Still wicked busy...

I've been putting off posting to this blog longer and longer, and I really dislike doing that. The subject of today's post is more a rant than anything else. I've had to switch off dealing with projects that use Spring WebFlow for the moment and switch back to reporting, which means that I've had to deal with JasperReports and iReport again. This time it means looking into the Charting capabilities of iReport, and from what I'm seeing, they're so piss-poorly documented by everyone (including the people who make it) as to be a pointless and useless feature. I'd kill for a good tutorial on it right now, but the fact remains that there's nothing useful out there. At best there's a couple tutorials that scratch the surface, and don't lend themselves to any practical implementation. Ok, bitching done. I'll start coming out with much more useful posts in future, most notably with code and examples to hopefully fill the gap that is a lot of the internet as far as I see it when it comes to development.

Go with the flow

I've recently discovered the joy that is Spring WebFlow. For those not in the know, it's a Java web component specifically meant for the C in MVC (Model-View-Controller architecture). It allows you to declaratively define logical flows of information within an XML file, define a few Java beans to fit into the flow, and combine them all together to get your work done in a very short amount of time. Does my description sound kind of high level, abstract, vague, airy-fairy ? Well, then that description goes pretty well with Spring WebFlow (SWF) because SWF abstracts a LOT of gory details. I'll go into detail on it in a later post, I just thought that I'd bring it up now because I'm super busy at the moment, haven't posted anything in a while, and thought that I should.