Lunatech blog retrospective - 2005
Looking back nine years on this blog, there are a mix of articles that stand the test of time, ones that were good at the time, and a few that… weren’t. Here is a small selection.
Overall, there were 22 Lunatech blog posts in 2005 on a mixture of topics, mostly about web development. Back in 2005, we were building Java web applications with Struts 1.2 and Hibernate, running on JBoss 3.2.
Technology
Struts URLs for perfectionists is my favourite technology article from 2005, because it describes a rare success in fighting wrong-headed J2EE web technology and managing to build a more HTTP-centric web application. While everyone else was building web applications with ugly URLs like:
/customer.do?method=edit&id=42
… or worse, we had worked out how to get Struts to work with something cleaner, like:
/customer/edit/42
In hindsight, this is a clear example of one reason why we would inevitably recognise the Play Framework as a Good Thing when it arrived some years later.
Agile software development
Information radiators: from dashboard to wall describes an example of an agile software development technique in Alistair Cockburn’s 2001 book on the topic that we had used on the Struts project with the nice URLs (see above):
This kind of thing is a lot more common these days, with more Scrum projects than you can shake a stick at, but agile software development was less mainstream and featured a lot less hype back in 2005.
Business
Business lunch rules is my favourite, though, because these instructions for how to have an effective business lunch are timeless in a way that Struts and agile software development aren’t. In this article, Michael sets the rules for not only how to use that expense account effectively, but with class.
Photo: Lena Vasiljeva