Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Church Website in a Box

I found this at postnuke.

This looks like something I could take on.

Church Website in a Box (CWIAB)

Should One Learn Java?

Java jobs easy to find; skills hard to come by

Training good programmers could prove to be Java's Achilles' heel

By Christie Vincent, ITworld.com

Summary
Analysts predict that demand for Java programmers will continue to grow at an impressive rate, led by Java's cross-platform and productivity features. Java, however, may be a victim of its own success as training bottlenecks raise costs and lower quality.

My take away soundbites:

""Java's background contains a lot of features from C and C++. Therefore, it's easier for C developers than Visual Basic developers to learn it," he said.

In fact, Feiman's research at Gartner indicates that C++ programmers are more likely to succeed in learning the new language, and they do so more quickly."

"Gartner's Feiman pointed out that trainers might have more ready success teaching some developers to be casual Java developers rather than professional Java developers. Learning object-oriented design and analysis, Web architecture, and application server design -- not just the Java language syntax -- takes more time, he said."

The rest of the story:

here.

What is XML binding?

"Answering a question about operation on the web (also closing an earlier action item from the [redacted] visit), [redacted] explained that use of an XML binding will enable us to use STEP files on the web. Several team members from industry are currently doing this. To be completely accurate, according to STEP part 28, since Express is the only language complex enough to handle the hierarchical structure of the 3-D Model, we need to use an XML binding on an Express based model."

What is XML binding?

Partial answer:
Use XML data binding to do your laundry

Explore JAXB and Castor from the ground up

By Sam Brodkin

Summary
The double buzz phrase "Java and XML" has been in the spotlight for a while now. Many programmers have realized that by using XML as a data format, they can make both their Java programs and their data cross-platform. These same programmers have also experienced severe headaches while writing and maintaining XML parsing and attribute validation code. Recent innovations in XML data binding, or mapping XML documents to Java objects, provide the headache remedy. XML data binding lets you seamlessly program with normal Java objects that represent your XML documents. This is much more luxurious than writing that grueling XML parsing code. What's more, instead of your Java program, a DTD (document type definition) or an XML Schema can maintain all your data validation rules. Think lazy: this validation stuff could become the responsibility of the XML expert in your office -- and not of the overworked Java programmer. In this article, Sam Brodkin walks you through two frameworks for generating Java classes automatically from XML data constraints: Sun's Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) and Castor from the Exolab Group. Then he shows you how easy it is to use these classes in a test program that washes his socks. (2,800 words; December 28, 2001)

The rest of the story
rest of the story

Future archive xml