Frameworks frameworks, everywhere.
I finally got around to reading Rod Johnson's Introduction to the Spring Framework on The Server Side and that inspired me to read the Rod Johnson interview. I also read Patrick Peak's Dueling IoC post comparing the Inversion of Control support in the Spring and WebWork2 frameworks and some interesting comments on Matt Raible's Web Frameworks - which one should I learn post. Looks like there are some very useful things in Spring, but without actually using it, it's hard to tell whether Spring is a cohesive and elegant framework, or a hodge-podge of book examples and helper code for AOP, IoC , MVC, and JDBC. It did, after all, start out as example code for the book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Spring deserves further study and because Springs features can be used a la carte (as demonstrated by the days old Struts Spring project), learning about Spring could pay off even for existing applications.
With schemas and everything!
I also read Mark Pilgrim's excellent new XML.com column The Atom API. The column reviews the history of weblogging APIs and then provides details of the new Atom API. The article makes it pretty clear that the Atom API is a better solution than the XML-RPC based Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. It is easier to implement and it takes advantage of XML features like namespaces and schema. Atom is simple and elegant, yet it remains SOAP compatible; a great example of a web services API.
In other weblogging tech news, two competing proposals for website newfeed discovery have appeared: FDML from Sam "it's just data" Ruby and friends and shortly after that myPublicFeeds.opml from Dave "it's just an outline" Winer. These proposed standards could be pretty useful to sites like Java.blogs that aggregate multiple blogs and JRoller which host a community of blogs.
Fishies.
I spent a lot of time last week painting fishies and even more bubbles. I might just have to bid on the table myself.
<img src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/fishies.jpg" alt="fish that I painted" /> <img src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/fishtable.jpg" alt="fish that I painted" />Any similarity to Disney characters past, present, and future is purely coincidental.