Just got back from the Denver No Fluff Just Stuff, where I gave two Tapestry presentations and a HiveMind presentation. Matt Raible attended the basic Tapestry session and was impressed with Tapestry.
I didn't stick to my presentation at all; Before the session, I took my finished examples application, gutted the two pages (Login and AddAddress) back down to plain HTML, and either trimmed or removed the page specifications and the Java classes. I then put them back together live! during the session.
Most people really liked this, they saw how quickly the exception report page gets you to fix problems, and just how little goes into the HTML (and the page specification and the Java class for that matter). One evaluation claimed that "watching someone code is boring", but that's the exception to the rule ... the clueful people could see how easily Tapestry would fit into their development cycle, which is the whole point.
Also got to demo some great features in Spindle while I was at it. I did have some stumbling points ... mostly the same problem getting me Dell laptop to work with Jay's projectors (I can't synchronize my screen to the projected view, so I have to code while staring up at the screen). Matt also suggests creating templates for the code, rather than laboriously typing in everything and that's a great idea ... I'll just create templates for each method I'll add to each of the classes.
Had a little fun on the expert panel ... David Geary was pretty cantankerous about JSF vs. Tapestry, and brought out that tired line about "It's a Standard". Results Not Standards folks! More comments on this subject later ...
My other two sessions were underattended ... right now, competing against sessions on Spring and Groovy is a non-starter. In fact, for the Tapestry components session, we just gathered around my laptop, which was a lot of fun.
I'm going to be retooling my presentations and hopefully will have a Tapestry and Hibernate session ready soon. In addition, we will probably combine the two Tapestry sessions together into a "Tapestry Kickstart" double (three hour) session.
What kind of dell laptop do you have? I had a very similar problem with my Inspiron 5150, where I couldn't figure out how to run an external monitor and the LCD so they had the same thing on them, which sounds like what you want. After spending useless time on the phone with tech support I figured it out and told them how to do it. If yours is similar to mine, I might be helpful.
ReplyDeletePlease do tell ... it's an Inspiron 8200.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like your 8200 could have one of about 7 video cards, none of which are exactly the same as mine. If it's the Geforce4 440, though, this may work.
ReplyDeleteRight click on desktop, go to settings. (You might need to have the external monitor or the projector plugged in at this point. If you don't have a projector at home you could probably try this out with just some external monitor.) Click on advanced. I have a tab that has the name of my card there, which is GeForce FX Go5200. When I click on this tab an extra menu tree pops up on the left side and controls what the tab is displaying. One option is "nView Display Mode" and my two options are "Standard (Dualview)" and "Clone". Of coure, the fun doesn't end there. My F8 key has a special function labeled "CRT/LCD". Hitting Function (Fn) + F8 cycles through my monitor's 3 modes, which are LCD only, CRT only, and CRT + LCD. When it is on CRT + LCD I either get one large desktop (when nView display mode is "Standard") or the mirrored desktop (when nView display mode is "Clone").
Of course, you might not have any of this, but just figuring out that "clone" and not "mirror" was the term my video card manufacturer used was of immense help to me. Hope this helps.
I guess you aren't allowed to have paragraphs in the comments section.
ReplyDeleteIt's kinda disorienting that the "preview" doesn't actually look like what the published comment will look like.