A Java geek

Playing with Spring Roo and Vaadin

One year ago, under the gentle pressure of a colleague, I tried Spring Roo. I had mixed feelings about the experience: while wanting to increase productivity was of course a good idea, I had concerned regarding Roo’s intrusiveness. I left it at that, and closed the part of my memory related to it. Now, one year later, I learned that my favourite web framework, namely Vaadin, had set their sight on a Roo plugin. That was enough for me to get back on my feet and try again.

JavaEE

Hades, your next persistence angel?

A year ago, a colleague of mine showed me a very interesting framework named Krank (latter renamed to Crank because the previous name means 'sick' in German, which does not bode well for any framework). Crank’s goal was to ease development on top of Java Persistence API 1.0. Two interesting features caught my attention at the time.

Java

Tread carefully with entities equality

I’ve barely begun Scala and I learned plenty of facts on Java (see previous article on a javac compiler quirk). Now, I’ve come upon another interesting point, this time completely unrelated to the compiler. It’s strange because now that I’ve realized it exists, it makes me nervous on how I could have ignored it before. The core of the problem lies in mutable objects.

Technical

Critical analysis of frameworks comparison

Let me first say I was not at Devoxx 2010. Yet, I heard from Matt Raible’s Comparing JVM Web Frameworks. Like many, as I read the final results, I was very surprised that my favorite framework was not ranked first. I passed through all stages of grief, then finally came to realize the presentation itself was much more interesting than the matrix. The problem lies not in the matrix, but in the method used to create it.

Development

Stay up-to-date and think in contexts

How many times in the last couple of years have you seen an initialization servlet (a servlet which is used only once with the load-on-startup parameter) although a context listener could have been used in its place? How many times have you seen a JSP full of indecipherable scriplets though equivalent taglibs were available? How many times have you disagreed with someone who wanted to talk you into using DTO regardless of your application’s needs?

JavaEE

Why CDI won't replace Spring

CDI is part of JavaEE 6 and that’s a great move forward. Now, there’s a standard telling vendors and developers how to do DI. It can be refined, but it’s here nonetheless. Norms and standards are IMHO a good thing in any industry. Yet, I don’t subscribe to some people’s points of view that this means the end of Spring. There are multiple DI frameworks around here and Spring is number one. Why is that? Because it was the first? It wasn’t (look at Avalon).

Java

A Java language quirk

The boys at Sun made really an amazing thing when designing Java. I mean, everyone is cursing it now, predicting Java is dead because of its verbosity and such but could those persons have done better? I doubt it. Just consider Java 's penetration in the enterprise… Verbosity enforces readibility, a nice feature in the enterprise where people move from position to position, in and out. However, I have stumbled upon a troubling quirk.

JavaEE

The OpenSessionInView antipattern

With such a controversial title, I’m bound to be the target of heated comments. Although provocative, such is not my goal, however, I just want to initiate an educated debate between people that are interested into thinking about the problem. The origin of this post was a simple discussion between developers of different level of experience on Hibernate. The talk was about eager-, lazy-loading and the infamous LazyInitializationException.

JavaEE

Server-client push with Vaadin

I’m more and more comitted into Vaadin since I see so many advantages to this solution. This time, I’ve investigated how to push server data to the client. Vaadin is a general purpose framework that is wise enough not to force you to code in one way or another. Many features are available in the core distribution but many more are available in the add-ons directory. One such add-on let you add push feature to your simple application.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog