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Category Archives: tools and techniques

A terrible, terrible Eclipse bug

Thursday, March 10, 2011

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.

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

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

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 [...]

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REST and SOA and Agile and Waterfall

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

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 [...]

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

Friday, November 5, 2010

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 [...]

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Mechanical Pencil Lust redux

Thursday, November 4, 2010

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 [...]

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Throw it away and write another one

Sunday, May 30, 2010

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 [...]

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Dynamically loading Spring contexts from the classpath at runtime

Thursday, April 29, 2010

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.

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Java + WebDAV … a solution for the PITA

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

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 [...]

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Mistakes you can make with SOA

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

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 [...]

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ORM-is-Dead meme

Monday, October 19, 2009

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 [...]

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