A Java geek

Feb 10, 2013 spring

The case for Spring inner beans

When code reviewing or pair programming, I’m always amazed by the following discrepancy. On one hand, 99% of developers conscientiously apply encapsulation and limit accessibility and variable scope to the minimum possible. On the other hand, nobody cares one bit about Spring beans and such beans are always set at top-level, which makes them accessible from every place where you can get a handle on the Spring context. For example, this a typical Spring beans configuration file: <bea

Feb 3, 2013 spring

Changing default Spring bean scope

By default, Spring beans are scoped singleton, meaning there’s only one instance for the whole application context. For most applications, this is a sensible default; then sometimes, not so much. This may be the case when using a custom scope, which is the case, on the product I’m currently working on. I’m not at liberty to discuss the details further: suffice to say that it is very painful to configure each and every needed bean with this custom scope. Since being lazy in a s

Jan 20, 2013 dry spring

DRY your Spring Beans configuration file

It’s always when you discuss with people that some things that you (or the people) hold for an evidence seems to be a closely-held secret. That’s what happened this week when I tentatively showed a trick during a training session that started a debate. Let’s take an example, but the idea behind this can of course be applied to many more use-cases: imagine you developed many DAO classes inheriting from the same abstract DAO Spring provides you with (JPA, Hibernate, plain JDBC,

Jan 13, 2013

The power of naming

Before diving right into the subject of naming, and at the risk of souding somewhat pedantic, an introduction is in order. History show us that naming is so important to the human race that it’s being regarded as sacred (or at least) magical in most human cultures. Some non-exhaustive examples include: Judaïc tradition go to great lengths to search for and compile the names of God.

Jan 6, 2013 arqullian java EE tomEE

Pet catalog for JavaEE 6 reengineered

Some time ago, I published the famed Pet Catalog application on Github. It doesn’t seem like much, but there are some hours of work (if not days) behind the scenes. I wanted to write down the objectives of this pet project (noticed the joke here?) and the walls I hit trying to achieve them to prevent others to hit them. Objectives were very simple at first: get the Pet Catalog to work under TomEE, the Web Profile compliant application server based on Tomcat. I also wanted to prove that by

Dec 23, 2012 dao

Do we really need the DAO?

This may seem like a stupid question, especially after years of carefully creating them. Yet these thoughts about DAO arose in my mind when I watched Adam Bien’s Real World JavaEE rerun on Parley’s. In his talk, Adam says he doesn’t use DAOs anymore - even though he has one ready so as to please architects (them again). My first reaction was utter rejection: layered architecture is at the root of decoupling and decoupling is a requirement for an evolutive design. Then, I diges

Dec 16, 2012

Short-term benefits in the Information Service business

It’s a fact that companies and their management have money in mind. However, they’re many ways to achieve this goal. In my short career as an employee, I’ve been faced with two strategies, the short-term one and the long-term one. Here are some examples I’ve been directly confronted with: A manager sends a developer on an uninteresting mission a long way from home. At first, he tells the developer it won’t last more than 3 months but in effect, it lasts more than

Dec 2, 2012 elearning

The cost and value of knowledge

I was a student in France when I discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web. At that time, I didn’t realize the value of the thing, even though I taught myself HTML from what was available at the time (even if I don’t remember the sites - they probably have disappeared into Limbo). When I began my professional life, a project director of mine joked about the difference between the developer and the expert: 'The expert knows about the cabinet where the documentation is'. Some ti

Nov 25, 2012 blog jekyll

Drupal 7 to Jekyll, an epic journey

There’s a recent trend in blogging that consists of dropping PHP platforms such as WordPress and Drupal in factor of static HTML pages generated when needed. Static blogs have many advantages over PHP engines: They’re much faster since there’s no computation overhead at runtime for composing the rendered pageThere’s no security issues regarding SQL injectionFinally, generating the site removes the need for a staging area with possibly mismatched configurations morevaad

Nov 16, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Final day

Devoxx last day, I only slept 2 hours during the previous night. Need I really say more? Clustering your applications with Hazelcast by Talip Ozturk. Hazelcast is an OpenSource product used by many companies (even Apple!). HashMap is a no-thread safe key-value implementation. If you need thread safety, you’ll use ConcurrencyHashMap. When you need to distribute your map against distributed JVMs, you use Hazel.getMap() but the rest is the same as for the Map interface (but not interface itsel