A Java geek

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.

Development

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.

JavaEE

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.

Java

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.

Miscellaneous

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.

Miscellaneous

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'.

Technical

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.

Event

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.

Event

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.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog