Well, a little news on my career

I am finishing with my current company in two weeks time, and heading back to a company I worked at before. Things just did not work out where I currently am, the company is a little too small, and seem reluctant to change their processes more towards those of a software house. My obsessive compulsive tendencies towards quality, are not shared by anyone else in the company it seems. They are a little too obsessed with what is shiny in the world...

I am looking forward to working with the new team, several of whom I know well, and to the challenges in the department. I will be taking with me several tools from my tool box, including Wicket, Brix, Maven, but hope to leave behind in large part Java, which I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with. I feel the JVM is still the way forward, but in order to compete with trends and the evolution of other languages I need to ditch Java.

Currently it seems that Scala does much of what I need to do, and my next step may even be to use the features of the language itself to enable me to drop all of those frameworks that the inadequacies of Java forced me to use.

More information sometime soon...

Getting involved with a newish project, Brix-CMS

Continuing my interest in all things Wicket, some months before Christmas I found an open source project called Brix CMS, currently hosted on Google Code. It seemed like a more agile fit for my needs regarding content driven websites, with high value placed on componentisation. Additionally the project owners are committers for Wicket, and have put a very well organised framework together in Brix, easily extensible, and very powerful.

I have bashed some sites together using Brix already for a range of clients for my company, and have been pleasantly surprised with how I have been able to apply the framework to so many different domains.

It is early days yet, but the discussion lists are picking up a little, and the roadmap looks promising. As a tool, it certainly fits my needs so I will be following it with great interest. Documentation is sparse but improving, and much of what you need to do to extend Brix is fairly intuitive.

Leveraging Wicket and Jackrabbit seems to provide such power and flexibility, I find it hard to go back to the ways of JSF or even worse Servlets and XSLT as some of my company's projects use. Cocoon with XSLT yes, Servlets with XSLT please no... no... no.

I am having a little difficulty getting my head around integration testing with Brix, the ability to test wicket pages in isolation is something I am missing, but hopefully I will find a way.