When the light goes on

So I am building this web app. For the first time, I'm trying to do it by the book. I have a spring context, DAOs and ORM through hibernate. Everything seems copacetic. Then I realize that the logic for stopping a workflow item has to be in two places. So I do the seemingly sensible thing and I pull it out into a method.

A few days pass, and the thought dawns on me that this is what they mean by 'business logic'. An operation that can be called independently of the website to perform a function against the data. The light goes on in my head. The ActionBean should be looking up an instance of this business object in the spring context and setting member variables and calling a method on the business object.

All my functionality like that should be moved into business objects.

D'Oh, Yay! I finally 'get it'. Nobody ever explained how this stuff is supposed to work to me.

This is a subtlety that most MVC guides fail to point out. There is really another level of abstraction there, MVCB, Model, View, Controller and Business Logic. If we were in a SOA this would be the stuff that would be at the other end of the service.

Let me tell you how awesome this is going to make Dot Artistry when I get it going.

Monitor Woes

I am working on this website. I am looking at the project page. The title for each project doesn't really stand out, so I'm thinking to myself, I should put a background colour on that cell. I'm trying to find out what happened to a line I thought I'd put in (a border-bottom) that wasn't showing up. I hit inspect on the cell and discovered that each cell was in fact separated by a line, and that the title cell already had a background. I moved the window from my crappy cheap Acer to my iMac screen. HOLY SHIT, it's a different colour!

I think that finally puts the nail in the coffin on this monitor for me. I've been desperately trying not to go out and buy a new monitor because it just seemed like an unnecessary expense. I mean, how much do I do colour work that I need to be able to see acurate colours for? I could just put that stuff on my main monitor surely? But for heaven's sake! The colour wasn't there. It was indistinguishable from white. That's not just a colour being off a bit, that's some serious contrast shit going on.

If I get paid any time soon by Century 21 or Talisman, I'm buying a new monitor. Now I just have to figure out which one. I know I want H-IPS or S-IPS and I really want LED backlit, but it's going to be costly. Maybe I can go somewhere in the middle. Peoples speak highly of the Apple monitors for the most part, though they are a bit dated, except the new one that goes with the laptops, though I could swear I saw it was hooked up to a mac mini at the apple store.