Welcome back Dave.

Cigarretes are a curse. Like him, I’ve smoked to problem solve or to help get in the frame of mind to problem solve.

Greg Allan a.k.a. Adam_Baum, the lead core developer and one of the four
founding members of the PostNuke CMS Development Project passed away from
injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. The accident occurred June 16,
2002 near his home in Meaford, Ontario in Canada.

Greg Allan was a humble and personable man who always downplayed his
considerable skills. He was a self-taught coder who contributed to every
aspect of development from cleaning up other people’s code to writing new and
innovative software.

Greg was an invaluable asset to the PostNuke development team, and a dear and
trusted friend and co-worker to people on every continent. Through this first
year of PostNuke’s existence, Greg’s personable and giving nature has been a
guiding light and inspiration to many people and projects that have shaped the
development landscape and social personality of the PostNuke project.

Surviving Greg are his parents, Bob and Leone Allan, his brother Brian, his
girlfriend Kim along with her two children Kristin and Kassandra, his dog
Chevy, and trusted friends Dean and Natasha.

For more – PostNuke Mourns Loss of Lead Developer.

You have my sympathies and prayers.

Pioneering non-profit managed websites. Maybe a model that my old PhillyFuture could have followed?

Microsoft is bringing the simplicty of the Visual Basic IDE to .net. Looks great.

Why aren’t there any IDE’s like this for JSP and Java? Am I missing them someplace?

Sending good thoughts to you Dave.

Mark Pilgrim’s accessiblity crusade brings to mind a new phrase – “compassionate design”. I’ve been won over and will try and implement his tips.

Almost All Java Web Apps Need Model 2

You use Model 1, which is page-centric, for simple applications or if you want to get something done quickly. Applications implementing this model have a series of JSP pages where the user proceeds from one page to another. This is the model you always employ when you first learn JSP because it’s simple and easy. The main problem with Model 1 applications is that they’re hard to maintain and not flexible. In addition, this architecture does not promote the division of labor between the page designer and the Web developer because the developer is involved in both the page development and business objects coding.

Cofax is a Model 2 application

Using Hashtables in Java

Good article. Doesn’t emphasize enough the performance benefits of unsynchronized HashMaps over HashTables though. I agree that you should probably use HashMaps in all cases where you don’t know up front you need synchronization – which has a performance penalty attached to it.

Interesting O’Reilly weblog post on the IDE.

A great O’Reilly article on using Ant to install software as well as compile it for you. This greatly shortens the whole compile, deploy, debug cycle. We do it as well ourselves. I’ve been meaning to add an ftp task to our build file to actually upload distributables to cofax.org.

Check out the review at theServerSide.com.