Guaranteed Delivery in Spring Integration
Posted by Wilfred Springer just before lunchtime: November 27th, 2009
This is not a rant against ESB. I am not saying that ESBs never have a purpose, nor suggest that it's all just a scam. If - after having read this post - you got the impression that I suspect a conspiracy behind ESB, then I want to tell you up front that this is certainly not what I intended to say.
JUnit 4.7 @Rules!!!
Posted by Wilfred Springer mid-afternoon: October 23rd, 2009
It took me a while before I really understood what this @Rule business in JUnit 4.7 is really about, but I like it!
The XML Instance Gamut
Posted by Wilfred Springer terribly early in the morning: October 19th, 2009
If you happen to be in the business of writing software serving XML documents or consuming XML documents - and if you read this post, then there is a fair chance you are - then there is always one big challenge: how do you make sure your service or client is capable of dealing with all of the XML documents you could possibly expect to be passed around?
And if you happen to come from the test-driven world, the answer is obviously: by testing it. However, if you try to do that, things might be harder than you expect at first.
What about schemas?
Organizing Archetypes
Posted by Wilfred Springer in the late evening: October 14th, 2009
Maven archetypes are an excellent way of allowing people to create instances of a particular type of project without having them to know or worry about all of the peculiarities and details. (And the latest incarnations of the Maven Archtetype Plugin are actually way better than I realized: somewhere down the line, they introduced the ability to use Velocity templates for parameterizing the output. Nice!)
(more...)
Pair Programming for Sysadmins
Posted by Wilfred Springer in the early evening: September 6th, 2009
At Xebia, we work quite a lot with teams distributed across the globe. In the true spirit of extreme programming, that means your pair programming buddy might very well be in a completely other timezone. In my team, Mikogo is quite a popular solution in situations like these. However, it is not always the most efficient solution. Especially if you and your team mate are working together remotely on a system neither yours nor your buddy's. Which is exactly what we are doing if we are working on our EC2 based deployments. (That basically means someone from our Dutch team working with someone in our Indian team on a system in the US.)
(more...)
Helping JAVA to find its way _HOME
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: July 8th, 2009
This entry is about JAVA_HOME. (Yep, you read that right.) I never imagined I would ever write a post on an environment variable, but - hey - I have been breaking my jaws on this one for a while, so I figured there are probably a couple of other people happy to learn about the solution.
@Composite for Unpacking COFF Data
Posted by Wilfred Springer just before lunchtime: July 4th, 2009
A while ago, I compared Preon with Erlang's bit syntax. I looked at one one of the examples from "Programming Erlang" in particular; an example that illustrates how to decode MPEG headers using Erlang. However, this is not the only example in that chapter, so I decided to take a stab at one of the other examples as well.
Open Letter to Geertjan Wielenga
Posted by Wilfred Springer mid-morning: June 26th, 2009
Geertjan Wielenga has been trying to pull me back into the NetBeans community for a couple of years in a row now. I admire his perseverance; if this is typical for the whole NetBeans team, then Eclipse is going out of the window some day soon.
Pecia: Towards a Fluent Interface for Building Documents
Posted by Wilfred Springer in the early morning: June 25th, 2009
1. Introduction
There is a chance that - after having read this article - you conclude that nobody in a sane state of mind would ever use what this article is going to suggest. Let me therefore start with disclaimer: I have never made any public claims regarding my state of mind.
Apart from that, I figure an article about a technology almost nobody is using, is still way more interesting than an article everyone is using. In fact, I guess the more senior you are, the more things you have already seen before, the less likely it is you will be you will be interested in something people already did many times before. Based on that, you might as well say that the most experienced people around will probably be interested in stuff that nobody is using. This article is for those people.
With that out of the way: Pecia is a new way of generating documentation from your Java applications. You will probably wonder why we need yet another way of generating documents from Java, and I have to admit that the Java world is not in a bad shape if it comes down to the number of frameworks allowing you to generate documents. However, Pecia takes another stab at it, and I just had to see if it would work. You be the judge whether it makes sense.
JavaOne 2009
Posted by Wilfred Springer mid-morning: June 22nd, 2009
Two weeks ago, I presented Spring ME at JavaOne. It was an interesting conference in more than one way. Some things were just plain surreal. Larry Ellisson calling onto the OpenOffice community to work on integration of JavaFX? What was that all about? And I haven't seen the official numbers yet, but the number of attendees must have been an all-time low. Same with the number of parties. 
Nevertheless, I have to say I had a marvelous week. Despite the economic slow-down, the quality of the talks was great, and it surely doesn't seem to have prevented people from exploring new ideas. From my perspective, the big topics were Java FX (largely Sun pushing), Cloud Computing (lot of vendor push, quite some traction behind it, very little convergence) and other languages on the VM (mostly based on traction from the community).
In summary, I would say that there is pretty widespread agreement that multi-core and cloud computing have exposed some of the weaknesses of the traditional VM, language and enterprise architectures. However, Java is certainly not dead, and it is not going to anywhere soon; instead, it's very much alive and kicking. However, there are quite a few different perspectives on how Java should evolve from all of this. And since a significant bit of the platform is driven by the community, the shake-out of these different opinions will take some time. Nevertheless, all of these initiatives are surely promising, and there seems to be a strong commons sense of avoiding ceremony. I'm sure something good will come out.
The rest of this entry are just some of the highlights I picked from my notebook.
(more...)
Archives
Xebia Sites
Categories
- Java (282)
- Agile (109)
- General (50)
- Testing (42)
- Performance (42)
- Hibernate (36)
- Scrum (33)
- Podcast (31)
- Architecture (31)
- Spring (28)
- SOA (24)
- Maven (22)
- Project Management (22)
- Middleware (23)
- Deployment (14)
- Flex (17)
- JPA (17)
- Eclipse (15)
- Xebia Labs (15)
- Quality Assurance (14)