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Category Archives: architecture

Come back Gavin King, all is forgiven (Spring is the new EJB 2.1)

I’ve just spent the past two days trying to make Spring transaction management work with JPA-annotated Hibernate-backed persistence classes that need to have multiple persistence units with transaction propagation REQUIRES_NEW between the two. For a start, the documentation is merely a series of outlines of brief hints. One measly section.The laughably short Spring 3 doco [...]

REST and SOA and Agile and Waterfall

Recently I’ve been working on two projects. They are an exercise in contrasts. First the technologies and the development methodologies. So the first company uses a very Waterfall process and the integration platform is SOA. We’ve managed to build, in the middle of this, a small and focussed Java component that uses JMS in and [...]

Stuff that is just plain wrong, part 1,893,567

Weblogic’s a big, vendor-supported, application server right? And it has advanced clustering features, right? So you’d think it’s clustered JMS implementation is one of the best in the business — after all large enterprise systems often require high capacity and reliable clustered messaging, right? And Weblogic is offered as a solution to those sorts of [...]

The Ordeal of Installing Oracle Service Bus on a Windows-based developer workstation

This is a genuine installation procedure which I wrote, but you might want to read it for its other values. Overview OSB installation in a development environment consists of a completely separate Weblogic instance and yet another ‘special installation’ of Eclipse. You can’t use existing Eclipse installations. Nor is it recommend to use one of [...]

Throw it away and write another one

Most developers familiar with agile methods are familiar with the idea of the spike. A spike is a time-boxed task that concentrates on clarifying the unknowns in your project. Usually these are technological (“can this be done with this technology?”) but they are also sometimes in the area of the business domain (“is this a [...]

Dynamically loading Spring contexts from the classpath at runtime

Using these three Spring features will enable us to be able to place a JAR file containing an interface implementation, and a Spring context XML file matching a particular pattern, into the classpath of our WAR, and on restart, we can dynamically pick up the newly inserted features into our application installation.

New software, old process, big mistake

Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]

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 [...]

On Architecture and Craftsmanship

The science of the architect depends upon many disciplines and various apprenticeships which are carried out in other arts. His work consists in craftsmanship and technology. Craftsmanship is continued and familiar practice, which is carried out in the hands in such material as is necessary for the purpose of a design. Technology sets  forth and [...]

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 [...]