About eight or nine years ago, I first read about Java in Wired Magazine. At the time, I was mostly programming in Delphi, C, and, if I really had to, in Oracle Forms. It wasn’t altogether clear what role Java was going to play; any examples you ever saw were applets, doing image animations on a web page. I bought a book that promised to explain it all, but did little else but list the standard libraries api docs. Although over time, more and more people were saying Java was going to be the next great thing, I didn’t have a clue what to do with Java, there & then. (Until 2000, when I did my first web app with Java, with EJB’s, and started wondering why I had ever wanted to be a part of this next great thing).

Right now I’m having a strong feeling of deja vu. This time, it’s about Ruby. Everyone probably knows by now that Ruby is a scripting language, developed nine years ago in Japan, became very popular in the rest of the world in the last year or so. Recurring discussions on TSS revolve around the question if and when Ruby is to be preferred over Java, and if it will be the next great thing. Surely the language looks interesting enough, and so does the web framework, Rails. But in order to really get to know it, I have to use it in a real project, doing real stuff (I have not enough patience or spare time to just code something for the sake of it).

There’s several books written about Ruby, of which Programming Ruby comes recommended by Remco, my local Ruby guru (and by none other than Martin Fowler, I read at Amazon). Until now, I’ve done it the cheap way by reading Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. This free ebook explains the basics of the language in the form of a rather insane story, illustrated with equally wacko comic strips. It tries to offer memory aids through its story for Ruby’s language features. Unfortunately, most of these memory aids are so far-fetched that I’m having trouble remembering _them,_ let alone the language elements they’re supposed to remind me of. But it does make for entertaining reading, offering an easy introducting to Ruby.

The BEA WebLogic Portal netui framework offers a useful method of creating and handling web forms. I’ve come to like how easy they are to use, specially with the Workshop wizards, one of the few advantages of using Workshop. I also like how you can put almost anything in a form class, like an XML bean generated class, and make their fields available on the form using the X-script notation (but why not EL!?). However, in the project I did in 2005 for a client, the time came when we were saying “I wish netui:textBox could do this, and netui:anchor could do that…” And although there’s not much to extend within the realm of JSP’s, tags are a noteworthy exception.

So we started to extend quite a few netui tags. Unfortunately, there was virtually no documentation to be found on this subject on BEA’s site or elsewhere on the Internet. The tag classes do not come with any apidocs either. Therefore, the first step was to decompile the tags we wished to extend, in order to uncover their internal workings. Having done this, I believe there’s no way you’re going to extend these tags without decompiling them. There’s just too much going on inside. Once you’ve figured this out though, it’s fairly easy to add your own stuff.
Continue Reading »