TeXnicle is a relatively new free Mac OS X TeX editor. I just had a go at it (for about an hour) to wheedle out some of its basic features and possible flaws. It is of course (i.e. conforms to current trend in LaTeX editors) one of that “all the things in a big window” [...]
I found a massive bug in Eclipse – it has a copy and paste function. In Eclipse’s defence, Intellij IDEA and Netbeans also exhibit identical broken functionality.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]