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Category Archives: programming

Software development and programming 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 [...]

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 when [...]

ORM-is-Dead meme

I agree with Stephan, andĀ  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 [...]

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 the [...]

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 [...]

That feature is trivial

How many times as a developer do we get asked by our clients to create a new story to implement a feature assessed by the client as “trivial”? How many times do we get surprised by their reactions when we give them our story estimate. I’ve seen developers give this sort of optimistic estimate too, [...]

‘//TODO’ considered harmful

Yesterday I said that developers should start being a little more militant about the craftsmanship of their code, i.e. pushing back on broken methodology that demands poorly-built codeĀ  be released into the wild. This sort of code is always inherently fragile and will break your software if it has not already.
Today I just want to [...]

JAOO Brisbane 2009 highlights and thoughts

I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the JAOO conference in Brisbane, and I have a couple of things which I want to say I thought interesting. (‘JAOO’ btw, because I see people asking about it on Twitter, is pronounced a bit like “yow” but with the “j” from German/Dutch like “jah”).
Firstly, I found the [...]

Building Oracle 10g portlets in a continuous integration environment

Ignoring all the hints (to use wizards and manual deployments) from the Oracle information as to how to go about creating JSR168 portlets for the Oracle 10g Portal server, we have successfully designed a continuous integration environment for the Oracle portal environment for a client. The Oracle 10g portal server is the old-school Oracle app-server [...]