JSF - the learning experience

Since fall when I had my JavaEE course in school I've been hitting seemingly every possible weird little bug in Glassfish's implementation of the JavaEE specification and the SDK's own little bumps and quirks.

It's been so bad that I've thuroughly enjoyed not working with Java at my internship, and I've come to understand why some don't share the love I generally have for Java. Scripting and non-compiled languages are easy and by their very definition light to work with.

But I've learned A LOT these passed 6 moths and it's been tough, but the experience I've gained is incredibly valuable. And where I'm at now, is where it's become really fun again. Even though the error message consists of "EJBException in container" and no reference what so ever to what's triggering it I've learned to identify what's causing it anyway.

My main issue has been with JSF. I'm very biased in that I know other frontend techniques that kicks its hind in all regards - ALL of them - (Imma let you finish but JavaScript has the best frontend of ALL TIME!) and I must have done some things wrong because there are so many things I couldn't get to work for the longest time.

I started out with RequestScoped, moved to SessionScoped master bean of bad practise (just to get it to work) and a turn over with ViewScoped WTF before getting back to RequestScoped again. I still have a bunch of franken-code, but I've gained a much deeper understanding of what I'm doing and how to design a system.

It's been rough, but I wouldn't want to trade this experience for anything in the world.

I walk stronger out from this.

No-fi

I'm starting to feel a bit old fashioned being poor. All my gaming consoles are old, I use pre-paid phone cards because I can't be sure that I have money at the end of the month to pay a subscription, and the pre-paid one charges less. I've always saved up to buy my phones straight, I've never used a partial payment plan for anything because I can't afford the fees attached to them.

So, unless I'm at (someone's) home, at work, or at some place that offers free dirty wi-fi, I don't really have access to the internet (not to mention I sometimes go to the lands of no cellphone coverage). This is incredibly infuriating when I'm looking for apps and services. Everything today requires an internet connection at all times. Developers just assume that everyone have internet available at all time.

For my computer that's usually not an issue, but sometimes the internet does go down and ironically enough, I end up only able to entertain myself with developing because the only things I have that doesn't require an internet connection is NetBeans and my application servers.

Now, I'm totally on board with the philosophy that "we should build for the society we want, not the one we have", but isn't there a limit to that? Cellphones lose coverage all the time. Fiber connections have downtime and not everyone can afford a lot of data (I'm thinking about the countries where you purchase internet by the data amount, be it for your cellphone or your ISP fiber connection). Shouldn't we at least make some services that can re-sync when internet is back on?

I can't even write notes on my phone because the app doesn't have an offline mode where it saves your writings on your phone and syncs it when you do come online. And my calendar? I totally get that you can't update it, but you can sync it at a later time.

It's also pretty ridiculous that the games that don't require an internet connection as they're single player games still needs you to log in to play them. (I'm looking at you Microsoft)

In some cases it makes sense that you don't have an offline mode; like a free to play game financed by ads; you could still make it offlineable, but you don't know if the user is never turning internet on ever again, are you gonna run the same ads forever? How are you gonna track the revenue of the app?

Luckily I do enjoy this ancient tradition of going outside, but that's also the time where I don't have internet access when the purpose of going outside is transporting myself from one place to another, not the leisure thing. You know, those commuting hours when planning your day and writing notes could be pretty handy before you get to work...

The things that noone tells you

Working with JavaEE and JSF through GlassFish has really put my problem solving to the test. My education did not provide me with the information I needed for this task, nor does the documentations or the tutorial/books on the subjects.

It's been a real test for me but I'm not gonna say I regret any of it because by facing all the weirdest bugs and errors I've learned so incredibly much researching how things work. The the kind or errors I've had are the kind where you get one error in the stack trace, but the real error is somewhere entirely else, and it's been ranging from errors on my part in not knowing how things work to nothing I could have done at all because it's a known error in the application server through the documentation being plain wrong about how it works.

JSF rendered html still looks horrid, but reading how it was rendered really solved how to work with JSF for me. Experimenting with code takes time, but it's a great way to learn. My hands are dirty, my legs are knee-deep in the code-mud but I feel great, because I pulled through this far all on my own.

Now, I can focus on the area I know (reasonably well at least); CSS. Someone brew me some tea because I'm going in!

First contact!

I finally fixed my issues with GlassFish and JavaEE (the ones I've had thus far at least) and made it all the way through the stack from frontend JSF to en entry in my database. FINALLY, I can start building for real.

That is all.

(I'm also pretty down with a cough so this success is probably overhyped)

GlassFish hates me

Since November I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with my glassfish; I've updated it, I've changed the eclipse links jars, I've reinstalled everything and now I can't even get it to start. Every time I think I found someone with the same issue as me, the solution that worked for them doesn't work for me. At first I would just get a plain RuntimeException whenever I tried to make a new JDBC resouce in the console, but today booting up, it won't start at all after I installed the updater in NetBeans.

I don't really know what to do newt, I mean; I uninstalled and reinstalled everything but the JDK and JRE. I just wanna code! What is this? I'm not feeling the sysadmin in me today.

Learning through work

At my internship I'm learning a lot getting headfirst into building things in a language I've never touched before. I got to read one chapter of a book on ruby, one chapter of a book on rails and here I am now; building things completely blind. It's fun and I'm learning a lot but I do wish I at least knew the language syntax or some basics about the framework, it would make googling soo much easier.

Today I got neck deep in frontend JavaScript and I can't help but to feel relief to venture into somewhat familiar grounds again (I know JavaScript backend but not so much the frontend parts). I know frontend. Frontend is good to me. (Sorry ruby, I'm sure 'll like you more when I can understand you).

It's a joy to wake up every morning when you get to have so much fun!

Laerning is love, learning is life

The thing I like the most about learning new things is how it widens my knowledge about what i already know. It also gives me new views to bring back to my coding in my "native" language and the other ones I already know.

Today I had fun learning more about GitHub pages by learning Jekyll. I also realized there's project pages, and user pages, which makes it immensely easier to make not just one but several portfolio sites. I can tie my domain name to host my site on Github. That's a lot of fun and very useful to a poor student like me.

Next on my list: Ruby on Rails!

Finding your own worth

Standing before my internship and the last part of my education I'm starting to have a look at the wages and it's turning my head upside down. One wage statistics site shows one wage range while others show a completely. Not to mention the part where you have to somehow estimate how good you actually are. How does one do that?

How does one measure how skilled one is compared to others with nothing to measure against? Against my classmates? But how are they compared to others? And how do I prove my worth?

I think I've arrived at a number I think is reasonable but based on what? I've settled for the strategy that I'll try to aim for that number but I'll accept whatever I get offered. Having a job is more important than worrying about selling myself short.

8/9 and going forward!

I've been rather busy with school and work while trying to find me an internship that's gonna lead to a job and so far it seems like I've had a huge success.

Out of all the courses I've completed so far 8/9 I've got the highest grade in, and the 9th one is a passing grade. I know school and real life are two different things but it still feels good to do well in school. If I can't even do that then how will I manage working with it professionally?

And I did manage to find a company that wants to hire me if all goes well during my internship! Woohoo! They're very nice to me and treat me as an employee already! My hopes are high though I'm also sad that I'm leaving my current company; I really like the company I've worked for the last 7 months.

RESTful APIs and RMM

I was putting my notes together from class about REST APIs to help someone out, but I found out I misunderstood what they needed help with before I finished but after I had written all this so here, enjoy, maybe you'll learn something.

Measuring RESTfulness and creating a HATEOAS REST service.

When you measure RESTfulness we have a scale that’s called Richardson Maturity Model. The scale ranges from 0-3 where 0 is not RESTful and 3 is HATEOAS.

0 on the scale of the RMM is a simple URI with the method in the request. This is the level SOAP is at. It’s not restful.

1 on the RMM scale is when you’re dividing the URIs on a resource level, instead of the URI /API/getAllTheThings we now split the things up in the URI not in the request body; /API/things/thingid, however, we’re still putting the request method in the request body.

2 of the RMM scale is when you’re on top of dividing your URIs on a resource level start using the HTTP protocol’s GET, POST, PUT and DELETE and the appropriate response codes:

100 - Continue

200 OK (it’s common practice to add the text OK to the responsecode) - Everything went well.

404 - File Not Found

418 - I’m a Teapot (and I can’t brew coffee)

500 - Internal Server Error

Pretty much the

• 100 codes are informative,
• 200 codes are success codes,
• 300 codes are for redirects,
• 400 codes are user/client errors and
• 500 are internal server error.

Read more about the different responsecodes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

3 is when you Reach HATEOAS and is the last on the RMM scale. You’re done, your webservice is - in theory - the best thing ever. Have a cup of coffee and high five your colleagues (or cat) and everyone who’s ever gonna use it.

So what is HATEOAS?

HATEOAS stands for:

Hypermedia - You had better look this up; hypermedia, hypertext and the other hypers are by legacy all the hype!

as

the

Engine

of

Application

State

To crudely sum it up; media (text, images, video, audio) is what’s supposed to drive the interaction between the client and server. The idea is to let a client know how to interact with your API without any manual or prior knowledge about the API. Just like how it works when you’re visiting a web GUI; you don’t need to know what URLs will take you to the next part of the website to go there, there’s a link, you click it and you’re there! Click here for free pictures of kittens!

Here’s a non HATEOAS JSON response from the API at the URL /API/messages/17

{

   “ID”: 17,

   “message”: “I love pie.”,

   “created”: “2015-10-12T10:25:00.000”,

   “author”: “25”

}

That’s the object of information that I wish to retrieve. But it really doesn’t say anything about the rest of the API.

This is a response from an API qualifying for HATEOAS:

{

    “ID”: 17,

    “message”: “I love pie.”,

    “created”: “2015-10-12T10:25:00.000”,

    “author”: “25”,

    “links”: [

        {

            “href”: “/API/messages/17”,

            “rel”: “self”

        },

        {

            “href”: “/API/messages/17/comments”,

            “rel”: “comments”

        },

        {

            “href”: “/API/profiles/25”,

            “rel”: “author”

        }

    ]

}

This response offers the information the client/user need to orient themselves while using the API.

But wait, there’s more!

Let’s say we’ve been good devs and made an API with a URI to the messages, the individual resource of a message, the profiles, the profile of the author, the comments and the individual comment like so:

/API/messages/
/API/messages/{nn}

/API/messages/{nn}/comments/

/API/messages/{nn}/comments/{nn}

/API/profiles/

/API/profiles/{nn}

Of course all of these maps back to the resources and objects in the code. How would we do with them HTTP methods in the requests?

/API/messages/ is the URI

Learning illustrator

Since it's about time that I make myself a CV to hand out to the companies I hope will wanna hire me full-time as a junior dev I thought I'd learn Illustrator.

This is how it's going:

Now that I have a screen that's actually larger than an A4 paper, dafuq man?

Things I wish someone had told me.

If you're new to Java or programming in general, here are a few things that I wish someone had told me before I figured it out the hard way:

Databases are server software. If you're making a desktop application, do mot use databases to store information; write to a file if there's something you wish to save. Most databases don't hide inside your jar/application and get installed along with your application; you'll have to tell the user to download, install and set them up so that your application can access them. It's just not how you get your application running...

By all means, use JOOQ over Hibernate when you're getting it on with a ORM framework for your application, but make sure that you NEVER EVER EVER EVER forget that whatever folder you set JOOQ up with will be completely cleansed of any files not generated by JOOQ. This includes your own personalized record objects.

If you're using maven, the code in the POM where you'll be putting your  JOOQ generation file will look something like this:

<target>
    <packageName>com.company.projectname</packageName>
    <directory>src/main/java</directory>
</target>

 Make sure you change the package name to something like com.company.projectname.jooq or it will remove EVERYTHING in your root project folder.

If you accidentally set JOOQ up with your project root, you'll be glad to have read the next point:

Taking your time to interrupt yourself to commit your work to git may feel annoying and distracting; it's breaking your flow! But I promise you, IT'S WORTH IT! Whenever something's running as it should, tests come back OK and all of that, commit it! If all hell breaks loose because JOOQ was set to your root folder, you'll be thanking yourself! Not to mention the even more important thing; it will ease tracking your own code. Git offers you the amount of control to even commit single lines inside of your files. Use it! Because one day you'll be looking at your commit dumps and wonder when the heck you changed what that is now bugging your code apart. It will happen.

Learn to version your code from day one. Just do it.

Don't ignore project structures, thread safety, unit testing, Dependency Injection (DI), multi-layering your architecture, proper class separation, separation of concerns or  how to avoid side effects. As soon as you can, you need to star learning how to implement these things. They matter, they are important and you will thank yourself for learning it the right way straight away, not after you learned how to code the thickest pasta github has ever seen. You're a programmer, not a chef.

For now the last, but not least, advice I have for you:

The programming communities are very helpful and as long as you're aware of the fact that the help they give you is incredibly invaluable and something they give you for free. Demanding help is gonna get you about as much help as stabbing yourself in the middle of a forest will give you.

Happy coding everyone!

Fortunate one!

I haven't written much here lately as I've been pretty busy as I managed to land a job which I work at while I study. It eats all of my time but I'm very happy and fortunate. Working while I study is kinda exactly what I thought it would be; I'm learning so much! So many things I never thought existed! I'm not doing as much Java as I'd hoped but what does it matter when I get to learn and try so much other things that are so much fun!

I've only been a developer for 9 months and it's yielded so much for me and I feel incredibly lucky and happy. I earn money on my hobby! On what I love to do!

Now if you excuse me, I have lots to learn so enjoy this random quote:

Teach a man to google and he'll be developing for life. Teach a man to have you google it for him, and you'll be googling for him for the rest of his life.

Bashing people for not using Linux is like bashing people for living in apartments

First off, let's start with everything that's great about houses and linux;
There's a lot of freedom. A LOT of freedom. You can remodel and build whatever you want in it. Want a second kitchen? BAM! Just build one and you got one! You can hire any contractor you want for whatever job you want, you're not restricted by your landlord. You can be as noisy as you want, you're not dependent on anyone else but yourself. There are no secret processes going on that you aren't aware of unless you chose to stay ignorant. Most people who know what they're doing would probably prefer to live in a house.

Hardware limitations transfer to your property's limitations; there may be restrictions about adding little huts or building out your house, but within the limitations, you can do whatever you want, and that is a lot more than when you live in an apartment.

Sometimes it can even be a lot cheaper to live in a house than in an apartment. But if you have to build a house, learning Linux takes time, and time is money. Ubuntu is like a module house or a suburban terrace.house. It's a little bit easier to live in and maintain, but it's still a house. You don't spend as much time building it. But you also loose a little of your freedom. Not to mention, nobody is going to fix things for you. There's no landlord to call about that dripping tap or the hole in your roof. You are your own boss here for the better and worse.

Apartments, like windows and macOS are easily available; they often come with your device, just like apartments are a natural part of a city, whereas houses usually are a bit away from the city core or any city for that matter. There are a lot more options where software translates to stores and services; the demand is higher and therefor the supply. They're cheap, you don't build anything really. With the landlord's permission you may be able to remodel your kitchen, but why would you? When the time comes, the landlord will do that for you. Things run smoothly, but you don't have that freedom you would have in your own house.

For some people, getting a house or a Linux computer is equally hard; there may not be houses where they need to live and if you don't have anyone to help you learning Linux, some might not be able to learn it at all.

For the mass who want the conveniences that a city gives you, an apartment is the best choice. And it only makes sense that an architect or property owner knows how the apartments work in order to develop them. Even if you live in a house, you'll probably still at least have an office in the city.

Sure, houses do have their own services too; you'll find a local store that has the essentials, but it's far from all the luxury you would have wanted. If enough people buy houses in your area, then of course the supply of services becomes greater too, but eventually, they'll tear down the houses and build apartments there too as it becomes a city rather than a village.

Linux is not bad, I love Linux, but it just doesn't make any sense to me to bash people just for using a certain OS. When you know your shit, Linux is awesome! But if you don't know your shit, if you can't build whatever you need when there's no supply of it, you're kinda doomed.

I do agree however that every developer should try to have at least one Linux machine, or a dual boot. Just like I do kind of believe that every developer should own a device running the OS they are developing. Unix is great to learn! But not everyone is capable of building their own house from the very basics.

Relationship blogging

private class SignificantOther implements Adorable {
        private void adorable(IceCream nom){
            nomNom(nom);
        } 
}

private class Me implements Weak{
        public IceCream give(){
            IceCream nom = Cupboard.get("IceCream");
            return Nom;
       }
}

Working hard or hardly working?

Well, I'd say I've been working hard lately. I've learned so much and things are becoming increasingly fun. Not to mention that I just started shallowly network for a job, and it's been way over my expectations result wise. I've been to two interviews for one company and I met one guy who wants to help me network with his contacts. And all this without showing a single line of code. We've talked code though, a lot of code. I love talking about code, but not as much as actually coding. And that is why I want to start working!

Also, the idea of having a job brings me one step closer to having the money to get me my optimization coding machine 3000:

Yes, it's a big thermos. 2,5L should be enough until about lunch.

Working hard

How I feel working on this project:

But hey, I made a log in window so I've got that thing going for me which is nice...

Testing the limits!

Yesterday I spent 13h sending a nice message to as many of my facebook friends as I could fit into that time-frame. I made a lot of people happy, which made me happy.

I feel the exact opposite right now.

I'm suffering from a really, really low self-confidence. It takes so much to make me believe that I'm actually kinda sorta not sucky at something. Programming kinda made me feel that way. I haven't written much here lately because I've just been so busy trying to keep my head above the water in school because what we've been doing in school is nothing. The "teachers" I've had have been so inadequate that going to school felt like a gigantic waste of time. I've been in need of a lot of tutoring from the nice guys at StackOverflow. They've been really kind to me and taught me so much.

But right now I feel like the dumbest person on earth. Nothing has worked for me today; the tabpane doesn't resize vertically even though I've set everything properly (what is it I'm missing?!), I had to reinstall MySQL, I can't get cygwin to move into the Program Files directory and I've manage to really test the patience of my really kind and helpful internet friends.

I don't even know what a project like the one I'm trying to build is supposed to look like. I've been reading so much SQL theory that I feel like I should know this already, but I haven't got a clue on where to even begin to put it into practice.

I'm sorry, but I just needed to write that. I hope I'll feel better soon. I'd like to think that something good always happen after something bad.

One can dream, right?

It would be nice if I could manage to get a job working with Java already; I love coding and it feels like I will learn more and become a better coder if I get to go out into the real deal business. I'm going to a gathering on thursday and I've been toying with the idea of making a website for myself to have something to show myself off with.

It would be nice indeed if someone thought I was of the right material to hire or train through a paid internship...

So the design I've worked up so far looks something like this:

"For dummies" is not for dummies

And it's definitely not for smarties either. I'm reading a book out of the series "for dummies" and it really baffles me how bad this book is. I already kinda have an idea about what the subject is about, and I know most of the best practices for the tasks described in them.

If you are struggling with a subject and want to learn more about it, do not buy a "for dummies" book. It will only make you feel more dumb and confused than you already are. And it's NOT because the book is overly complicated; it's just poorly written.

I've just shifted through 40 pages of utter and pure bull that won't teach you anything and has little to no relevance for the subject you're studying. It includes a role-play and a long rant of how awesome you're gonna be when you've read this book. It isn't, because following those 40 pages, is a on-and-off continuation of the role-play mixed with bad implementations of the code. They show you some concepts of the subject at hand but never really explain what the red thread for the subject is.

The pedagogy is null.
The facts are null.
Any pattern for the concept is null.

I'm getting an awful lot of NullPointerExceptions from a book that's supposed to to teach patterns, design, and structure.

And that is an issue because the readers the book is targeting can not tell that the information is faulty, that the pedagogy is bad or that it isn't their fault that a book marketed "for dummies" makes them feel more stupid. That's a horrible trait for a book to have, and it strongly discourages people from learning. You shouldn't have to feel that you're too dumb to learn something just because you read a bad book.

The only dummies relating to that book, is the one who let the books be published with such poor and confusing content.