Posted by Wilfred Springer in the late evening: February 6th, 2010
I’m proud to say that – during the six years of employment at the company formerly known as Sun Microsystems – I wrote all my documents in DocBook. Of course there was the occasional warning that we were all expected to use StarOffice, but by making sure the DocBook generated output resembled the printed material produced by HQ, it never turned into a big argument. And since my entire DocBook chain was built from open source, I had to use Apache FOP.
Apache FOP has a long history (more…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: January 11th, 2010
There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to validate an XML document against a schema, so I figured I would roll my own library for it. Now, with that library, validating against a schema all of a sudden becomes easy. In the past, I hardly ever considered validating a document against a schema in my tests, but now I find myself doing it all over the place.
Anyway, I will just give a brief introduction. (And there really isn’t that much to talk about.)
First of all, let’s assume that you have a File reference to an XML file (xml) and a File reference to a RelaxNG schema file (schema) (more…)
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.
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: November 11th, 2009
It was actually quite a while ago since I looked at Spring ME, but then Davide Cerbo mentioned that he had presented Spring ME on Android at a Rome Spring meeting. Way cool! It triggered me thinking about the things that – according to the document I once wrote about it – were not implemented yet.
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!
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?
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!)
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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.)
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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.
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.