Initial fear

I poked at JS several times. The absence of static feedback while writing code scared me. I never thought about it while writing SQL, XSLTs etc. In college, I didn’t know what eclipse is. I was happily using Turbo C Editor. I was just biased without getting my feet wet in JS.

Change the code and refresh the browser, you got your output and errors. The results are quick. After getting used to this, I don’t miss static typing, and any IDE.

How I Learned?

• Crockford on JS and other videos
• Codecademy
• Mozilla Guide
• Secrets of the Ninja
• Other blogs
• Recently I came across Superhero.js
• For code quality and practices. I used underscore.js and some other JS projects on github as reference

Some thoughts and advice

• Learning new language introduces you  to new concepts. In this case ,I got my hands on concepts like functions, closures, lambdas, and prototypal  inheritance. It also encouraged me to try Scala.
• Learning JS is not sufficient for web development. Know CSS and cross browser incompatibilities.It saves you lot of time.
• Some of the best practices of coding in Java applies here too. For example, Single responsibility principle. Don’t cram all the code in single function. Learn from frameworks like Backbone. Explore the other best practices of the language.
• Like in Java world, there are frameworks here too. For example, underscore, jquery etc can be considered as equivalent of guava or apache commons. Use them, rather than write your own utilities.
• You can be productive in different ways. For  example, I had to develop UI  using REST api which is under development. I used node and express js to simulate the REST api, which is damn easy. I am not saying you should learn node and express just for this scenario. If you learn new language, your alternatives will grow.
• Practice what you read. I have to tell this to myself over the years, several times. I made the mistake with other languages like Groovy, Python etc. I just read the books and didn’t write much code. Implementing a project changes everything.
• Finally, don’t worry about whether you will be as good as your primary language. Probably you won’t. But does it matter when the journey itself is fulfilling?

dwr.engine.setTextHtmlHandler(function() {


CREATE FUNCTION DATETIME_RANGE_OVERLAP_MINS(startDate1 TIMESTAMP, endDate1 TIMESTAMP ,
startDate2 TIMESTAMP ,endDate2 TIMESTAMP )
RETURN NUMBER IS
overlapMins NUMBER:=0;
startDateMax TIMESTAMP;
endDateMin TIMESTAMP;
BEGIN
IF ( startDate1 > endDate2 OR endDate1 < startDate2) THEN
--No overlap
return overlapMins;
END IF;
–Find maximum of two start dates
startDateMax:=startDate2;
IF startDate1>startDate2 THEN
startDateMax:=startDate1;
END IF;

–Find minimum of two end dates

endDateMin:=endDate2;
IF endDate1
endDateMin:=endDate1;
END IF;

--We will get overlap in days. Convert it to minutes.

overlapMins:=ROUND( TO_NUMBER( CAST(endDateMin AS DATE) - CAST(startDateMax AS DATE)) * 1440) ;

return overlapMins;

If you don’t provide message source, acegi classes use AcegiMessageSource through MessageSourceAccessor(Helper class which wraps MessageSource and provides overloaded getMessage methods). If you call one of the getMessage() method on MessageSourceAccessor with out Locale as argument, it tries to get message in default locale provided to it. If default locale is not set, then it tries to get Locale from LocaleContextHolder. But who sets Locale to the LocaleContextHolder? If you are using Spring DispatcherServlet for your requests,a LocaleResolver will do the job for you. For other apps you need to do this before authentication processing filters(For example, AuthenticationProcessingFilter) kicks in. Otherwise i18n won’t work.

In summary, you need to set the Locale to LocaleContextHolder, for apps not using DispatcherServlet, for Acegi’s localization to work. Let me know, if there are any workarounds or I am missing something here.

It is good to find Queplix there. It is open source, customer care application, which leverages GWT for UI. They did a fantastic job although I feel that the UI transition is not really smooth.Check their demo here. The user name and password for the demo is ‘demo’.