the corner office

Right, so, a techie ramble is long overdue. As I mentioned, I'm playing with some new stuff at work. My main new thrill is Spring. All I ever knew about Spring before was that it (a) relied heavily on Dependency Injection, (b) was decried for being XML intensive, and (c) featured in a very large percentage of job adverts.

I like it. I like the DI approach to things - not necessarily because it's the only virtuous way of putting together large systems, but because it makes life easier in all sorts of ways. If you've ever battled with rigging up mock objects for a test environment, you know that it's a helluva lot cleaner than the alternatives.

Spring has had a few other nice surprises for me. It's a gentle introduction to pain-free AOP. I've always considered AOP to be intellectually interesting but not very practical for a lazy lay developer - in terms of esoteric tooling, and limited adoption. Spring is powerful and entrenched enough that it solves both those problems. Spring's JDBC support is also great. I've tried my best to like Hibernate, and I know it's incredibly powerful if you're willing to submit to the Hibernate way, but I'm still happiest cranking out SQL statements and knowing exactly when I'm hitting the database and why. Spring takes out a lot of the drudgery and housekeeping, which is a real time-saver.

On the home front, I'm still plodding on with Eclipse RCP development, mainly adding bits and pieces to our home budgeting app. I spent a bit of time moving parts of it over to Swing using Matisse4MyEclipse, but in the end I gave up. I liked Matisse4MyEclipse and I'd gladly recommend it for working with Swing - but I reached the point where I had to admit to myself that no matter how convenient and powerful the tooling, I just don't like Swing. It's mainly an aesthetic thing, I'll admit, and I wouldn't call myself an SWT/JFace fan, but the only Java app I spend a significant amount of time using is Eclipse, so go figure.