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Category Archives: programming

Software development and programming topics.

Mechanical Pencil Lust redux

Now my University research project is on the final straight, and I’ll have a new one starting sometime next year, I thought it time to have a look at some new mechanical pencils. Well, actually, I thought I had lost my previous favorite pencil, the Faber-Castell TK Fine Vario L 0.5mm. However I found it [...]

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.

Java + WebDAV … a solution for the PITA

Spent the day tooling about with Java web DAV libraries and the Apache httpd server on a Centos machine. First, just let me start by saying that if your webDAV installation on Apache ain’t working as it should and you’re on a Redhat-style installation, have a good look at what SELinux is doing. If I’d [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]