DWR has just had cool contribution from InfoQ. As part of the development of InfoQ Alexandru created a neat tie-in for WebWork that allows you to execute part of a WebWork action using DWR. The integration was fairly easy before, but it is even easier now.

InfoQ have used DWR for part of their user interface which is neat. I've got lots of examples of DWR being used in large internal projects - it's nice to see it being used in more large public projects too.

I've also noticed that dzone - the new site from JavaLobby is also using DWR for their Digg like voting system.

Responses[2]

Posted by Joe Walker on 29 June 2006 08:31:39 BST #

1. I learnt that Retroweaver actually works. Retroweaver tweaks your JDK5 compiled classes to make them work on JDK1.4. The JavaPosse had some doubts about it a while ago, but James Strachan and Geert Bevin love it. I'm thinking that DWR v2 will probably adopt this and drop the support for JDK 1.3. Please shout now if you need us to keep JDK 1.3 support.

2. I learnt that red wine and light blue t-shirts don't mix. Sorry Nathalie.

3. I learnt that OCAML is interesting language to teach your brain new tricks. Bruce Tate was talking Ruby up, as expected, and saying that programmers should learn a new language on a regular basis to keep on their toes. However I spent the flight home chatting to Alan Sexton who convinced me to take a look at OCAML and a better mind stretching exercise.

4. I learnt that a simple "hola" (hello) makes a big difference in Spain. I'm not great at foreign languages - I can get by in French, but only badly. I got an extra legroom seat on the flight home for nothing. It's either because the girl at the check-in was magnetically attracted to my rugged good looks, or because I smiled and said Hola. Anyone that has actually seen my rugged good looks will agree that Hola makes a big difference.

5. I learnt that continuations and closures still confuse lots of people. They are very different. Continuations are when you freeze a thread and serialize the stack to be re-run later. Closures are functions that can be assigned to variables where the functions can refer to variables in the enclosing scope. Nothing to do with each other, but often confused.

6. I learnt that it is a real shame industry and academia doesn't mix more. I can't see much in the Ajax world coming out of academia just because the Ajax world is spinning so fast, but there are some brains there that could certainly teach us a thing or two.

7. I learnt that many top universities still don't teach copyright/patent law as a mandatory part of their courses. This is a huge hole. How can you be a good programmer without knowing the basics of what ideas you can copy from others and when?

Responses[2]

Posted by Joe Walker on 26 June 2006 11:53:07 BST #

The cutting edge of DWR development is being presented at SpringOne this week, and frustratingly I can't get there to hear it; Bram has been working on getting DWR v2 working with Spring 2 namespaces.

The idea is that you'll be able to configure DWR easily from within a Spring beans.xml file which should make configuration from Spring much easier. I'm sure Bram will blog his slides when he is done, and you can download a preview of DWR 2.0 milestone 3 here.

Update: Bram's slides are now available. The really cool slide is this one:

<beans>

  <bean id="ajaxFacade" class="com.interface21.springone.AjaxFacade">
    <dwr:remote javascript="AjaxFacade"/>
    <property name="autoSuggestService" ref="autoSuggestService"/>
  </bean>

  <dwr:configuration>
    <dwr:createtype="new" javascript="AjaxHelper"
        class="com.interface21.springone.AjaxHelper"/>
    <dwr:converttype="bean"
        class="com.interface21.springone.data.Person"/>
  </dwr:configuration>

  <dwr:controllerid="dwrController" debug="true"/>
  ...

</beans>

Responses[1]

Posted by Joe Walker on 14 June 2006 23:00:53 BST #