A Java geek

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.

Development

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).

Technical

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.

Java

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.

Book

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.

Java

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.

Java

Announcing More Vaadin

During the writing of 'Learning Vaadin', I had many themes I wanted to write about: components data, SQL container filtering, component alignment and expand ration, separation of concerns between graphic designers and developers, only to name a few. Unfortunately, books are finite in space as well as in time and I was forced to leave out some interesting areas of Vaadin that couldn’t fit in, much to my chagrin.

Java

CDI worse than Spring for autowiring?

Let’s face it, there are two kinds of developers: those that favor Spring autowiring because it alleviates them from writing XML (even though you can do autowiring with XML) and those that see autowiring as something risky. I must admit I’m of the second brand. In fact, I’d rather face a rabbied 800-pounds gorilla than use autowiring. Sure, it does all the job for you, doesn’t it?

Java

Adapters in JAXB

Java XML Binding (aka JAXB) is part of many applications since it provides a convenient API to marshall/unmarshall Java to/from XML. Like so many area, the devil is in the detail, like when one has to unmarshall a JAXB-incompatible class. Such classes come across one’s code for a variety of reasons: design, legacy, third-party… Suffice to say that such a sand grain can be a blocker for any project.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog