A Java geek

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.

Development

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.

Java

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.

Java

Use local resources when validating XML

Depending of you enterprise security policy, some - if not most of your middleware servers have no access to Internet. It’s even worse when your development infrastructure is isolated from the Internet (such as banks or security companies). In this case, validating your XML against schemas becomes a real nightmare. Of course, you could set the XML schema location to a location on your hard drive. But about about your co-workers then?

Development

Why I enrolled in an online Scala course

When I heard that the Coursera online platform offered free Scala courses, I jumped at the opportunity. Here are some reasons why: Over the years, I’ve been slowly convinced that whatever the language you program in your professional life, learning new languages is an asset as it change the way you design your code. For example, the excellent LambdaJ library gave me an excellent overview of how functional programming can be leveraged to ease manipulation of collections in Java.

JavaEE

Web Services: JAX-WS vs Spring

In my endless search for the best way to develop applications, I’ve recently been interested in web services in general and contract-first in particular. Web services are coined contract-first when the WSDL is designed in the first place and classes are generated from it. They are acknowledged to be the most interoperable of web services, since the WSDL is agnostic from the underlying technology.

Java

Lessons learned from integrating jBPM 4 with Spring

When I was tasked with integrating a process engine into one of my projects, I quickly decided in favor of Activiti. Activiti is the next version of jBPM 4, is compatible with BPMN 2.0, is well documented and has an out-of-the-box module to integrate with Spring. Unfortunately, in a cruel stroke of fate, I was overruled by my hierarchy (because of some petty reason I dare not write here) and I had to use jBPM. This articles tries to list all lessons I learned in this rather epic journey.

Java

XML validation with imported/included schemas

Recently, I tried to help a teammate design a WSDL file. I gently drove him toward separating the interface itself in the WSDL file and domain objects in a XML Schema file. One thing leading to another, I also made him split this XSD into two separate files, one including another for design purposes. Alas, tests were already present, and they failed miserably after my refactoring, complaining about a type in the included file not being found.

Java

Re-use your test classes across different projects

Sometimes, you need to reuse your test classes across different projects. These are two use-cases that I know of: Utility classes that create relevant domain objects used in different modulesDatabase test classes (ans resources) that need to be run in the persistence project as well as the integration test project Since I’ve seen more than my share of misuses, this article aim to provide an elegant solution once and for all.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog