Via  Rob Connery Interviewed by Miguel de Icaza, I took a quick look at SubSonic, which appears to be a good solution in the ASP.NET world for very rapidly generating Create-Retrieve-Update-Delete functionality pages that honor database foreign keys.

One of the dazzlers in the Ruby world is a library called ActiveRecord, which powers similar functionality within Ruby on Rails. If you're lucky enough to be starting with a new database, you can generate "scaffolding" to edit your tables in a matter of quarter-hours. (As Steve Jones says in CRUD is Crap, that such functionality is considered dazzling in the year 2007 is an indictment of our toolsets, but nonetheless.)

Any client-facing application almost instantly moves beyond scaffolding, but I've been reminded recently of the need for rapid data-editing / cleaning in any large application but especially in SOAs, with data continuously flowing into the system boundaries. Garbage-in, garbage-out is a big problem in SOAs.

Two downsides of ActiveRecord are that:

• Foreign key relationships must be manually inserted, and
• It's naming conventions can be tough to overcome when using a legacy DB

These seemingly minor issues can be significant when you're dealing with an enterprise-sized database with several hundred tables. Whether SubSonice addresses these issues, I don't know, but I look forward to adding it to my arsenal.

Tablet Input in Java

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

10:06 AM

Turns out that, contrary to what I'd feared, the Tablet Input Panel for the Tablet PC does recognizes SWT components as text labels, and you can use the TIP to add recognized handwriting to a Java/SWT application:

So now, the challenge of programming forms in Java for the Tablet PC reduces to the problem of setting the TIP context dynamically from Java so that you can command it to bias the handwriting towards the expected entry type (a date or a phone number or what-have-you). The difficulty with that is that as far as the TIP is concerned, all java.exe executables look alike. So I'll have to figure out some way, within Java, to register for a  callback when the TIP gets activated. Then, use JNI to set the TIP context. Stay tuned…

Download: Table Input in Java.one

The WMPlayer10SDK does not contain the expected primary interop assembly (PIA) so that Windows Media Player can be programmed from .NET languages such as Visual Basic and C#. The WMP 9 SDK puts a PIA in the /redist directory. However, the WMP10 SDK can be programmed in a managed language: you can just copy the files AxInterop.WMPLib.dll and Interop.WMPLib.dll from the /samples directory. Or, you can still download the WMP9SDK and use the old PIA.

Okay, hopefully this post now contains enough keywords to be found via search engines...