Code and Whatnot

HTML/CSS developers, and, really, many developers, don’t spend their time at the command line these days. In a Java world, build scripts are usually run from the command line or automatically from Eclipse. In my experience, most front-end developers don’t like Eclipse, preferring IDEs like Dreamweaver, Coda, and Notepad++. To make their […]

The Java project for which we’re doing front-end development uses JSP Tiles. These clever little guys allow HTML output to be broken into pieces that can be reused in many places by the application.
As development begins on a new phase, I meet with one or more back-end developers to go over wireframes and work […]

Over the last several months, I’ve worked hard to make it as easy as possible for our front-end developers (including me) to perform front-end development in a Java environment (on Windows).
Here are some of the preconditions I am dealing with:

The Java application (via Tomcat) outputs absolute references to static assets.
Tomcat is not serving CSS, Javscript, […]

This post is mostly for my own benefit, and may be edited in the future. Since I’m a shell guy stuck (at least for now) in a Windows world, I find myself installing Cygwin on machines on a regular basis. I still don’t really understand how anyone gets anything done on Windows machines…
Digression: […]

HUGE was kind enough to send me to the Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose earlier this month. Overall, I give the conference high marks. It’s a pricey conference, but they included three meals a day (which weren’t bad) and the conference was a 12+ hour experience on each of the first […]

Martin Fowler recently posted OneLanguage, and article exploring the costs and benefits of using multiple programming languages in a project. He also hints at what my dad has also been preaching: Ruby, and languages like it, are as significant an advance beyond Java as Java was beyond C++.

As of last week I was getting pretty tired of my laptop’s inability to suspend to RAM in Ubuntu Feisty 7.04. The ati driver that comes with Ubuntu didn’t work at all on my machine, and the fglrx driver package (the non-free driver from ATI), while it did work, caused the machine to freeze […]

I tested Drupal and Joomla! to see how easily I could set up a CMS that had basic site & content control, image galleries, video content, blogs, and a calendar of events.
The winner: Drupal
The installation was quite painless. Finding and installing modules was also a breeze. I haven’t yet had time to screw […]

Here’s a quick update. After about 5 weeks working at HUGE, I’ve gotten a lot done. I’ve learned Perforce quite well, and I’ve learned my way around the Java Spring framework as well as any front-end developer would ever need.
My main contribution so far has been the establishment, automation, and documentation of front-end […]

the first thing the boss asked me was “What OS do you want?”