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Category Archives: infrastructure and frameworks

Glassfish is doomed in the ‘department’

There’s been lots of discussion the past six months about the fate of MySQL under the ownership of Oracle. Now that the purchase of Sun is complete, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the excellent JEE platform Glassfish. For example some people think that superior technology will prove to Oracle that Glassfish is [...]

ORM-is-Dead meme

I agree with Stephan, and  Aldo; ORMs increasingly get in the way.
Collection mapping is one of those “hello world” problems. (The “hello world” example in the doco looks totally trivial and completely ideal [which is the problem], but suck-in-the-galaxy-greet-it-and-then-map-all-the-stars problem, which is more like what your real app looks like, is far less than trivial [...]

Out of the box experience

Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]

Running Oracle XE on Mac OSX using virtualised JeOS

So Oracle in its wisdom doesn’t have Mac OSX version of its free database. This is of course really annoying to Mac users who need to develop systems that use Oracle databases – Oracle XE is a great little database especially for development environments. Recently I found myself in a situation where I would be [...]

Tapestry 5 web framework

Lately I’ve been writing a Tapestry 5 based web application. I’ve used it before for a smaller application but this is the first time I’ve used it on a larger project. In a number of ways it is a very powerful framework to write web applications.
The basics of Tapestry is that it is a component-based [...]

Agile is dead

I know that’s a pretty bold statement but here’s why. This morning I went to a vendor’s presentation morning, it was the usual game of buzzword bingo from the very first slide on. All the usual enterprise2.0, social-networking, portal-compliant, content-management, vertically-integrated, SOA-BPM-UCM-JEE-ESB-WS-BPEL platform-framework-enabling scalability-enhancing fun-lovin’ don’t write code but manage-the-enterprise-blog-wiki-twitter-facebook-youtube shopping cart drag-n-drop non-content that [...]

Google Wave is coming …

I don’t normally just blog technologies, but this is so incredible you have to see it, if you haven’t already. If you want to see the future of both email and social networks, check out Google Wave. It’s described as:
… a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is [...]

‘One throat to choke’

Many developers will have heard this term used as a justification for buying all, or most, of an organization’s IT infrastructure from a single vendor. And it is, like most of these idiotic aphorisms bandied around IT management, a complete crock of excrement. It’s the sort of thing that salesmen must tell credulous IT management [...]

Money-is-Money v0.16

Putting money-is-money into my own Maven repository gave the impetus to me to clean up the actual code base of the library. There are now a grand total of three classes, including an interface, which is much reduced. As anyone who knows me, will know that I think this is a great improvement. See this [...]

Hosts and subdomains and infrastructure deployment

It always amazes me how many IT infrastructure managers apparently fail to understand just what a ’subdomain’ is. How many of the developers reading this blog entry have ever been confronted with the situation of deploying their applications onto infrastructure that’s named like the following?

Local development: localhost, localhost, localhost, joes-dev-box
Development / Integration: tomcatdev-svr1, orcldb0, mq-dev, [...]