web framework I’ve used. Two of the projects I’m working on now use Hibernate, which I haven’t used before. It’s interesting to get into the persistence layer-I enjoy it—but the all the xml configuration between the web app, Spring and Hibernate makes me want to vomit. I spent several hours trying to understand what was there and make the app work with some new domain objects. In Rails it would have taken me almost no time at all.