I’m John C Bland II

Husband, Father, Tech Author, Deacon.
Founder ofย Katapult Media, and full-stack polyglot developer.
Political Free Agents Podcast Host.

I create. I launch.

YouTube Channel

I post regular fun on YouTube like me playing the bass and anything else I find fun.ย 

Get Something Built

All project work goes through Katapult Media. Business is open. Let’s chat.

BlazeDS SVN Repo

In case you were wondering how to get involved with BlazeDS development, grab a Subversion client and checkout this repo: “https://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/blazeds/trunk”:https://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/blazeds/trunk or just click on that link to look through the repo in the browser.

I suggest reading a bit more about the repo here: “https://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/Source”:https://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/Source. They suggest not checking out entire repo…just trunk. “Warning: You probably don’t want to check out the entire blazeds directory, as you’ll get every branch and tag, each of which is comparable in size to the trunk.”

Spring’ing my Flex via BlazeDS

Spring+Flex+BlazeDS = NICCCCCCCCCE, seriously. First, “Spring”:https://www.springframework.org is a pretty nice approach to Java development. Couple Spring with “Velocity”:https://velocity.apache.org/ and you can do some pretty quick web work. Anyways…I’m talking Flex here…not Velocity. ๐Ÿ™‚

So, I struggled BIG TIME getting this thing to work. Java has this insane idea that you need to configure everything (hehe)! Configuring Java/Spring/BlazeDS whooped my tail today. I finally got it and it seemed most of my problems were due to me missing a few jar’s in my /WEB-INF/lib folder.

Anyways…I got it working and I am officially Springing my Flex. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Here are a few code snippets of why this is a nice approach.

In my DAO I have a method (let’s call it foo) that returns a List. To query the database I setup in my applicationContext.xml and return the List, I simple do the following:

bq. return getJdbcTemplate().queryForList(“select * from mytable”);

My DAO is extending JdbcDaoSupport so it takes care of a few things for me. That’s pretty easy huh? That is almost as easy as ColdFusion queries. It gets a bit more hairy when you have to build a query string but that is expected.

You will DEFINITELY hear more from me about Flex+Spring via BlazeDS. My next task (after finishing this app) is to build a messaging app to showcase how sweet it is to push content to my Flex app vs my Flex app asking for content.

Stay tuned…

Java: HelloWorld++

That’s right…I wrote a Java app and extended HelloWorld with HelloWorld++. I introduce you to…the newest version of HelloWorld…in Java. {insert dramatic music}

bq. package com.llnw.training;
/**
*
* @author johnb
* @version 1.1
*/
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args){
System.out.print(“Hello World”);
if(args.length > 0){
System.out.print(“\nand hi ” + args[0]);
}
}
}

Hooah! ๐Ÿ™‚ Ok…this isn’t my first, per se. I built HelloWorld first then HelloWorld++ was the v1.1. hehe.

Some serious/full posts will come soon (post-training).

Busy, Busy, BUSY / Java here I come!

*Busy, Busy, BUSY*
Work has been great but good Lord!! Having to come home and work on remaining client projects and two other business I’m part owner in has been HECTIC! Anyways…to lighter topics. ๐Ÿ™‚

*Java here I come!*
At work we’re moving to Java (from PHP) for numerous reasons but from what I understand we already have some Java stuff floating around. So, here I come Java!

Now, we (UI Dev team) do have a few standing jokes about going to Java but I have had to admit my heightened interest in learning it. Here are a couple reasons why:

#) ColdFusion is Java. As most of you know, I’m a ColdFusion lover. Knowing Java means I can easily start leveraging Java where CF may be lacking. For example, in CF7 you couldn’t “natively” manipulate images so some people built some libraries which harnessed the Java image api(s).
#) Eclipse is built on Java. I want to do numerous things to improve my Flex Builder experience and knowing Java means I can now fulfill my wish(es). ๐Ÿ™‚
#) Adding Java to my knowledge-base means I will have the 4 major backends under my belt: .NET, ColdFusion, PHP, and Java.

I could probably drum up a few more reasons but I said a couple then gave 3 so I’ll stop there. ๐Ÿ˜€

Anyways…I’ve been a bit silent (on blogging, that is) but no worries…I have a lot to say. ๐Ÿ˜‰ Stay tuned.