A Java geek

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

Nov 15, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Day 4

This is a a sum-up of talks I attended on the second day of Devoxx. It includes Unitils, anti-patterns, Scala, Angular JS and Apache TomEE.

Nov 14, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Day 3

-- the last evening was a little hard on me, shall we say. I begin the day at noon, which suits me just fine -- Securing the client-side by Mike West If you want the largest possible audience, chances are you’ll use HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Native hasn’t (yet) the same traction as those traditional technologies. Business logic is slowly moving from those big backends toward browsers. A prerequisite to anything is to send data securely, using HTTPS. There’s no reason today

Nov 13, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx 2012 – Day 2

This is a a sum-up of talks I attended on the second day of Devoxx. It includes Scala, front-end performances, Maven and JUnit.

Nov 12, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Day 1

This is a a sum-up of talks I attended on the second day of Devoxx. It includes Java EE and the integration of Weld and OSGI.

Nov 11, 2012 scala

Scala cheatsheet part 1 - collections

As a follow-up of point 4 of my previous article, here’s a first little cheatsheet on the Scala collections API. As in Java, knowing API is a big step in creating code that is more relevant, productive and maintainable. Collections play such an important part in Scala that knowing the collections API is a big step toward better Scala knowledge.

Nov 5, 2012 coursera scala

My view on Coursera's Scala courses

I’ve spent my last 7 weeks trying to follow Martin Odersky’s Scala courses on the Coursera platform. In doing so, my intent was to widen my approach on Functional Programming in general, and Scala in particular. This article sums up my personal thoughts about this experience. Time, time and time First, the courses are quite time-consuming! The course card advises for 5 to 7 hours of personal work a week and that’s the least. Developers familiar with Scala will probably tak

Oct 14, 2012 project management

The problem lies not in the technology

Let’s face it, I’m a technologist: I will gladly debate with you for hours on the merits of Java vs Scala, SQL vs NoSQL, Google vs Apple or what have you. But in fact, none of this matters. Statistics show that more than half of software projects are failures; I’ve been doing software projects in various positions for more than 10 years and root cause for failures was never the technology.

Oct 7, 2012 mock powermock testng unit testing

PowerMock, features and use-cases

Even if you don’t like it, your job sometimes requires you to maintain legacy applications. It happened to me (fortunately rarely), and the first thing I look for before writing as much as a single character in a legacy codebase is a unit testing harness. Most of the time, I tend to focus on the code coverage of the part of the application I need to change, and try to improve it as much as possible, even in the total lack of unit tests.