Xebia Blog

A couple of weeks back I was at the TiE Summit 2007. There I could hardly find anyone who was not interested in the mobile space. Mobile phone space definitely is something which cannot be missed given that today the number of mobile phones far out number the number of personal computers. Also, with each passing day they are getting better memory and better computing power. It would soon become a necessity for all major e-commerce sites to offer their services over the mobile phone assuming that they are not already working on it. Apart from this there is a lot of potential for specific mobile phone applications which would help the consumer do better personally and professionally.

Almost coinciding with the mobile space euphoria, Google released Android. It is a a fully integrated mobile "software stack" that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications. The important objective is to deliver a vastly improved web experience on mobile devices, equal to what people can experience on a desktop computer, in contrast to the limited functionality on today's mobile phones.

At the TiE Summit I also heard many speakers saying that “portal is dead.” The next technology wave is dependent on the platform. Many applications and services would be built depending on the platform and a business would be successful depending on which platform does it align with. So if you align on the Android platform then assuming that Android is successful, you could be successful as an Android service provider, Android powered device maker etc etc. HTC would be launching Android powered phones in 2008.

Given all of the above I decided to check out the Android offering over the weekend and here are my initial findings
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Filed under: General, Java
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I have used the mylyn plugin before (it was called mylar then), but I never had a project where it could be really useful. But now I that I have, I'm really enthusiastic.

First let me explain what mylyn is. According to their own website it is a: "Task-Focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy". It does this by integrating with your task repository (issue tracking systems like jira, trac, bugzilla), so that when you need to switch to or from issues it will maintain the context of the issue you were working on, so that when you switch back you will have all the files you had opened and that we’re important then. This will reduce the overhead associated with switching between tasks.

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Filed under: Agile, Eclipse, Java
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Combining Groovy and Java

Everybody refactors (I hope). But what if your standard refactoring just isn’t good enough? Take the next step in refactoring into Groovy code and see how easy it is to integrate Groovy into your existing Java projects.

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Filed under: Groovy, Java, Maven
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Escape Analysis in Java 6?

Last month we held our Speeding up Java applications course in the Dutch woods. When preparing for it, I discussed some of the new topics with my peer instructor and creator of the course Kirk Pepperdine. We explain new features of Java 6 and how they can help improve your performance. One of the more sophisticated features on the VM level is called escape analysis. The question is: does it really work? (more...)

Filed under: Java, Performance
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Just the other day someone asked me: “what is the difference between managing risks and working the impediment list?”. At that time I didn’t get much further than "impediments may be risks and they may already be existing problems, but not all risks have to become impediments"… A correct answer in my opinion, but not a very clear or complete one. So let’s see if I can provide a better answer.

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Filed under: Agile, Project Management, Scrum
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Last three days I have been to JavaPolis 2007 in Antwerp. It was the first time that I went to this conference and I really liked it. Great things about it are it's location and, most of all, it's speakers. The location is a cinema. Slides and demo's are shown on huge screens that are normally used to show blockbusters. The list of speakers included heroes such as James Gosling, Joshua Blog, Bruce Eckel and Scott Ambler.

I will give some of my impressions.
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Filed under: Java
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Hibernate is a very mature and feature rich product that can be used to solve a lot of basic or advanced problems. One of its core features is the ability to map collections. If an entity contains a collection, for example a Map, Hibernate will map the entity and the map onto a relational structure (a number of tables) and allows the application to navigate through the collection without having to make explicit JDBC calls. Hibernate will under the hood perform the correct queries to fetch the data or even update rows in the database according to changes made by the application on the data structure in memory.

But what if you have a very large collection that you need to search for a single entry? For example, say the system is used to fetch the PostalCode a particular Street in a City. Fetching the complete collection of Streets and PostalCodes just to find out the PostalCode for a single street is not a very attractive idea. The normal approach would probably be to use a DAO and make an explicit query. Apart from the problem of getting the DAO object injected into the City entity, using a lazy Map is a more elegant solution.

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Filed under: Hibernate, Java
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A good team can make or break the success of a project. Where does this success come from? Is it the way of cooperation or is it the mixture of the right personality types in a team? Do you pick the right personalities and make them work together or does it happen naturally?

Different personality types contribute to a successful team. Although behavior can differ from a personality, it forms a base of behavior people feel comfortable with. Knowing your personality type can help you understand what makes you tick. This self-awareness is an important factor in being successful. In general a personality type will define 1) your flow of energy, 2) how you take in information, 3) how you prefer to make decisions, 4) the basic day-to-day lifestyle that you prefer.

Many methods can help discover personality types. Myers-Briggs type indicator, (i)DISC assessment, Enneagram of personality, etc. supply tests in order to figure out what personality type people have. Some of these methods need intensive testing, and are therefore hard to apply without doing the actual test. However some of the elements of a type can be noticed without intensive testing. For instance the way people get their energy. Do they get their energy from within themselves or from external sources? Do they absorb information in principles or in details? Are they comfortable with scheduled/structured or open/casual environments? Knowing these preferences it will be easier to approach and work with other person.
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Filed under: Agile, General
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I wanted to write a blog on Security Protocols. This was the course I liked the most during my College days. Lets look at some protocols and some of the ways these protocols can be attacked. These are some protocols that i studied during my college days.

The two most common words in Security world is Confidentiality and Integrity. Understanding these two terms is very crucial. In simple words Confidentiality means that only authorized entities can read information. Integrity means reassuring the recipient of the message that the message has not been altered since it was generated by a legitimate source. (more...)

Filed under: Security
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Displaytag is an open source suite of custom tags with which you can easily display a collection of Objects as a table including direct support for paging and sorting. Normally selecting a new page, or sorting the tables leads to a complete page-refresh. It is more user-friendly to refresh only the data in the table using Ajax technology, however Displaytag doesn't offer this out-of-the-box. But we can of course try to add support for this using one of the many Ajax frameworks that are currently available.

A non ajax enabled Displaytag would do a request to a controller for every action such as a sorting or selecting a next page. This would result in a complete page refresh (step 1-8 ). When we Ajax enable the Displaytag we skip the page refresh and only refresh a specific piece of the page using an exposed service which provides the updated HTML fragment (step 1a-8a).
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Filed under: Ajax, Java
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