Gmail has been deliberately not supporting IMAP for some time now. No one cared because their web interface is so wonderful, and Google themselves will be wonderful forever and ever. Until you get an iPhone, that is, and Gmail sucks on it. iOops! Perhaps having access via standard protocols, and being in control of one’s primary internet mailbox, matters after all.

Another thing that doesn’t work so well on the iPhone is Wicket’s ModalWindow component, which this weblog uses entirely to create and edit posts. We cared about this until we remembered that the iPhone’s lack of copy & paste makes it impossible to post anything anyway. (What is it with this curse?) The iPhone is already nicer than a computer for reading the web (not kidding!), but for writing it’s the stone age. We will sacrifice a dogcow and pray that our fruity software overlord grants us ink.

A question about how to avoid opening a Spring-Hibernate session when serving package resources with Wicket (that had no easy answer) spurred Databinder to optimize its own Hibernate session handling. The latest snapshot only opens a session if one is requested. Take that, OpenSessionInViewFilter!

The story of X considered harmful: “Street trading is considered harmful for girls under sixteen, therefore is some places is prohibited, and in others carefully safeguarded, according to local dangers and customs.” —The Craftsman, July 1907

A little news about Thoof’s underpinnings is trickling out: “What is interesting in my opinion is that Wicket itself is not mentioned as a part where the focus was when tweaking the architecture, but rather the database layer. Instead of using Hibernate, they opted to use iBatis instead.” Oh boy. There’s going to be an enraged rebuttal over at the Hibernate weblog in two or three months.

Dive into Mark on IBM’s Project Zero: “In the true spirit of Web 2.0, we’ll let you make all the content, and we’ll keep all the money.”

The Scala language site is finally in the Google top ten for “scala”. Number four! We’ll throw a party the day it overtakes Scala Prom Dresses. [warning: music and frilly pastels behind that link]

Xavier Hanin has contributed his very awesome Hibernate query panel to Databinder. (It could move to a full-blown XooCode project later). If you’re using Databinder snapshots you can try out the panel immediately. Those not using Databinder might be interested in the new databinder-components module that houses this and other components independent of Databinder’s request cycle and base application classes—more on that later!

Quiz: What’s a ”Spring complainer?” 1. Someone who complains if Spring is not used for everything. 2. Someone who complains that he’s expected to use Spring for everything. Apparently it’s number two. Bonus question: in the post’s lead sentence, “I’m not an employer. But if I do, here are 5 ultimate reasons…” what is “do” supposed to mean? (Excluding Xavier’s post, we are so tired of everyone’s lists, “ultimate” or not.)

NYT on outsourcing: “Jobs in technology services may be particularly vulnerable because computer programming can be described in math-based rules that are then sent over the Internet.” Ha ha, sure. Why not write those “math-based rules” in code? That’s what it’s there for. The article goes on to claim, fed with quotes from IBM drones, that to make it in this crazy new world you need “business knowledge” that is hard to outsource. Good luck with that, businessy people! In any field, having talent and working with a passion that goes beyond paychecks will ensure you stay busy. Those who think of programming as “lower-end” or unappealing work don’t deserve to participate in software at all.

The iPhone’s Safari isn’t version 3, which helps explain why our RSA password field takes ages to encrypt on it. Speaking of that phone, we should probably eat some crow for dancing around thinking our prediction that it would run widgets had come true. No such luck, though it may happen later (and before compiled apps are permitted). It only runs “ajax” apps—giggle—and only those that are useful without a clipboard!

A long overdue questioning of design patterns: “If you find yourself frequently writing a bunch of boilerplate design pattern code to deal with a ‘recurring design problem’, that’s not good engineering—it’s a sign that your language is fundamentally broken.” And boy does this ever resonate: GoF patterns replace “thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality.” And don’t forget that framework whose main selling point was factoring out design pattern bloat (by stuffing it in a gigantic XML closet).

The iPhone’s Samsung processor has a “Java acceleration Engine.” Must be feeling a little bored.

The Lilu HTML templating system for Rails works on code-free templates. It ties into element IDs, a strategy others have tried before opting for namespaced identifiers (like wicket:id). As with Lift, we’re left wondering where the component hierarchy is. (In that case we were persuaded that similar-but-different functionality is in there somewhere.) These Li__ frameworks are a step in the right direction, anyway!

Whoa, Buildr has a serious-looking web site to go with its 1.2 release. And just wait until you see what we’re doing with it to make extendable components better.

There’s a patch to make Buildr compile Scala: “Hey Scala fans! I know you’re out there!!” We are soo out there. Thank you, because Coderspiel has already gotten enough help on the Buildr listserv this month. Asking someone to turn our crazy Scala-compiling hack into a properly integrated builder would have put us way into needy n00b territory.

IBM to motivate zoned-out workforce with a really fun-sounding MMO: “You earn Serios by, presumably, completing real life quests, such as showing up to work on time or killing 10 accountants and looting their bodies for crap you’re just going to sell to a merchant for Serios.”

All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash (video)

Buzzword Bingo on Spring: “there is probably a case for not using Spring at all in a Wicket/JPA application, if there are no links to other types of systems or frameworks and database interactions are all there is to it.” But what’s so great about JPA, other than talking about swapping in some Hibernate wannabe? Guess we’ll find out in a few months when we finally reorient Databinder around it.

If you feel like getting angry, skim through this horrible post: “I deliberately [avoid] the term ‘Software Engineer’ because this would imply the use of a scientific method to programming.” Tim Bryce goes on to say programmers are not particularly smart, though he’s the one botching elementary principles: engineering and programming are both applications of science. What—don’t they teach you that in communications and business school? Tim’s right that there are a lot of crappy programmers out there, but sneering “management consultants” won’t inspire any more creativity and productivity in them. (Don’t miss Jenny’s comments at the bottom. Girl needs a weblog!)

The only way we could describe our reaction to the Wicket and Geronimo tutorial is with lolcats imagery. Sadly, that fad has played itself out. Anyway, soldier through the required registration and watch out for the Coderspiel Easter egg on page 3. Now, please excuse me—I have to fetch Databinder. He’s drunk on Zima and has wandered out to the street asking people if they “know who he is.”

The special olympics of googling: “After some Googling, I was able to positively ascertain that there are no Wicket components which provide Textile rendering.” Oh, really? Also, for more canonical Textile, and Markdown, and the excellent Maruku, there’s always this. Those public text processing components for Wicket that don’t exist are generating the markup for this very paragraph!

The new Seaside site is live-generated by the code it advocates—welcome to the club! It’s hard to take web tech seriously that doesn’t do the same. If the authors can’t be bothered to write a content-only site in it, which should take about an hour, it must not be so great.

From a comment on Scala and Wicket: “One thing I can’t stop thinking about is how the scala code could be validated with scalacheck to generate the component tree prescribed in the HTML template.” That would be sweet. Everyone wants tighter pre-compile integration between Wicket templates and their definition code; this sounds like a good way to get it without depending on a specific dev environment.

Some criticism of social-whatever sites: “aggregation sites are taking the value that the web provides and concentrating it in proprietary databases … when the comments are in programming.reddit.com instead of on the blog post, what happens?” Nothing good! But also consider that one reason people use those sites is that commenting is too hard at most weblogs. Because of evil spammers. Those huge sites give people a place to comment without hurdles and without mixing with spam. The best way to encourage home commenting is to have a simple form processed by Akismet. And we totally agree with that post’s commenters who point out that raganwald uses Blogger and therefore has crappy commenting. Why does any programmer use Blogger?

Java hateration: ” My sense of it is that on Java, too many web frameworks—think JSF, or Struts 1.x—consider the Web something you work around using software patterns.” My sense is that people look at the crap floating around on top of Java and conclude that’s all that’s there. Dive a little deeper, people! (Likewise, we should probably look into this whole “ETag” thing.)

Have you heard of Artifactory, the application based on Wicket and Jackrabbit for hosting a Maven repository? If not, your first thought might be, “What’s wrong with using the filesystem?” Fortunately, that’s their first FAQ. The answer is enterprisey, but Artifactory definitely does things that some people want, whether or not they fly for The Federation.

Container-managed everything is running out of steam. We were promised that the “container” would do all kinds of time-saving things for us, but its indirection made our code harder to write, read, run, debug, and deploy. Now, embedding Jetty inside webapps (turning the container inside out) is catching on. And Wicket can persist its own sessions to disk better than any container could—it’s poised to even cluster them itself. By the time Java EE 6 is finished, the bandleader may find that the band has moved on.

Just so everyone’s clear, if you’re using Ruby on Mac, follow these instructions. It will save you hours of heartache. (You can stop as soon as you get through installing RubyGems. Unless for some reason you want Rails.) The “Ruby” that comes with Mac OS 10.4 is incapable of many things, including running Buildr.

CMS genius who is tired of replacing everyone’s bad home-grown CMSes uses Blogger, the worst weblog platform, so it’s easier to reply here: Welcome to July 22, 2007, when open source CMSes are starting to become flexible and powerful enough to use. As you said, “Finally, in the upcoming 3.0 release, Plone will have versioning.” My company’s unauthorized “home-grown CMS” has had versioning for a year and half now—instead, we should have used Plone and told our writers to be very careful when pressing save? Or we should have bought a rigid behemoth like Documentum, which pretty much ruined the year 2002 for me? I’m glad that free JCR impls are maybe worth using now, but I’m not sorry for having made web publishing systems that users wanted instead of shoehorning everything into disgusting marketing portals.

What is up with Coding Horror’s run of unbalanced Mac interface criticism? { Exhibit A, Exhibit B } Those things are that way because they have always been that way on Mac. (And because Apple invented everything, they’ve been that way longer than they’ve been the other way on Windows.) Zoom vs. maximize, and no-install vs. setup.exe (remember .exe?) are unresolvable debates. Are there Mac-fans that debate over gray areas of Windows that are arguably just as good as Mac? Probably! And we don’t want to read them either. Unless a conclusive argument is made with good experience in all environments, it’s not worth reading no matter how smart the writer thinks he is.

Infinitely recursive Ars headline: Apple earnings expected to exceed expectations. We just hope the bug is intentional.

David Pollak posts some notes on load testing the new site he’s making with the Lift web framework for Scala: “We want to be sure that CircleShare is stable and scalable, so I spent about a week building code and an environment to test the scalability of CircleShare.” But we’re sad to learn that “it turns out that Tomcat 6 has about 20% better throughput than Jetty.” { previously }