A Java geek

Nov 6, 2011 logging slf4j

Configuring Maven to use SLF4J

I mainly write articles for two reasons: to understand something that is new to me or to document something I regularly have to explain to others. This article definitely falls in the second category: in order to celebrate the new 1.0.0 version of Logback, I’ve decided to write down once and for all how to properly use SLF4J with Maven since it seems there’s no shortage of questions about it. Basics The basis of SLF4J is to have two separate components, one API and one implementat

Oct 30, 2011 vaadin

Learning Vaadin is out

This is it! After 10 monts of work, my first book is out: 'Learning Vaadin' is now available at Packt and Amazon. First things first, what’s is Vaadin? Vaadin is a presentation-layer web framework that let you easily develop Rich Internet Applications. It does so by provding an abstraction over the Servlet API and by letting developers assemble components to design screens (as opposed to pages as in previous generation web frameworks). If you got 5 minutes to spare, you can go try the tut

Oct 16, 2011

Simplest Push

When I began working more than 10 years ago, I expected push technologies from web (or application) servers. I was very disappointed when I realized that, no, there weren’t such things. Nowadays, there are many attemps at providing push technologies. They even come from such simple technologies as HTML: aside from WebSockets, I recently learned about Server-Sent Events, another push technology brought by HTML5.

Oct 9, 2011 maven

Maven doesn't suck, your POM does

Maven bashing is an all-time favorite: there are plenty of articles telling how Maven downloads the whole Internet, or how POMs are bloated and so on. While I agree that Maven could be perfected, I’m also aware that some (if not most) of its shortcomings are not intrinsic but are caused by (very) bad configuration. Worse, even if used correctly in your projects, problems sometimes come from third-party dependencies! You do not believe me? Well, two examples follow, from standard libraries

Oct 4, 2011 maven

Free eBook: Apache Maven 3 Cookbook

Dear readers, In order to celebrate the release of Apache Maven 3 Cookbook, Packt Publishing contacted me in order to hold a contest to grab a free copy of the eBook! To be frank, I haven’t a clue toward organizing a contest so the first three who send me a mail at nicolas at frankel dot ch with the subject 'Apache Maven 3 Cookbook' will be sent the eBook for free. Don’t waste your time: on your mark, ready, go! And thanks Packt for these gifts. Update[10h20]: Sorry folks, all

Oct 2, 2011 CDI fest testng

TestNG, FEST et CDI

No, those are not ingredients for a new fruit salad recipe. These are just the components I used in one of my pet project: it’ss a Swing application in which I wanted to try out CDI. I ended up with Weld SE, which is the CDI RI from JBoss. The application was tested alright with TestNG (regular users know about my preference of TestNG over JUnit) save the Swing GUI. A little browsing on the Net convinced me the FEST Swing testing framework was the right solution: It offers a DSL for end-

Sep 25, 2011 eclipse m2eclipse maven

Migrating from m2eclipse to m2e

Since Indigo, the Maven Ecliple plugin formerly known as m2eclipse became part of Eclipse release . The name of the plugin also changed from m2eclipse to m2e. This was not the sole change, however: the number of tabs on the POM has shrinked drastically, and the features as well. This will probably be the subject of a later post since I feel quite cheated by the upgrade.

Sep 11, 2011 m2eclipse maven

Better Maven integration leads to unforeseen consequences (bugs)

This week, I was faced with what seemed an near-insuperable problem. I was called by one of my dev: as soon as he upgraded his Eclipse (or more precisely, our own already-configured Eclipse), he couldn’t deploy to Tomcat through WTP. Here are the steps I took to resolve the problem and more general thoughts about upgrading and tooling. The log displayed a ClassNotFoundException, one involving Spring. So, the first step is to look under the hood. Provided you used the default configuration

Sep 4, 2011 dry maven

Skinny WAR done right

In a previous post, I wrote about how to create skinny WAR with Maven the DRY way: it was not the DRYier way to do it, as was demonstrated to me this week by my colleague Olivier Chapiteau (credit where credit is due). His solution is far more elegant; it is reproduced in the post for reference’s sake.

Aug 28, 2011

Enough spam

Spams are a blogger worst enemy. For me, things went worse gradually, until last month, when I had to face about 10 spam comments per day on average, even though I had the WP-SpamFree plugin installed. When spams were fewer, this was not a problem since I had to moderate comments beforehand: users saw nothing. On my part, however, that meant some precious time managing comments and with the number of spam raising, I couldn’t do it anymore. My first reflex was to turn authentication on: yo