Skip to main content

AppFuse and Seam

Hmm, I really liked what I saw in Seam, especially the fact that there are so few files in an app :) Basically, I have the view that one big advantage of Rails is that it controls the whole application stack and that is kind of what Seam tried to do as well. So that's the good part.

The bad part is that the application scaffolding does not work as advertised. OK, it's beta, so that's forgivable. But if you look into the Seam forum you find that many people have problems even with the scaffolding example when they try to use their own db's. There is help given in the forum but overall I was a bit put off at this point.

Back to AppFuse I was again shocked just how much code is there already in an essentially empty starter application. So I had to get over that, adjust my mindset not to think about Rails and off I went. I was not very productive, but I got my stuff done in the end (Matt has really done a great job with AppFuse IMO). I guess Spring, Hibernate, etc can be considered outdated, but they work and there is plenty of material, help and tutorials around. And that helped my productivity quite a bit as well.

In case you should try to follow the Seam application scaffolding example take this hint: the Hibernate reverse engineering tool when applied to a medium sized Oracle db is so slow that you will assume it has crashed. Chances are that it has not. In my setup it took around 20 mins to come up with a list of tables. Apart from this abysmal performance on Oracle I like the tool, actually.

Comments

Bassem R. Zohdy said…
I just wanted to point to Grails for you I think it is good for you, as you like rails and want java code.

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan

Running the iTunes genre tagger script with OS X Automator

Due to public demand here's a little recipe how to run last post's mp3 tagger without using the command line on OS X: Open Automator Start a new "Application" project Drag the "Run Shell Script" action into the right workflow panel, set the "pass input" drop-down to "as arguments" and edit the script to (see screenshot below): for f in "$@" do /opt/local/bin/python /Users/michaelmarth/Development/Code/mp3tagger/tag_groupings.py -d "$f" done (you will have to adapt the paths to your local setup) Save the application and happily start dropping mp3 folders onto the application's icon.