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by Thomas Gideon.
Original Post: More, Better JavaBean Utilities
Feed Title: Command Line Interface
Feed URL: http://www.gideonfamily.org/roller/rss/cmdln?catname=Java
Feed Description: The blog of a programmer-hacktivist-curmudgeon who occasional rants about society, work, and technology, among other things. Now how do I get to a command prompt on this thing?
I wrote a while ago about how disappointed I was after reading through the BeanUtils code from the Jakarta Commons. While it certainly fills a niche in a world where explicit property accessors are made mandatory by the Struts and Struts-like web frameworks out there, I still believe it lacks power and sophistication. There ain't much to the java.beans package, but what is there should lend itself to some interesting applications, such as a dynamic bean that is also a fully compliant JavaBean, instead of a Map with some custom self-descriptive classes.
While I'm not sure the world needs yet another commons-like project, I had the opportunity to explore some of my ideas recently with some work I did for my new employer. Most of what I wrote was pretty specific to the crummy, custom framework they've licensed from a bunch of Cobol and .NET clowns, dealing with the poorly chosen input field names and trying to ease the burden of manually coding they introduce everywhere. The smaller classes are on the order of six thousand lines long, some of the larger around twenty thousand. See my recent postings in the Professional category for some more context.
Anyway, while I'll need to start from scratch, to have a clean conscience and avoiding any legal messiness, I've not only got some interesting ideas I'd like to try, but the will and time, at last, to implement them. Granted, both derive from the fact that my current job is just so hopeless I cannot bring my usual personal and professional investment to the table, not without some sweeping changes in the organization. Also, I want to actually put this code to use, somewhere, like in at long last re-writing the photo album module for my personal site. Based on my experience, I believe shared libraries are best implemented when you have a real need for them, something that can help show where the rough and sometimes useless bits need to be polished away.
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