A Java geek

Java Twitter integration

During the writing of Learning Vaadin, I create a sample application step-by-step. This application is in fact a Twitter client. Twitter provides a nice API along with its related documentation in order to interact with their site. However, I’d rather deal with a Java API that shields me from all the griity details of the how to let me focus on the what. Hunting for such a component gave me Twitter4j. During my development with Twitter4j, I was stuck with the authentication process.

JavaEE

Learning Vaadin

Vaadin is a Rich Internet Application framework in Java that let developers code applications in a very productive way. For more information regarding Vaadin, please consult its site. When one wants to learn a framework, one needs to read some documentation. In this regard, Vaadin provides plenty resources:

JavaEE

Identity federation and OpenId

Identity federation is a hot subject at this moment, at least for my customer. It began innocently enough: someone who did not belong to the organization needed to access an application. Not a problem, let’s register him. Some year later, needs number in thousands of users, and the identity management has outgrown its capacities: the software was sized for the organization, not for the myriad of third-party users around it.

Development

Cost of correcting rule breaks

Last week, Simon Brandhof and Freddy Mallet of Sonar team and me were discussing Vaadin uses. At the end of our meeting, and although Vaadin finally did not fit their particular needs regarding Sonar, the talk disgressed toward quality. As regular Sonar users know, the former includes a very interesting plugin aptly named Technical Debt plugin. As a reminder: Shipping first time code is like going into debt.

Technical

Dropbox and other backup products overview

I’m a happy Dropbox user but that doesn’t mean I’m not watching similar products, either for myself or my clients. I even made some comparison.

Technical

Both sides of the story

Amazing thing this week! Imagine this case: developers need to access production application servers logs. These are inaccessible for now because application servers machines are production level. So they are placed in a different network zone. Between the AS zone and the DEV zone, there’s a firewall configured to disallow access from developers machines.

Technical

Symbolic links for Windows

No Java this week, just the solution of a problem I’ve encountered in the past weeks. Don’t be scared, it’s computer-related. Since a couple of months, I’ve become severely addicted to the excellent Dropbox. It has three features, that linked together are particularly interesting for me: online backup, computer synch and file sharing.

JavaEE

Second try with Vaadin and Scala

My article from last week left me mildly depressed: my efforts trying to ease my Vaadin development was brutally stopped when I couldn’t inherit from a Java inner class in Scala. I wondered if it was an impossibility or mere lack of knowledge on my part. Fortunately, Robert Lally and Dale gave me the solution in their comments (many thanks to them). The operator used to access an inner class from Java in Scala is #.

JavaEE

Mixing Vaadin and Scala (with a touch of Maven)

People who are familiar with my articles know that I’m interested in Vaadin and also more recently in Scala since both can increase your productivity. Thus it is only natural that I tried to embed the best of both worlds, so to speak, as an experience. As an added challenge, I also tried to add Maven to the mix. It wasn’t as successful as I had wished, but the conclusions are interesting.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog