A Java geek

1. Generalities Web applications have several advantages over traditional client server applications: since business code comes from a unique server (forget clustering here), they are always up-to-date. Moreover, deployment of a new version is only a matter of minutes. They have one big drawback, though. Since HTML code is sent through the network, responsiveness is generally much less than that of traditional applications. The responsiveness of an interactive system describes how quickly

With new JEE 5 standard has come the EJB3 specifications. From an historical point of view, EJBs come into 3 different flavors: (i) Entity for persistence, (ii) Session for business logic and (iii) Message-Driven for listeners. Entity EJB are the most time-consuming to develop in their 2.1 version. Apart from the inherent complexity of EJB (local and remote interfaces, homes), developing an EJB 2 is error-prone because of the mapping mechanism. All in all, EJB 2 development really needs a very sp

Noticed anything different on this blog? No? Yet, I upgraded WordPress from version 2.5 to version 2.7.1. Since you had no problems viewing this post, we can safely admit the upgrade process was entirely successful. The upgrade process is very simple since WordPress is developed in PHP. Just copy (and sometimes overwrite) the contents of the wordpress folder to your webserver and presto, you got the new version. I must admit I was a little afraid something would go wrong…​ And what

If like me you’re traveling often, and develop while doing so, you don’t want to waste time. Every laptop nowadays has a wifi interface: problem is finding the hotspot, not an easy task on a plane or on a train. Once, I used to download and save each and every Javadoc of Java, JEE and the various OpenSource frameworks I used (Struts, Hibernate, Spring, you get the idea). As bad luck would have it, 9 times out of 10, I hadn’t the correct version when I needed it. That was both

Usually, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: in our case, this is a mistake. You can find here a fully comprehensive pocket guide for Ubuntu v8.04 & v8.10. Have a look and enjoy!

Since it first version, Spring has known success. How is it possible that such an unknown framework (at the time) has become so widespread that companies demand to attendants to have Spring knowledge? I think they are two main reasons for this. First, the use of Inversion of Control really helps unit testing your classes and since unit tests have become a hot topic, it is natural that a framework that promote independency between classes should win. But they are other IoC frameworks available.

Sonar is a free OpenSource product that provides you with a general dashboard displaying information about the codebase of each configured project, such as: Number of failed tests,% of code coverage,% of rules compliance (more later),% of duplicated lines,and much more. Then you get an additional graphical information showing: a square for the size of your project’s codebase relative to the entire codebase’s size,a color (from red to green) for the % of rules compliance. Yet, w

In applications, one sometimes needs to run some processes before and after the application’s run. Whereas in an application server you have full access to the web application lifecycle through the javax.servlet.ServletContextListener interface, there is no such thing in a plain old Java application. Doing things before is easy enough since you have access to the application’s entry point in the form of the public void main(String[] args) method. But how do you things after? Where i

Ever heard of reflection? It’s a powerful Java technique that make it a possible for the JVM to manipulate objects the developer did not know about. There’s an entire API devoted to it: it is located under the java.lang.reflect package. For example, I once created a RPC web-services engine that could launch any methods of any class so long a the adequate class could be found on the classpath. It is not really hard to do. But the true power of reflection lies within its ability to