BangBits

While preparing to do a backup recently, I realized that I had over 2GB in 110.000 files which was the result of either an Ant build or Maven target. It occured to me that with Maven especially, this is nothing more than garbage to keep around, since Maven will copy the artefacts to its /.m2 folder anyway! In a previous blog entry , I explained how to mount a RAM-drive on Ubuntu and use it as a development folder for much higher performance in the compile-test-run cycle. I have to admit, I don't use this for each and every project since it's a little complex and fragile. But there's an interesting compromise to be had here. It turns out it is possible to instruct Maven to build artefacts to a RAM-drive. That way you not only gain some performance but also some automatic "garbage collection" in that by the next boot, you will have no traces of these build steps laying around. It would also be a very healthy thing to do if you're running from of an SSD drive, wh...

While I like the idea of a component based web framework, JSF never really felt right to me. There are too many pitfalls and the whole programming model (even with the use of Facelets) feels cumbersome and more complex than necessary. I could probably write up a detailed list of reasons for why I think JSF is the least productive and fun web frameworks of those I know, but that is not the purpose of this blog post. Suffice to say this appears to be a shared sentiment . This post addresses only JSF's focus on server state and the associated overloaded POST aspect. The problem of state All programs that does anything remotely interesting, needs to keep some kind of state. In web applications, there are really only two places to put state and that is either on the server or on the client. Because HTTP itself is stateless, most frameworks stores state on the server in a session that is allocated the very first time a unique user visits. This is done either through an associated cookie ...