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Category Archives: technical

Technical topics.

Money-is-Money 0.17

I just released a new version of Money-Is-Money, v0.17. If you’re interested, see the features here and here. My aim with it is to make the most accurate currency-aware Java money handling library available. This time I’ve added just a couple of new methods to get the whole and fractional amounts as Integers (I use [...]

Desktop lockdown

An interesting Wall Street Journal article, “Why You Can’t Use Personal Technology at the Office”, came my way courtesy of a Linked In group discussion this morning. In terms of the article, I agree it has been my experience for many years where I have faster/better personal technology than my workplace. At one place we [...]

Mistakes you can make with SOA

Bob Lewis has a great column this month, “What if SOA is a mistake“? His penultimate paragraph asks: Lost in the shuffle is something basic: Programmer productivity. Friends who are hands-on with such matters tell me the available SOA development environments are less than half as productive as products like PowerBuilder and Delphi were, back [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Agile and assembly lines

Coder Friendly’s got an interesting article about Agile Evangelism. First I’m not going to take issue with the article itself but something that he quotes from DanC’s Lost Garden on Managing Complexity: The repetative (sic) steps that a single worker performs on an assembly line is a good example of a simple task This is [...]

American Express are enablers of security threats

Peter Newton, “Director of Marketing” at American Express Australia Limited ABN 92 108 952 085, really likes Russian Mafiosa. Or maybe it’s Chinese Triads, bikie gangs, or maybe some local spivs operating out of a small rented smash repair shop near Beenleigh. Perhaps all of the above. Look at this email I got in my [...]

Systems versus Individuals and technical debt

I kind of disagree with this picture by Josh Susser regarding the “circle of death” in terms of code quality and late night effort. It is right enough as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough. First up, the easy way out – take a day off, go for a walk in [...]

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 [...]