A Java geek

Apr 18, 2012 devoxx

Devoxx Fr 2012 Day 1

Though your humble writer is a firm believer in abstraction from underlying mechanics, I chose the following conference because there are some use-cases when one is confronted by performance issues that come from mismatch between the developer’s intent and its implementation. Matching them require a better understanding of what really happens.

Apr 15, 2012 spring

Spring: profiles or not profiles?

I’m a big user of Spring, and I must confess I didn’t follow all the latest additions of version 3.1. One such addition is the notion of profile. Context Profiles are meant to address the case when you use the same Spring configuration across all your needs, but when there are tiny differences. The most frequent use-case encountered is the datasource. For example, during my integration tests, I’m using no application server so my datasource comes from a simple org.apache.

Apr 9, 2012 unit testing user interface

Dependency Injection on GUI components

For some, it goes without saying but a recent communication made me wonder about the dangers of implicitness in it. In my book Learning Vaadin, I showed how to integrate the Vaadin web framework with the Spring DI framework: in order to make my point, I wired Vaadin UI components together. I did this because I didn’t want to go into the intricacies of creating a service layer. I had some comments questioning whether injecting UI components was relevant.

Apr 1, 2012 griffon groovy

Trying Griffon and loving it

Admittedly, Java’s Swing is a much under-estimated technology for intra-enterprise applications. I’ve had the chance to work for some enterprises that used it and I’ve very much admired the delivered applications. At that time, they were far superior in usability compared to those meager web-applications (even though the gap is closing). That is not to say that Swing is a silver bullet, far from it.

Mar 25, 2012

Dangers of implicitness

This article is a reaction to the 'Unlearn, Young Programer' article I read the other day. It would be better if you would take some time to read it before, but for the lazy kind (of those I’m part of), here’s a short resume. The author seems to be a seasoned software developer. He makes the observation that when he tasks other junior developers to do some things, results are often not what he expected.

Mar 18, 2012 virtualization

I made the step forward into virtualization

I have heard of virtualization 5 or 6 years ago and at the time, I didn’t understand the real implications of its use, save it was a tool toward an agile infrastructure. More recently, I heard that a virtual platform could be run on top of an undetermined number of physical platforms: you need more power, you can add platforms; a platform is down, there’s no effect (except a decrease in performance).

Mar 11, 2012 html 5

HTML5, still a non-event?

A little less than 4 years ago, I wrote an article named 'HTML 5: a non-event'. That was before the HTML5 umbrella move grouping HTML 5, CSS 3, WebSockets, etc. and before the HTML5 logo. At that time, there was a buzz around HTML 5 coming to save developers from pesky HTML 4 limitations. At the end of the article, I was doubtful of the real value of HTML 5 in the short-term and predicted the coming of the final specification 2 years after (2010) at best.

Mar 4, 2012 spring transaction

A Spring hard fact about transaction management

In my Hibernate hard facts article serie, I tackled some misconceptions about Hibernate: there are plenty of developers using Hibernate (myself including) that do not use it correctly, sometimes from a lack of knowledge. The same can be said about many complex products, but I was dumbfounded this week when I was faced with such a thing in the Spring framework. Surely, something as pragmatic as Spring couldn’t have shadowy areas in some corner of its API.

Feb 26, 2012 osgi

OSGi in action

This review is about OSGi in action from Richard Hall, Karl Pauls, Stuart McCulloch, and David Savage from Manning Publications. Facts 11 chapters, 548 pages, $49.99Covers OSGi R4.2 Pros Easy step-by-step learning approachCovers many OSGi pitfallsUse-case study included Cons Too much material 😉 Conclusion I tried once or twice to tackle OSGi on my own, without much success.

Feb 19, 2012 security

Trust stores and Java versions

My debugging contest of the week happened to take place on a IBM AIX system. The bug happened when we upgraded from Java version 1.4 to version 6 (which I admit is a pretty big step). Suddenly, an old application stopped working and its log displayed NoSuchAlgorithmException. A bit of context: when Java applications have to connect to hosts with SSL over HTTP, they must trust the host - it’s the same as when you browse a site with HTTPS.