As I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, I had trouble installing Fedora Core 5 earlier this week. What I did instead was wipe my machine and install Ubuntu Linux. I have to say I’ve been very impressed! My wireless card didn’t need any messing around with ndiswrapper… Ubuntu detected it and configured it automatically, all I needed to do was input the SSID etc! Now that is progress. I think it’s generally a more polished distribution than Fedora – they’ve obviously put a lot of effort into making it user-friendly. I’ve installed it onto Philippa’s machine and she’s had no problems to date, so that’s a good sign!
So, yes, I’m very happy with Ubuntu so far 🙂
The other thing I wanted to mention is DWR. Now, I’ve mentioned AJAX on here before. I think the stuff you can do with it is really cool. The only problem I had with it with J2EE was on the server-side. I had previously used ARSCIF (a good framework, by the way) to do my remote scripting, but it was a bit fiddly because it used quite a few servlets and I found things started to get a bit untidy.
DWR on the other hand is a bit different. It comes with just one servlet, and you use an XML configuration file to tell it which java classes you want to expose the methods of. When it loads up, it automatically generates the JavaScript that you need to access those methods, all you need to do is write functions to call them / receive the callback. Anyway, long story short — it’s made my life a lot easier!
If you’re involved with AJAX in a J2EE environment, I’d definitely recommend checking it out!
Sorry for the techy nature of this point, normal service shall be resumed soon…
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