OK, I know in my original post I tempted fate by suggesting that my Hello World post might end up sitting in solitary on my blog, forever archived on google or the memory hole. However, I have been fairly busy.

I’ve been working on creating my own WordPress theme which was interesting. It’s always fun taking a blank structured HTML page and using CSS to organize and bring it to life and hopefully making it look good. This page gives you a great introduction to WordPress themes starting from the very basics and building up from there. Some items needed tweaking to work ok, but once I got the basics down, I started fresh (like the article does) with my own css layout and built my pages from there. It still needs some work, and it still needs some visual tweaks but overall I like it. Of course, next month I might just decide I hate it.

I’ve also been working on a rather long article comparing Spring Web Flow and JBoss Seam. I took the easy option and started writing it using MS Word thinking I would just port it to HTML or print to PDF. However, after a while it got rather large, and I started wondering how easy it would be to port to HTML and do I want to limit it to PDF? The answer I found was in using docbook to produce the document. Docbook is an xml like markup language for defining technical documentation. This page offers a great tutorial on setting up an eclipse project in which to edit and build your docbook source into HTML and PDF targets.

Regarding the article comparing JBoss Seam and Spring Web Flow, I am still working on it. It is complete except for the conclusion, although I am still proof reading it, and have been trying to do this over the past month or so. It attempts to draw some comparisons that are very relevant to the typical CRUD code that developers write every day, and avoids the simplistic Hello World projects that are often used to demonstrate and compare technologies. The article(s) compare frameworks in the context of a somewhat real world project involving CRUD, and master detail relationships. I’m hoping to have this completed in the next few weeks.