Monday, February 4, 2008

What's on Jason's Hard Drive?

This title is borrowed from interesting article by Jason Hunter, famous author of Java Servlet Programming, that describes his "paperless house" organization. Published in Nov 2006. Main components:
  • Scanner; with a habit to scan all relevant documents to tiff (Jason keeps paper for a chance of audit)
  • All documents are kept in a version control system. His choice: Perforce (for historic reasons; can be used for free if max. 2 users and up to 5 workspaces), or Subversion (CVS is not a good choice if most documents are binary). Even if many documents exist in one version only, version control brings portability
  • Hierarchical organization of files. Everything in one repository - personal, business, scans, photos, source code, articles, ebooks.
Cons: all files on every client (is this a drawback?). Subversion with keep two copies on client??? Repository will be backed up (or RAID-ed) as well, i.e. lot of redundancy.
Explicit commit is needed.

There are also a few additional tips and links in the discussion section.

TODO: what is my organization of information?
logbooks, PeterWeekReports

As a side note: How did I ran into Jason's article? Spring's multipart (fileupload) documetation claims support COS FileUpload (http://www.servlets.com/cos). Jason is author of COS (com.oreilly.servlet) support classes (last version Nov. 2002). However, COS support was removed from Spring codebase starting with version 2.1. Currently, Spring supports only Commons FileUpload (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/fileupload) in traditional mode, without streaming API (note also additional dependency upon Commons IO).

Oh yes, and a brief explanation of changes across Servlet specifications can be found in Jason's articles on JavaWorld.

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