My current project requires the generation of PDF reports in a web-based J2EE app, using free tools. Everyone knows about Jasper and iText, but our requirements are for a small number of somewhat simple reports, so I thought those would be overkill. Not to mention the fact that my preference is to use presentation technology that is familiar without any custom coding.

So, I was going through a stack of podcasts that had piled up. One of them was an interview with Zed Shaw (creator of Mongrel) at http://ajaxian.com/podcast/. He pontificates about a number of things. It's an hour long, but of particular interest to me was when he was talking about the old Rails-In-The-Enterprise debate. He mentioned three key barriers to Rails in this area:
1. EAI (i.e. interfacing w/ legacy apps, arcane data sources, etc)
2. Authentication (very limited support now)
3. a Rails stack with good management tools (the JBoss or Websphere of Rails, as he puts it)

I've made extensive use of Apache Commons Collections over the years. It has a lot of really handy wrappers and utilities for doing list and set manipulation that Java doesn't do out of the box. So, in my current project I am using jdk1.6, generics, and all that good stuff. I was using the LazyList class and got the old List is a raw type. References to generic type List should be parameterized warning from Eclipse. So, I thought to myself: "Oh bother.. I bet it doesn't support generics yet." I did some poking around, and confirmed that.

I am on the mailing list for Artima Devleoper, which is one of my favorite websites that cover Java/JEE, Dynalangs, and C++. Today's e-mail had a link to a talk by Douglas Crockford who created JSON and Yahoo UI (which I used on my last project) on the state of Ajax. He goes through a bit of computing history (for some reason), and much of the talk is about stuff an experienced web developer would already know.

I've recently finished reading Web Project Management: Delivering Successful Commercial Web Sites, by E-commerce guru Ashley Friedlein.

So, I was reading the latest issue of Practical Web Design, which has become one of my favorite trade rags to read, and I began to think about just how the presentation layer and the back end have been converging - not just from a technological point of a view with stuff like AJAX, Flex, etc.. but more within our profession how its changed working relationships, and the kinds of things developers and content creators think about.

While I am not going to complain as much as this guy: http://planet-geek.com/archives/001120.html (a little Java rant I find amusing). There are cases where J2EE's level of abstraction and flexibility has its frustrations (as opposed to .NET where stuff just generally works out of the box). I'm working with the technology stack described in the subject line - and when JBoss first starts up, everything works just fine.

On my current project, we have a number of authorization requirements for a brand spanking new J2EE web application. We're already using Spring Acegi for authentication (Kerberos against an Active Directory server), so it made sense to use it for authorization too. The basic approach Acegi uses employs the notion of secure objects - basically, you can wrap security around a method invocation through an Acegi interceptor, and then advice can be applied to that method invocation via Spring AOP or AspectJ.