Joseph Ottinger

Yesterday, Sun made an early access version of Studio Creator (i.e., "Project Rave") available. I downloaded it for both of my normal development platforms (the SPARCle, running Solaris, and Windows) and gave it a go. On first impressions, Creator is meant to be a Web application development tool, from the looks of it. There's no mention of distributed APIs outside of the servlet environment and web services, although Web services do seem to be pretty deeply integrated. Further, the kind of Web applications it's designed to create are, specifically, JSF applications. This is good and bad. I'm not a proponent of JSF, yet, because I can see horrible, horrible things from it. Sun apparently sees it as a competitor to MS' WebForms, which to me sounds like they're trying to compete against something that just isn't that good, in someone else's arena. However, it's technol... (more)

How Can I Escape Quotes in SQL Queries?

It depends on the SQL backend you're using, and how sincere you are. Basically, you'd want to convert every single quote to be double-single-quotes (i.e., O'Donnell becomes O''Donnell), which means writing a custom function. That's ugly, and unnecessary. (Aren't you glad?) If you use PreparedStatements, the JDBC driver will escape all data for you, for the specific database you're using. (This is important, as some DBs don't follow the "double single-quotes" rule mentioned above.) Example code: PreparedStatement ps=conn.prepareStatement("insert into names values (?)"); ps.setString... (more)

How do I find out how many records are in a RecordSet?

If you already have your ResultSet, you have two choices, both bad: one is to keep a counter as you read the records in the ResultSet, and the other is to hope you have a compliant JDBC driver that supports the getRowCount() method. Both ways probably do the same thing: read the entire dataset. If you're interested in only a count of records, that's a lot of bandwidth down the drain (and memory, too, if you happen to need the data as you fly past it.) A better approach is to run a separate query to determine the count of rows: PreparedStatement ps=connection.prepareStatement("select... (more)

It Just Works

We tend to see the United States through a lens made up of its major population centers: New York; Los Angeles; Washington, DC; Miami; Atlanta; Chicago; and a few others. That's because these are the places that have things "going on," and as a result we get a skewed picture not only of what the United States is about, but of what the United States actually is. From this bird'seye view, you get the sense that America is all about urban angst, hip-hop, people crammed into shiny metal boxes. The truth, however, is quite different. Those things are part of America, to be sure, but t... (more)

Java Viewpoint: "I'm Starting to Like Java Studio Creator..."

I am really coming around to Java Studio Creator. I spoke with Jim Inscore from Sun today about it, after detailing my initial impressions on it, and we spent some time discussing the product, its positioning, and its future role. For one thing, he never called it "Rave," that I remember. I like the name "Rave;" it's distinctive, it has a certain panache. That said, it's only a code name for Sun, and lacks Sun's typical vanilla naming, so we have "Creator," instead. We talked about where Studio Creator fits in the developer landscape. Sun places Studio Creator squarely in the cor... (more)