World Cup starts tomorrow!
World Cup will be starting in 22 hours time! Although it’s terribly commercialized, but football is football. I think enough people still love the beautiful game. I compare football to programming actually. Both needs experience, flair and a certain passion, and a good piece of code just like a ball well passed and well scored is a marvel on its own. On the flip side, sadly sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have the best skills or the best code, but it’s the scoreline or the final deliverable that matters. No matter if you dived to get a penalty or scrapped by a lucky goal, a goal is still a goal and a match win is all that matters. No matter how well you code, it’s the final product that still matters. You might have coded extremely well but if your software fails to deliver the functionalities, it’s still a failure. You still lose the match.
Still. Not all is lost.
Maybe I’m idealistic but good code is like football well played. It’s not just the accolades you get, but the deep down satisfaction that you have done it and you have done it well and with flair and style. The feeling that you have snubbed the opposition in his face, there you go, take that! The rush and thrill of creating something out of nothing, that you have fought entropy and all its minions dragging you down, and you have won. Something is born, you give life to a piece of code that maybe struggled when it was first born, but the wonder and amazement of creation, still.
Over dramatic? Yah. I suppose it’s the same rush some people get jumping off planes or off buildings with rubber bands tied to their feet. But weird though. I can be such a geek sometimes. Oh well.
Space invaders update
I’ve been bad. I’ve neglected my Space Invaders project for the past few weeks though I did manage to get up to the part where I have a laser shooting out bullets at an array of invaders that bounce off the left and right walls of the screen. They don’t explode yet though — haven’t done the collision detection bit yet.
JSS updates
I have updated JSS considerably and is currently writing a presentation to show the guys in my team. Hope they can appreciate the principles behind JSS — of simplicity in maintenance and transparency in code. Nothing hidden, totally open.
JSS has also been accepted as a incubator project in java.net at https://java-server-scripts.dev.java.net/
I haven’t done much on this though. I’m going to release JSS under MIT license though I originally used Apache internally. Doesn’t make much of a difference really, just which brand to use that’s all. With respect to Ruby on Rails, the original inspiration to JSS, I’ll make this MIT licensed as well.
Why java.net and not Sourceforge? Well … although I’m more familiar with Sourceforge, it’s probably better to host a Java project in java.net, might even get hosting space to run a demo, which would be almost impossible in Sourceforge. Anyway let’s try something different. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll move it to Sourceforge.
There hasn’t been any code release yet, so don’t bother check it out yet. I’ll go slow on releasing JSS, want to use this internally first if possible.
So what’s new in JSS? I can now generate scaffolding like in Rails :) No kidding. It’s probably not the most useful feature in Rails and probably the most disabused but it is certainly one of the most well-known features. Oh, I can’t do the same magic as in Rails, but it’s close (I think). In any case it’s the model that is dragging me down most of the time (not to blame Hibernate but I don’t really see any other alternatives to ActiveRecord in Java).
Generating models is also easier — I can selectively generate models based on certain tables only though it does take a bit of configuration. I’ve also added a lot of jss tags, in fact most of the HTML input fields are covered.
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