I just came across this slightly older writing from Patrick about the pain of ActionForms in Struts. I, personally, have not written Struts code. In my last job, I managed some people who were writing Struts code, though. I’m aware of the benefits of MVC, but it really did seem like there was a whole lot of programmer overhead in writing Struts apps. xDoclet seems like one possible solution, but it really makes you wonder if the framework can or should be doing more. WebWork2 sounds promising, and we’re planning to try out both Struts and WW2 for an app we’re just starting.
Software Development
Take on Gates, Kalam tells Indian techies - The Times of India
President A P J Abdul Kalam on Wednesday urged Indian IT professionals to develop and specialise in open source code software rather than use proprietary solutions based on systems such as Microsoft Windows.
Technology
Or, at least, I agree with the speculation and general concept. According to the article about Bush signing the new tax cut bill,
Eventually, Bush could create a flat-tax system, under which savings and investment would be tax-free, said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a political action committee. “We’re crossing this river in five or six jumps rather than one huge leap,” he said.
See, here’s the deal: I am very much in favor of a greatly simplified tax plan (like the Fair Tax). I also agree that it would likely take a few steps to get there. However, I don’t think that running the government into deficits again is the way to do it. Bush is claiming that reducing taxes like this will spur growth, making up for the shortfall caused by the tax cut. But, what we have to show for Reaganomics at this point is a debt that exceeds $4 trillion.
Politics
In an increasingly interesting story, Novell now says that it claims UNIX System V, and that SCO is full of it with regards to the letters that they have been sending Linux users. SCO has sued IBM and alleges that IBM has put some of SCO’s code into Linux. As the CEO of Novell says, SCO really needs to show the world what proof they have of anything.
Technology
PC Magazine brings us a list of Niche Search engines for finding that stubborn piece of data. They even include the search engine of my organization.
Technology
Do people not learn? At the very least, they don’t read the Fool. One can expect that a good growth company will have some growth built in to the price. But, with 4 Internet stocks hitting new 52-week highs, you have to wonder if people learned the lessons of the Internet bubble: only so much is justified. Granted, some of the increase in these companies comes from short sellers covering their positions. But, long buyers had to have started the stocks heading in this direction. Check out these market values: eBay: $32.71B, Amazon: $13.65B, Yahoo: $18B, USA Interactive: $19.13B. eBay is a really solid company, with more than $1.2B in sales last year and a fab $250M in profit. But, can you really justify valuing the company at more than $32B? That’s a lot for them to grow into.
Money
With more than 300 articles in the Random category, I’ve decided to add a couple of new ones: Money and Parenting. There’s certainly a fair bit of things that I read and link to that are business-related, so the money category will be useful. Parenting is something I don’t have a lot of experience with, but will be learning a lot more firsthand come July 
Random
Dave Winer wrote about the problems of weblogs that are riddled with inaccuracies. I had saved my copy of the Scripting News email because I wanted to respond to this, but I hadn’t yet had the chance. Now, I don’t need to, because Andrew Oliver said it for me.
It’s guaranteed that people will post things to their blogs that are plainly wrong. But, just like in the open source world, you can’t require bloggers to check their facts. They’re not getting paid to blog! That said, the bloggers with more integrity will check (or correct) their facts, and will likely be more widely read. The volume and pace of blog output is phenomenal, and there are some automatic filtering mechanisms that happen via links. It’s quite a system, and what Dave is characterizing as a problem is actually part of the charm.
Random
