I was having lunch with a colleague, and commenting on how slow another colleague was in learning new frameworks. I wondered if it had to do with experience, since he was relatively new. But still, the rate he was picking up was unimaginable (to me at least).
I cited how I had to help in resolving a compilation and deployment problem, which by just googling a similar pattern of the error message (since the exact message would not yield that close a match with our project names, user folders, etc in it) gave me a hit on the first page (maybe not the first result, but at least it was on the first page).
I wondered if it had to do with the educational system, where they are more spoon-fed and focused on passing exams. Back in the older days we had a genuine desire to learn new stuff. We would borrow and devour books (figuratively speaking)
And then I mentioned about how I went about learning Struts2 and Tiles for this current project.
Which led me to notice the approach I took to learning it (as well as the previous JAX-RS framework).
1. Reading official documents and tutorials. The framework usually have some form of documentations. Even if they are incomplete or few, they are still a source of learning.
2. Google. For something you want to be done, there is a high chance that someone else has done it as well.
Usually these two would be sufficient, but recently, I go a step further.
I just came back from an IDM project. Sun Identity Management product. It was heavily customized. And at times, we had to deal with insufficient documentations, and find out if something is a product bug or a customization done wrong.
And how we do that is to turn on log tracing, and trace the calls, and then check the product source code (decompiled).
After the project, I had just unknowingly do that whenever I hit a problem in using a framework.
I fire up the logging, and find out which method call I had to use, and go through to look at the source.
In fact, it helped me understand the framework much better.
Of course, some would argue that reading source is hard. But I did not find it that way. I could still find my way around it, even though it might take a while.
Let me share my latest experience.
I was using Struts2 with Tiles, and I ended up with a problem of wildcard matching of definition names, and cascading attributes. The attribute was not found in the nested definition.
First, I tried to check the documents. They cited examples of wildcards, and then of cascading attributes, but not together. So I was not able to determine if I was using it correctly.
Next I tried to google. It took a while, but I finally managed to find someone with the same problem. Apparently it was a bug the guy reported, and he was asked to produce a JIRA (not sure if he did), and it was dated April 2009.
But this did not solve my problem, since it was a deliverable project. So I had to fix it myself. I dug through the code, and realized that the problem was in ResolvingLocaleUrlDefinitionDAO.replaceDefinition, where the definition was not duplicating the cascading attributes, only the local.
Now to figure out how to fix it. I just need a custom DAO. From my experiences with the various frameworks, a good framework usually allow you to provide custom components, defined in a property file or web.xml. There was no property to provide a custom DAO (I traced through the DAO creation path by code), but there was a way to provide a custom DefinitionsFactory, which create the DAO.
So I did that, and solved my bug.
If I had gave this task to that new colleague, I doubt that the bug can be resolved. Somehow, decompiling might not have crossed his mind.
I am trying to find out, what was the reason of the difference.
Was it because I was placed in a situation where I had to read the source and debug and fix?
Was it because I had more years of experience working? (approaching 6 this year)
Was it because of inadequate googling skills? (That proved to be a problem for another of our ex-colleague, who was not that good in English)
Was it because I am used to reading logs?
Was it because I am comfortable reading source code?
But in any case, learning new framework and reading source code does give me various new ideas on how to design and develop. A case in point: if it is a framework, most components should be allowed to be defined and replaced by the consumer of the framework, just like the Tiles case above.
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