My last 'new favorite thing' of 2008...

I am not sure how long it will last, but I have a new favorite thing:

Stateful session EJBs (SFSBs)

I have been working with some fairly massive (and complex) data structures that I have been reloading from my database every time I needed to do a query or modification. And now, it looks like I may be able to stop doing this!

There will be some fairly radical changes necessary to really take advantage of SFSBs - but I am expecting the speed improvements to more than justify the work.

Yay! I like new toys.

Trying out new toys...

Up until now, I have been perfectly happy to only use stateless session beans in my application.

And, I have been able to do a lot of optimization to speed up the user's experience.

But, if I can avoid reloading large data structures every time the user is making a change to them - then that should be an additional (and possibly very large) speed boost.

Plus, I would be able to make changes to the data structure separate from the back end database without trying to cache it on the browser - which would be a nightmare!

So, I am finally going to try to use a stateful bean. If it works (if I manage to make it work) then I'll get to rewrite a -lot- of code to take advantage of stateful beans.

If it doesn't work, then at least I already have everything working with stateless.

OMDB!

I never mentioned it, but I did manage to do an initial stab at making an AppEngine version of my origami model diagram database (omdb).

For grins, you can try it out.

Here are the address formats to request information:
http://omdb.appspot.com/getDesigner?designerFirstName=&designerLastName=

http://omdb.appspot.com/getAuthor?authorFirstName=&authorLastName=

If you enter something that does not exist, then it creates it and adds back to the data store. If you have the record ID, then you can replace the names with designerID= or authorID= - respectively.

There are pages for origami models and books, but there is no nice way to find something unless you already know everything about it - not very useful yet.

This is harder than it looks...

I'm not sure where I got the idea that doing a blog would be easy.

I have enough 'life' going on, that there is no natural time for blogging.

So, I am going to try (or at least try to try) to do a minimal amount of blogging by forcing myself to enter -something- on a regular schedule. And then, if something noteworthy comes up, then I'll blog it as it comes up.

Finally! Steps forward...

This past Thursday, I got to attend the AppEngine Hackathon in Chicago.

And now, I have the back end of my origami database website written.

All it does right now though is return XML files containing the designer, author, source (book), and model information. I still need to write the presentation part of the site (and write up usage info so that others can access and use the API I am making to access the data).

And Python is officially an interesting language.

Still weird though.

Every dark cloud...

Not everything is bad though.

Since I was blocked by hosting my website and mail locally, I began taking a look at the Google App Engine (there is probably a trademark in there somewhere).

It also uses Python as the language for apps, so - I have begun trying to figure out how to host the 'data server' for my origami web site on GAE.

Not there yet.

Again, hopefully soon.

False starts anyone....?

Well, I put together my server and set up my web server and app server then tried to 'tunnel' through my hardware firewall.

No dice.

And that is where I've been stuck all this month.

This sucks.