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I’ve just started working on a fairly small web application project that uses Struts as its web framework. I like Struts, its fairly simple to use and covers just about everything I need for my application. Since I’m now using NetBeans 5 Beta 2 ( eventually !), I though I would have a read of Geertjan’s series of articles on how to use Struts with NetBeans. These are good articles if you are new to Struts or want to see how NetBeans handles Struts development. However, since I’ve used Spring in the past, Geertjan’s method of grabbing database connections seems odd. I’m not detracting in any way from the series of articles (which are great) which are intended to discuss struts development with NetBeans – this is more of a problem I have with Struts. Once you get into the rhythm of using DI, it seems strange going back to explicitly setting things up. For example datasources – injecting datasources directly into DAOs is one of the best things that I like about Spring and somethin...

There has been a lot of talk recently about the demise of Struts. Its true that there haven’t been any major developments recently on the core product. However looking at the most popular blogs on Javablogs.com today shows that there is still a huge interest in Struts. 5 out of the top 6 read blogs are relating to the merger of Struts and WebWork. Maybe everyone just finds this an interesting story, or maybe they just want to read about products that they used to use, or maybe people are still using Struts and are interested in what the future will bring ;) . Whatever your point of view, this is interesting news.

If you’ve read my blog before (you do read it don’t you!), you’ve probably noticed that I tend to talk about JBoss and NetBeans quite a bit. I like the JBoss Application Server and use it for all my J2EE deployments, and use NetBeans for Java development whether this is J2EE or Swing development using Matisse. JBoss has just created a new forum "for discussing the development of J2EE applications for JBoss with the NetBeans IDE". The new forum can be found on the JBoss website.

Norman Richards has done a small review of the JBoss at Work book just released by O’Reilly. Reading this review, and looking at the Table of Contents , I like the sound of this book and will be buying it – unfortunately, Amazon currently says its out of stock.

I read this blog recently and thought, "yes, that’s true". I’ve seen a lot of code that has resource leaks because programmers don’t properly close database connections. This is one of the most compelling reasons to use something like Spring’s database classes – they remove the boilerplate code for you and make using JDBC just that little bit easier. If you don’t want to use Spring, then its not too difficult to write a couple of library methods that will close all database connections correctly.

I’m trying to download the latest beta of NetBeans , but unfortunately I think many other people are also. I’m currently only getting 3KB/sec. Looks like there’s a very high demand for this new beta, so I’d recommend waiting a while before trying to download.

I see that NetBeans 5.0 Beta 2 has been released . I’ve found the first beta to be very stable apart from a few issues with the new GUI builder. I’ll be downloading the new beta shortly to see how it fares. Apparently over 1880 bugs have been fixed since beta 1. That’s some going. Congratulations to the Netbeans team.

Tip of The Day on devx.com shows how comparing strings is different in C# and Java. One to remember for developers using both languages.