A Java geek

Nicolas Fränkel's blog

Safely give away your demo applications

Last month, I had to develop a Proof-of-Concept web application for a potential customer. Everything went fine, but at the end of the meeting, the customer asked 'Surely you will give us the demo so we can play with it further on our own'. I was pretty sure of my craft, so I had no problem about bugs and yet I gently refused anyway. Why so? Because I didn’t want to risk that my customer open the WAR and see how I made things happen.
Swing

Flamingo tutorial

In this article, I will provide you with the documentation to easily use the Flamingo framework and more precisely, its ribbon widget. Never say that Microsoft never innovates: in Office, it introduced an interesting concept, the ribbon band. The ribbon band is a toolbar of sort. But whereas toolbars are fixed, ribbons layout can change according to the width they display. If you have such an application, just play with it for a few seconds and you will see the magic happens
CDI Swing

Lessons learned from CDI in Swing

Sinced I dived into CDI, I explored classical Java EE uses. Then, I used CDI into a pet project of mine to see how it could be used in Swing applications. This article sums up what lessons I learned from itthis far. This article assumes you have some familiarity with CDI; if not, please read my previous articles on CDI (CDI an overview part 1 and part 2) or read the documentation. In my last attempts at Swing (I’m more of a web developer), I figured it could be nice to config
tomcat

Tomcat 6 Developer's guide

This review is about Tomcat 6 Developer’s guide by Damodar Chetty from Packt Publishing. Facts 11 chapters, 395 pages, 44$99This book covers how Tomcat works: Server,  Service, Connector, Valve, Pipeline, Engine, Host, Context, Wrapper and Manager won’t hold any secrets anymoreThis book is intended for administrators that want to know how their product work and architects that need to bring additional functionnality into it Pros There’s not much details on Tomcat’s
CDI

CDI, an overview - Part 2

In the previous part of CDI, we saw some injection, qualifiers and scope. Now, it’s time to browse through more advanced features. Producers Previous examples cannot resolve all our use-cases. Some of these include: injection of random valuesinjection of context-dependent valuein general, places where the injection process cannot be narrowed down to a simple new() These hint at a very well-known pattern, the factory. Factories are implemented in JSR-299 as producers. Let’s tak
jawr

Decrease your pages load time, one year later

More than one year ago, I blogged about pages load time and Jawr. Since then, either my projects were intranet applications where load time was not an issue or we had no say in the tools used. So, I had no possibility to use any of the tools I found then. Now, I’m soon to be faced by an application that will be used by people outside our network and I definitely want the application to be as responsive as possible. Armed with my previous Yahoo best practices, I hunted on the web for tools t
spring vaadin

Chicken and egg problem with Spring and Vaadin

The more I dive into Vaadin, the more I love it: isolation from dirty plumbing, rich components, integration with portlets, Vaadin has it all. Anyway, the more you explore a technology, the bigger the chances you fall down the proverbial rabbit hole. I found one just yesterday and came up with a solution. The problem is the following: in Vaadin, application objects are tied to the session. Since I’m a Spring fanboy, it does make sense to use Spring to wire all my dependencies. As such, I