A Java geek

Chicken and egg problem with Spring and Vaadin

The more I dive into Vaadin, the more I love it: isolation from dirty plumbing, rich components, integration with portlets, Vaadin has it all. Anyway, the more you explore a technology, the bigger the chances you fall down the proverbial rabbit hole. I found one just yesterday and came up with a solution. The problem is the following: in Vaadin, application objects are tied to the session. Since I’m a Spring fanboy, it does make sense to use Spring to wire all my dependencies.

Technical

frankel.ch goes mobile!

If you do browse this site with your computer, chances are you didn’t notice anything. On the contrary, if you browse it with a mobile device (an iPhone for example), it’s kind like a new user experience! In fact, in almost 1 minute, I made this site adapted to mobile browsing. How? Just used my friend Google who found WPTouch, a WordPress plugin which in fact behaves like a configurable theme, but only on mobiles. WPTouch features are impressive (and free).

Java

DRY and skinny war

In this article, I will show you how the DRY principle can be applied when using the skinny war configuration of the maven-war-plugin. While packaging an EAR, it is sometimes suitable that all libraries of the different WARs be contained not in their respective WEB-INF/lib folders but at the EAR level so they are usable by all WARs. Some organizations even enforce this rule so that this is not merely desiarable but mandatory. Using Maven, nothing could be simpler.

Technical

GMail HTML signature

This time, I won’t ramble about some point of details that only a handful of specialists have thought about. This time, this article has the potential to touch ten thousand of normal people across the world (I only exaggerate a little of course). This time, I will blog about GMail signatures. Ever wanted to have a nicely crafted signature in your emails? Outlook has the feature. I guess other fat softwares have the feature. Guess what? GMail doesn’t.

Java

Debugging Hibernate generated SQL

In this article, I will explain how to debug Hibernate’s generated SQL so that unexpected query results be traced faster either to a faulty dataset or a bug in the query.

JavaEE

Vaadin Spring integration

I lately became interested in Vaadin, another web framework but where everything is done on the server side: no need for developers to learn HTML, CSS nor JavaScript. Since Vaadin adress my remarks about web applications being to expensive because of a constant need of well-rounded developers, I dug a little deeper: it will probably be the subject of another post. Anyway, i became a little disappointed when I wanted to use my favourite Dependency Injection framework, namely Spring, in Vaadin.

Development

Let others work for you with Selenium

With a provocation this big, I hope I’ve caught your attention. So, let’s draw some lines: the objective is, of course, not to let others do you work. It is to share work once between the client, the business analyst and the person that will run the acceptance test. From my point of view, all these persons do the same work: the client wants features. As such, he will test those features when the product will be deliveredthe business analyst will describe those features in details.

Java

Bean validation and JSR 303

In this article, I will show you how to use the new Bean Validation Framework aka JSR-303. The legacy Before getting the result that is JSR 303, aka the Bean Validation framework, there were two interesting attempts at validation framework. Each came from an end of the layers and focused on its scope. Front-end validation Struts was the framework to learn and use on the presentation layer in 2001-2002.

Development

Managing web sessions

In the previous article, I set up a cluster of 2 Tomcat instances in order to achieve load-balacing. It also offered failover capability. However, when using this feature, the user session was lost when changing node. In this article, I will show you how this side-effect can be avoided. Reminder: the HTTP protocol is inherently disconnected (as opposed to FTP which is connected). In HTTP, the client sends a request to a server, it gets its response and that’s the end.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog