The need to query LDAP directories arises surprisingly rarely for me. As such, each time, I essentially need to relearn how to do this.

I recently contributed to a PHP based project in which LDAP queries would be needed in certain circumstances, once per session. But in the deployment environment, PHP had not been compiled with LDAP support, and I couldn’t ask for this to be updated.

So, I decided to write the needed function in Java, knowing that LDAP support is part of the Java standard libraries and the server we were deploying to was a Solaris machine, so I knew Java would be available. I could then call the Java program from PHP. Clearly, this approach is far from perfect, but its portable and ultimately I felt it was the best way to work within the constraints of the system. And because such queries would only be executed once a session–and only for certain users–the performance hit of this approach was acceptable.

I’d like to talk more about what I expect to be doing this year, which as an experienced developer, might be somewhat interesting. Then, I’d simply like to speculate on how things that are already happening might play out.

Its hard to think of many people more qualified to talk knowledgeably about Web frameworks than Matt Raible, particularly on the Java platform. The slides to his presentation, “Choosing a JVM Web Framework” contain some very interesting comparisons of the competing Java Web frameworks.

So, I’m sitting here learning Ruby and Rails, and a thought starts to emerge: I wonder if I could use things like ActiveRecord separate from Rails for writing command line database maintenance scripts in Ruby, for example? Then I start to see other Rails features that also might be very useful outside of a Web application, and then I start wondering if Rails could be used not just as a Web application framework, but as a general application framework, in the way that some people have used (or at least suggested using) Struts and Spring in the Java world.

It seems in the last few weeks, there has been an especially hot debate around Ruby on Rails (RoR) and Grails. The debate on both sides has been respectful, and most importantly, a lot of good ideas are being exchanged.

If you’ve scanned my blog in the past, you know that I am a big fan of Python and have been obsessed with Django recently, which to date is the most elegantly designed Web framework I have encountered. So far, other than using it on a very small project, I have mostly just been exploring Django and looking forward to using it on a more significant project that’s on my schedule for this summer. Unfortunately, it looks like I won’t be using it on that project after all, and the story behind it, which involves a good deal of office politics and my reasoning as I try to find a way through it, may be of interest to some.

Recently, I was pair programming in Java with a less experienced partner when we came to a point where we needed to ensure that a collection of files was ‘flattened,’ containing no nested directories, in preparation for ingesting those files into a digital preservation system. I recognized it as a problem of recursion and was prepared to begin constructing a unit test for this while my partner expressed caution, and a belief that this was a difficult problem that would require much more planning to get right. It made me realize that the type of recursive processing I was envisioning could be difficult to initially wrap your mind around.

This post is meant to orient the agile Java developer to Python. It’s not meant to be either representative or exhaustive of Python’s offerings in any of these areas, and its very much based on my own experience coming to Python from Java.

The iBatis data mapping framework for Java, .NET and Ruby increases developer productivity by facilitating database storage at a higher level than say, JDBC, without the complexity of larger object-relational mapping frameworks. This introduction is intended to show Java developers how to quickly integrate iBatis with a legacy MySQL database.