Xebia Blog

Currenttly, I'm in the process of building a Grails application. While I've built several prototypes/quick hacks, this is actually the first 'real' application I'm building. "So", I thought, "if this is a real application, I'm in need of some real tests!". When you're in the normal flow of developing a Grails application, everything goes so fast, you almost forget about writing the tests. So I decided to do it a bit differently, and do it just like in Java: do it TDD!
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Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Java, Testing
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At April the 4th, 2008, we held another one of our quarterly Tech Rallies. A Tech Rally, as the name implies, is a whole day of technical training for the whole Software Development department.

The subject of an ITR can be almost anything, as long as it's technically focused, or related to our work. For example, previous Tech Rallies were about Ruby, Grails, CSS/Javascript/Ajax and Oracle Databases, to name a few. This time, our Tech Rally was about creating the best SCRUM tool ever. Quite a challenge, when you've only got 8 hours, but to give a quick conclusion: the results were very impressive. It's quite challenging to organize an event like this, so to put a bit of focus on the fun and team aspects, the group was divided into smaller groups (of approx. 4 people in size) and could pick the technologies of their liking.
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Filed under: Java
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These days a lot of big organizations are spending a good amount of money on making their websites more usable. And you may want to know why?

Think about a Fortune 50 organization (with around 100 thousands employee strength) which has many web applications working across the organization. It may have intranet applications, some business applications etc to facilitate business in effective way. These organizations spend a lot of money on IT spending and generally require many new applications every quarter. Now think about a case where all these new web based applications are different in their look and feel (navigation, fonts, colors etc) from each other.
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Filed under: Java, Usability
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The aim of this blog is to introduce the audience about JMatter framework and its features and capabilities.

JMatter is a software application framework. It is designed specifically for building business software applications for work groups. Variety of applications can be developed using JMatter like accounting software, software for legal firms etc.

The main advantage of JMatter applications is the massive reduction in the development time. Development time is unbelievably small when compared to traditional methods of developing software.

Let see how this is possible.
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Filed under: Frameworks, Java
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For as long as Java has been around, java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar have been nuisances. This will hopefully very soon be a thing of the past with the addition of JSR-310, the Date and Time API, to the Java API. At the basis of JSR-310 lies the Joda time library, which has been around for quite some time as a replacement for the standard Date and Calendar classes. However that this API is not without its own peculiarities need not come as a surprise, given the complexity of the human interpretation of time all over the world.
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Filed under: Java
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One of the most powerful features of Maven is it's reporting mechanism, also known as maven site. There are a lot of reports available which can give you an indication of the quality of your code. However if you overload yourself by adding too many reports or let the reports produce too much information everyone ignores them and the reports become useless.
In this blog I'll share which reports we chose in my current assignment and how you can customize certain Maven Reports to produce the information you want.

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Filed under: Java
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Quality is an everyday part of the life of a Xebia software developer. One of the ways to get insight into quality is by looking at metrics like FindBugs, PMD, Simian, Code Coverage, etc. With large software products consisting of different modules, quality assurance can become quite a trying task. This means that tools which alleviate this burden are a welcome addition to our toolbox.
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Filed under: Java, Maven, Quality Assurance
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Consider the following scenario: we want to have two select boxes and we want to add options from one to the other and back.
Currently, this is not easily possible in Wicket, even though there are a lot of extensions available.
This blog describes an easy way to create a component which does just that!

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Filed under: Ajax, Java
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Bart Guijt introduces us to the world of RIA, this is part 2 of the interview!

Bart tells us about;
- Microsoft Silverlight
- Open Laszlo
- Other RIA tookits
- Future of RIA

Hosted by Robert van Loghem

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under: Ajax, Flex, Java, Podcast
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The biggest Java event of the year is coming up again, the JavaOne. For me this is a place of inspiration. Seeing the newest technologies in action and talking to some of the great minds in the Java world, how can one not become inspired!
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Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Java, JavaOne
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