Seperation of Code and Page

Ahhhh, the wonderful world of seperating logic from UI. JSPs can get very large and confusing after adding more and more functionality into them. If all you html and Java all goes into the JSP then it gets to be very dirty looking, and then it becomes hard to read which makes it hard to debug and scale. If you've ever done much html on the side or otherwise you know what a pain layout and styling can be, add to that a bunch of Scriplet tags and Java code and you've got a nightmare of a page on your hands. Enter the ability to tie your JSP to a Java Class (a Java Bean but not EJB) with some handy little JSP Server tags, ~voila~, logic seperated from UI. Still looking forward to STRUTS though... so more to come on that.

More about The Ten:
Well, lets see. It seems that The Company couldn't have chosen a group of people that are so different yet so similar at the same time. We all come from very assorted backgrounds. Some of us came farther for this opportunity than others (I myself have been an Okie for more than the majority of my life). There are some here at the training who haven't yet found places to stay in OKC. Although there is a kaleidoscope of backgrounds we are all very similar. We are all here for one purpose: to seek a career in software development. Oddly (at least we have discussed it and find it odd) that of the ten people that were hired not one of us is a smoker. Less than half of us are married, but to my knowledge there is at least one of us that is engaged. Working together is pretty easy for us. We all have different programming backgrounds so we all seem to pick up the slack where we can. I think The Company did a great job (with the help of a few well mannered consultants) at building this team.

Development Environment: We are using Websphere Studio Application Developer 5.1 (wsad). This is a great IDE, well, it is built on a great IDE. wsad is actually a platform built around the open source IDE eclipse. There are a lot of neat things that come in the package for J2EE development. I do look forward, however, for the company to upgrade to RAD 6 (Rational Application Developer) because it is built around Eclipse 3.0, while wsad just uses Eclipse 2.1, but one step at a time, wsad is great whichever eclipse it uses.

Until next time.
Les Martin