Make your site search engine friendly

I've got several sites online at the moment ranging from firstpartners.net and the red-piranha enterprise search tool , not forgetting this blog.

A common theme with all of these is the ability to get search engines (like google) to index them. After all ,what is the point of maintaining websites if the content goes unread. How do you notify the search engine of your brand new content? Google site maps are one way - an xml document that you submit with all the relevant details. Included is a tool to generate the sitemaps , written in Python. Still playing with it , but it appears that (a) the format is easy to generate and / or (b) the script will run in Jython (java+python).

More on Ajax

Sun also has an article on building Ajax from scratch here but IMHO you're better off using a framework every time ...

Best of GUI , Best of Web

Normally you have to make the choice between having a web-type interface (easy to deploy , but very clunky) , or a richer GUI interface (more interactive , but much harder to roll out , and almost certainly won't work over the internet).

Ajax (Asynch-Javascript-XML) gives you the best of both worlds - a good example of it in action is Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) , where the scrolling and updates are dynamic through *any* web browser. Ajax is a type of application , rather than a framework like Struts of Cocoon.

Ajax type applications will be the way the web is going , and so far the field is wide open as to which framework is the best way of implementing them in Java / J2EE. Whichever wins out is likely to be 'the next struts' ie the defacto standard for Java web development.

2 promising open frameworks are Echo 2 and DWR

Latest Hot Skills Survey

Always take these things with a pinch of salt , but the latest 'hot skills' survey is available here.

It's US Based and some of the 'findings' make sense (e.g. Websphere and Oracle coming from a large installed base, Project management due to cull of recent years , and above all security). Some others are a bit strange (e.g. Perl is 'stone-cold' , yet I'm sure is in constant use behind the scenes). Others (like HTML skills) are also listed as stone cold - but anybody who has been trying to make a living as web designer knew this already.

Dublin Java Meetup Meeting

Some of the guys are trying to get a regular meeting going for Dublin (Ireland) Java and J2EE people. If you're interested in coming along to the next meetup , or just finding out what happened , click here: http://java.meetup.com/15/