I'm a nerd. Or do I mean geek?... Hi, my name is Noah.

Aaaand it's Thanksgiving. I'm up late because I just got my slice and I can't stop tinkering.

I think my master's project is dead meat. Yes, JSF component creation is woefully painful and slow. Yes, a framework helps tremendously. Yes, my framework was good, and let you choose your Ajax implementation, and so on.

The problem with all that is that the JSF Ajax implementations suck. And the learning curve for JSF (much less components) sucks. It's just too quirky. Hopefully JSF 2.0 will make component creation easy, enable RESTful services, and will make it easier for newbies and old hands to just get things done. I'd like to hope all of that, but the only positive things I tend to hear about 2.0 are from Ed Burns, who seems like a very nice guy, but whose rhetoric reeks of corporate "gotta toe the line/I think my company is the best ever, is not a dinosaur who is slowly and inconsistently embracing open source, and is a bit too bureaucratic to be able to save Java." JavaScript is it, ya know.

Which brings us to my next topic. Kevin at work is the new Grails evangelist. I have to admit, Groovy is a cool language. If not for the fact that JavaScript is the NBL, I think Groovy would be the weapon of choice. Optional static types, intuitive C like syntax, closures everywhere, functional programming, etc. It's a readable LISP, IMHO. Since we'll probably be using Ext for my next project, (in wonderful freezing cold Pittsburgh, no less...) I thought that I'd take the opportunity to get familiar with it by working up a sample project. It's going quite well, so I must remember to get a few entries out of it (yes the separate tech blog is pretty much dead).

Groovy is a great complement to JavaScript/Ajax programming primarily because the thought processes are the same. There are some more syntactic niceties in Groovy, and there is sadly no Prototype for Groovy, but switching is completely effortless. And if I need to, I can always turn the static types back on and write some Java code. If you are a JEE developer and haven't looked at Grails yet, you need to.

More bulletins as events warrant. Cheers.