Interviewed On TheServerSide
May 23rd, 2007
Archive
Archive for May, 2007
Getting involved with microcredits
May 8th, 2007
Recently, I ran across Kiva.org, a site that allows people throughout the world to loan money to people in developing areas. Loan amounts are typically small, around $25, and can go towards things like buying sewing machines for an embroidery business, or to allow a shoe seller to expand inventory.
I’m not a fan of simply giving to charities because I have little idea where the money goes or how it’s spent. (After walking past a United Way office on Long Island to see a parking lot full of luxury cars, I have a rough idea where that money goes.) Microcredits provide the poor with necessary capital to develop businesses and become, hopefully, self-sufficient.
Kiva.org works with agencies on the ground to ensure people requesting funds are actual or potential business owners, and provide a way to monitor repayments. Kiva.org also claims a 100% repayment rate. Of course, microlending is almost always unsecured, but the repayment data is encouraging.
If this is something you’ve considered, I’d encourage you to look at Kiva’s FAQ and see you’re interesting in becoming a lender.
Wicket Component Tour: RadioGroup
May 7th, 2007
The next component in the Wicket Component series is the RadioGroup. This is component isn’t exactly obvious, especially if you’re new to Wicket.
Wicket Component Tour: DropDownChoice
May 3rd, 2007
Coming from a Struts background, select lists were always incredibly painful to deal with. The first in a new series of posts on Wicket components presents a more elegant way to deal with select lists from the Wicket perspective: DropDownChoice.
Web Services with XFire
May 1st, 2007
A recent project required several web services implemented in a very brief timeframe, and they had to be SOAP-based. REST wasn’t an option. Since I’m not a fan of SOAP, I looked for a framework that would insulate me from having to deal with too many of the messy details. A past project used Axis and it was less than enjoyable to work with, so I decided on XFire.
Admittedly, I started using XFire because it wasn’t Axis. After about a day of reading and creating test code, I was comfortable enough with XFire to start developing the application services. Spring-managed and JSR-181 equipped, I had functional services in a few hours, and delivered a huge chunk of the required functionality in just a few days. Support on the mailing list is pretty good, but IRC support (irc.codehaus.org#xfire) is really the best place to get help.
If XFire has any problems, it’s the documentation. Documentation exists, but it’s often tough to find what you’re looking for. For instance, I need to use my services to transfer files and XFire has something called MTOM to support transfers, but I really don’t know what it does or how it works. The documentation just says that it’s there and how to turn it on. The distribution ships with some examples, but they’re under-documented. Even with some problems with documentation, just writing some services with XFire and seeing what happens is really enough to figure out how to use the framework.
XFire also provides a nice utility to generate SOAP clients based on a WSDL. I’ve only run it through Ant, but it also has Maven support. The client classes require Java5 since they utilize the JSR-181 annotations.
As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of SOAP, but XFire made creating a few dozen web services almost enjoyable.