My very own crappy little web app

I have been spending the last couple of days coding up an application to track the English Premier League. Nothing fancy, just a screen to enter match results and another screen to view the points table. The application is based on JSF and MySQL and runs on JBoss. My experiences:

1. JSF seems quite promising, but there were times when things didn't work the way they were supposed to, but there were no exceptions or any other errors thrown. Or if there was an exception, it was not very straightforward to decipher it (here is an example).


2. MySQL's AUTO_INCREMENT feature along with last_insert_id() is pretty cool. No need to create sequences and triggers as in Oracle.


3. I know this has been beaten to death, but MySQL's habit of silently accepting invalid dates is not a Good Thing (tm).


4. I used JEdit for this. JEdit looks OK, but it's a bit slow. I'll reserve judgment till I have spent more time with it.


5. Do not place the wrong version of j2ee.jar in your classpath. Having both JBoss and Tomcat choke with weird errors is probably amusing in hindsight, but it's not funny at all when you are tearing your hair out late at night, wondering WTF happened.


6. I am also beginning to see why some people don't think very highly of checked exceptions in Java.