Solo sysadmin/coder

Are you a solo coder who doubles as a sysadmin or some other role(s) in your organization?

I share your pain - and I want to share these articles with you, because if you struggle with it too they will change how you look at it.

• Coding Horror: In programming, One is the loneliest number
• Burn-out
• Depression, burn-out and writing code

The Coding Horror article was written by Jeff Atwood, a damn fine developer and co-founder of Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, which to me gives it a bit of added oompf.

While you're at it, read this article on programmer's bad habits ... because you probably do at least one of them. I know I do. They're counterproductive and just make you feel worse, so being aware of them helps.

Of course, nothing is as good as saying "I'm dropping all my other roles, you can hire someone else for them. I'm just programming now, that way I can actually finish the projects I started two years ago." I only have to hold out another two months before the new guy at work is ready to take over :-)

Using Seam 3 with Glassfish 3.1

Seam 3 builds on top of the Java EE 6 standards, filling in holes and omissions in the functionality provided by the specs and providing important enhancements that many programmers would otherwise find themselves implementing themselves. Seam 3 Solder in particular addreses some of the frustrating limitations in the CDI and Java EE 6 specs, providing well-engineered and easily re-used solutions to common problems.

Being a JBoss project, Seam 3 is unsurprisingly better tested on the JBoss application server. However, its goals explicitly cover portability and it's supposed to work on Glassfish and - where possible - even on servlet containers like Tomcat and Jetty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Glassfish doesn't get as much attention , so it's a bit harder to use Seam 3.0.0.Final on Glassfish than it is on JBoss. It appears that it was also harder for the Seam 3 folks to get quick fixes for the many Glassfish bugs they found into Glassfish than it was for them to get fixes into JBoss AS, so many of the fixes for issues found in Seam 3 won't hit a Glassfish stable release until 3.2 comes out, if then.

In the mean time, there are some quirks to work around. The Seam 3 project documents Glassfish 3.1 compatibility issues here and you should read that document before continuing.

Many of the issues are solved pretty easily once you know what to do and where to look. It's well worth using Seam 3 instead of rolling your own solutions to many of the problems it tackles, so read on.