My name is Aleksey Maksimov. I am Software Architect with many years of IT experience and architecture experience. I work for a global IT consulting company and live in the United Kingdom.
This is my software rants blog. I also have blog about my life happenings, in Russian. I also registered in almost all social networks, usually as ctpeko3a, sometimes as lechat and rarely as drunkenfly. Here is my FriendFeed and 
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I tried to search all over the web for a Java Faces component, which will do a simple thing: totals and subtotals. And I failed. It seems that whole web is about how much more AJAX you could put everywhere, not how more useful your product could be for average user.
It could be done through a facet tag, which is obvious.
I think about that as competitive advantage for myself. If nobody done it – I should do it and be recognised for it!
Excellent article on branching in Subversion. One thing missing is the branch timeline chart. Something like this:
Where horisontal line is the trunk timeline and angled lines are releases. Based on my experience, that chart often helps developers to understand when branches are created and how to deal with them.
I was reading a lot of Ruby on Rails books in order to start my own project. I found the thing, which really disturbes me: though Ruby is a proper OO language, none of OO desugn features are presented in Rails books.
Proper Object Oriented Design should simplify software development by introducing abstraction from unneccessary logic constraints.
Take, for example, books dealing with making simple online store. They all say that there is no way to add products into shopping cart because products can be in many shopping carts. Because of that you have to add LineItems, which will point to a product description.
This is true when we speak about database design, but completely untrue when we speak about software design. From OO point of view there is no such thing as LiteItem. It has no value to a business logic and it must be dropped from model.
This model look much cleaner and causes no confusion. Additional work must be done on model layer, but this is just to avoid database limitations.
Featuring Bjork
Just made a configuration change on my hosting account: disabled Java in order to get Ruby-On-Rails
For a website I want to build, I have to choose the platform and the programming language. At work I use Java and Websphere 6, but can’t use it for my own project. The reason is that I don’t know how popular my service would be it seems quite expensive to put it into Websphere hosting. I have Java capabilities in my hosting plan here, but its only for web applications with no backend server support. In other words – there will be no MVC. Only JSPs and servlets.
And I will not be able to use JDK 5, nor be able to change server to, say, Glassfish, so I will be able to use some latest useful JSF components.
Another choice would be to choose other language, say Ruby. But I don’t have any experience using it, so it would be a major roadblock for a starters.
I’m stuck again!
News from Writer’s blog
The following is a summary of the changes in the Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update:
* Tagging support
* Support for Blogger Beta
* Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
* Improved startup performance
* Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
* Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
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* Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
* Custom date support for Community Server
* Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
* Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
* Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
* More robust image posting to Live Spaces
* Improved style detection for blogs
* Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
* Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
* Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts
IBM Rational development organizations host a number of early betas to gain the expert contribution and insight from our customers and from those evaluating IBM Rational products. New open betas for IBM Rational Software Architect V7.0 and Rational Functional Tester V7.0 are scheduled to be available soon. Preregister now and we’ll inform you via e-mail when the code is ready for download.
Here is the page with the overview and information on how to register.
Here is the map of the one of the Moscow’s streets with the directions on how to get from one street to another.
They should have put the roundabout there…
This blog post answers the questions about which version of Axis framework developers should use and also gives a short story about Axis development history. Short and must read.
Twitter: LeChat