My new client is using Weblogic Workshop, which means I have to learn it. The IDE looks nice and I’m going through a tutorial of yet another GUI tool that promise to make a Java development a breeze. They’ve wrapped up struts under nice looking components like Page Flows and introduced so called controls (you just drag and drop and it generates the code for you).

So I started learning how to create a Java Control: you just give a method name and click on something to create a callback that will notify a client when the method (it was a credit approval calling a Web Service emulator) is done. Initially I was happy reading detailed steps of the tutorial periodically watching auto-generated code, which was well written. Closer to the end I saw that there was a method call on the interface that was never implemented. I was ready to learn some new cool trick…but at this point the tutorial suggested to click on some button. Voila, and the rest of the example has been magically completed (probably in one of the supporting files) and the application started running displaying the log that proved correct asynchronous callback after the credit approval was done … I guess, I should be happy that everything works, but the problem is that I do not know WHY and HOW it works. I’m sure I can spend more time and find some explanations somewhere deep in the generated files… Maybe it’s OK: when you drive a car you do not have to know what’s under the hood. Ten years ago I was happy using PowerBuilder without bothering how its powerful DataWindow control actually worked.

But for some reason I am not happy now…