A Java geek

Hibernate hard facts – Part 7

This is the 7th post in the Hibernate hard facts focus series. In this post, we’ll have a look at the difference between saveOrUpdate() and merge(). Hibernate’s way for updating entities is through the update() method. We can get an object, detach it from the session and then update it later with no problem.

JavaEE

New declarative security features in Servlet 3.0

Servlet 3.0 is not only about the replacement of the web.xml deployment descriptor by annotations. In this article, we’ll see what improvement it makes in the realm of security. In Servlet 2.5 (and before that), declarative security was about the following features: authentication method (BASIC, FORM, etc)authorization to differents parts of the application (web application resources)data confidentiality and integritysession time-out Servlet 3.

Technical

Vaadin courses on JavaBlackBelt

For those of you who haven’t heard of JavaBlackBelt, it’s an e-learning community site. Once registered, users can use the site in a variety of ways: First, one can take courses on a variety of programming-related subjects.Then, one can pass exams on these subjects. Each exam is made of questions one has to anwser in a limited time frame. Passing an exam gives you knowledge points; with enough knowledge points, you get the next belt, until the fabled black belt!

JavaEE

New Filter API in Vaadin 6.6

Vaadin is available in version 6.6 preview since this week. Among other interesting enhancements, one surely caught my attention, the new Filter API. To understand why it’s so interesting, one must know how it’s handled in version 6.5 and before. But first, a word about filters in Vaadin: they are used in containers, which handle collections of items, in order to sort out eligible items.

JavaEE

First try with CloudFoundry

The cloud is here to stay. When Google made Java available for its App Engine PaaS platform, I was there and I tried it. Last week, VMWare launched its competitor, the CloudFoundry platform, and I wanted to try it the same way. Since then, I’ve played a little with it and it’s full of good surprises compared to Google App Engine.

Development

100% code coverage!

The basis of this article is a sequences of tweets betwen me and M. Robert Martin, on April 8th 2011: If you have 100% coverage you don’t know if your system works, but you do know that every line you wrote does what you thought it should.@unclebobmartin 100% code coverage doesn’t achieve anything, save making you safer while nothing could be further from the truth.@nicolas_frankel 100% code coverage isn’t an achievement, it’s a minimum requirement.

Java

Cons of custom assertion matchers

Ten years ago, the only tests we knew of were users acceptance tests. The last decade saw a gigantic leap forward: it brought unit testing. Unit testing was made popular with JUnit. In turn, TestNG added annotations to the test classes, making them ever easier. Then, EasyMock provided the means to mock our class dependencies in a test context while Mockito streamlined the process of doing so.

Java

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:

Nicolas Fränkel's blog