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Persistence providers are not all alike
At the NFJS conference I attended over the weekend, I wound up going to two session by Mark Richards. His topic was the JPA specification as part of the overall EJB3 spec. As I’ve mentioned here, I’m quite interested in that. Will and I just finished an introductory EJB3 course for Capstone where I wrote…
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20 days and counting…
In honor of the first Yankees/Red Sox game of the season (okay, pre-season), let me just remind everyone that opening day is only 20 days away. Sweet. Just to prove to myself that my son (Xander, age 14) doesn’t read my blog, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve told him that we’re…
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Playing Games with Martin Fowler
It’s been a very busy week. Will Provost (owner of Capstone Courseware) and I just finished putting together a two-day Introduction to EJB 3.0 course, which took a lot of work, especially because I was teaching a Spring class at the time. That meant late nights and challenges for both of us. I think we…
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Silly Mr. Holland’s Opus question
I recently lucked into another showing of Mr. Holland’s Opus on cable. That movie arguably changed my life and played a major role in my choice of career, but that’s a story for another day. There’s one question that has always bothered me about that movie, though. I thought I’d ask it here, even though…
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Why is @OneToMany so strange?
I’ve been working with EJB3 these days in a big way. I have to say I do like it. One of the reasons is that it’s given me a change to really play with annotations, which I’ve neglected so far. I moved to Java SE 5 some time ago for my regular work. Mostly I…
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Several posts coming soon
I’ve really gotten out of the habit of posting here, but that’s not because I don’t care. It’s mostly because I’m involved in many things at the moment and don’t want to give any of them short shrift in a post. I’ve got to get over that, and I will. The two biggest things going…
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Always trying to make contact
I guess this is more of a Xander story than a holiday story, but it has the benefit of being true and even cheerful. My son Xander (short for Alexander — calling him Xander makes him unique in a crowd full of Alexanders and Alexandras) enjoys playing baseball, but he never had a chance to…
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Web Immortality (or, some things never go away)
I didn’t start out as a software instructor, or even in the IT industry at all. My original career was as a research scientist. My first permanent job was investigating the unsteady aerodynamics of axial turbomachines for United Technologies, the parent corporation of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, among other things. I guess it’s okay…
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Tools vs. Technologies classes
There are two types of training classes… (Okay, mandatory aside: there are two types of people in this world — those who divide people into two categories, and those who don’t. (Variation: there are actually three types of people in this world — those who can count and those who can’t. :))) … classes based on…
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Netbeans marketing?
A few days ago I added a post here about my Eclipse frustrations. Since then I’ve gotten three comments from readers suggesting I move to NetBeans. Now, it’s interesting enough that anybody found this blog at all. I know I have a few regular readers (I’m reminded of the quote from The Big Chill where…