The Learning Journey

I'm starting to wonder what more can Freemarker offer than JSP 2.0 (or even 1.2) with JSTL EL (Taglibs)?
Still it isn't clear separation (as claimed by FM folks) between the Ms and Vs.

Moreover (for someone like me), embedding JSP Tag libs (being it Struts, JSTL, or the like) into Freemarker templates is equivalent to using JSPs with JSTL but with the subtracted benifit of adding java snippets to the page.

OK, OK, I can hear screams about the last sentence, but, what's the harm in <%= (new java.util.Date()).toLocaleString() %> inside a JSP? (I can't still figure out how to echo the current date in Freemarker)

One more thing - Does the word “Specifications” mean anything?

Would like to hear opinions about Freemarker.

Thanks to that someone/thing who came to my blog from Google Reader, I wouldn't have known that the labs has came up with such a nice service.

It's your favourite feed reader (except of course being a server side one), in addition to a website subscription service. You can also use OPML to import your current lists. I also love the “Blog This”, “Gmail This” actions for the reader items. The “Gmail This” fills out the content of your message with the reader's item content.

May be the shortcuts are a bit confusing, but, I guess these can change when the Google Browser is out

I wonder what's next?

Took the IPATo. 3 Parts (Data Manipulations, Numeric Analysis, Mathematical Reasoning). Can't claim I did good, partly because of some distractions (which is a major factor if the allocated time is 4 minutes for one of the parts). The first part “looks like” matrix manipulations, but I guess it tests your level of comprehending and processing information (and probably obfuscated tech docs and code). Numeric analysis is the hardest, mainly because of the allocated time. Mathematical reasoning reminded me of the GRE quantitative section and its math questions.

What is strange is that I haven?t been contacted by the Big Blue (yet?), I thought this test was a second or third step in the process, but, it was the first in my case. Hope this turns out well.

I was getting ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in <controller#method>. The error was a bit weird, since I was getting it after a period of inactivity (overnight).

The server was using a connection to the database which MySQL has closed due to a long period of inactivity

I reopened the Rails Ticket as it seems the problem is not yet solved (at least for current config Win2003, Rails 0.13.1, MySQL 4.1.9)

MySQL has a workaround of setting the wait_timeout for mysqld in my.ini to a high value.

FCKEditor is so powerful, but, when weighed against the fact that CrystalReports understands only a limited set of HTML tags (crHTMLText text interpretation), the benifits diminish.

I've been trying for an hour to get the best of both words (FCKEditor, CrystalReports) with no real success. The HTML support in CrystalReports is quite basic and my HTML doesn't render correctly in the report.

I've tried also to use JasperReports instead of CR for more flexibility but it needs time to implement my own HTML2Text expression to wrap around the desired field.

Has anyone had any success in such scenarios where “beautiful” HTML shows up in reports?