Development Links

Micromanagement, often has a negative connotation associated with it. It is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of his or her subordinates or employees. Usually Agile development and micromanagement may seem to be opposite ends of spectrum however, they are more related than what meets the eye.

I guess Mr James lives in a funny la-la world where there are millions of programmers just dying to work at your startup. When you are the founder of a company, you want to skimp on frills; they seem like a waste of money to you. That's fine. But don't think that candidates interviewing at your company will have the same emotional attachment; they won't. They are looking for a nice place to work.

Follow these steps and we will build a complete Android development environment from scratch, starting on a fresh Windows installation. The whole process should not take more than 20-30 minutes, provided that you have a good internet connection.

Let's face it...we all have to learn to write Ant scripts at some point in time. And often we have to re-learn a bit of it, because we use different build tools from time to time, or someone else on the team spends more time with the build scripts then you. I'm glad that this is put together as a reference. If you are knee deep in Ant, consider getting "Ant In Action", but I hope that you aren't knee deep in it! "For this tutorial however I will go cover what ant is primarily used for, building a project and creating a deliverable, in this case a jar file. This will provide a good intro into the usage of ant and how it works."

Nevertheless Spring AOP framework comes with certain limitations in comparison to a complete AOP implementation, such as AspectJ. The most common problems people encounter while working with Spring AOP framework derive from the fact that Spring AOP is “proxy – based”.

Tomcat 7 is the first Apache Tomcat release to support the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2 specifications. Please note that Tomcat 7 requires Java 1.6 or better, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you are running OS X 10.5 or 10.6. Here are the easy to follow steps to get it up and running on your Mac

At times I was involved in discussions where people of top brass where also present. I was having (and still have) little experience compared to them. I used to hear lots of terms which clearly and smoothly surpassed my head. I was at times amazed by listening about friction, surface area and all in software design talks.

Sonar is an open platform to manage code quality. As such, it covers the 7 axes of code quality: * Architecture and Design * Comments * Coding rules * Duplications * Unit Testing * Potential bugs * Complexity Sonar has got a very efficient way of navigating, a balance between high-level view, dashboard, TimeMachine and defect hunting tools. This enables to quickly uncover projects and / or components that are in Technical Debt to establish action plans.

My friend Dan Allen's presentation on using Arquillian and ShrinkWrap to really test in the Java EE container - Don't Fake It!

I started to write this with Ant/Maven, and then switched to Gradle. I'll present few code snippets here, that should give you a decent understanding of difference that Gradle makes. Please judge for yourself if the switch from Ant/Maven to Gradle was worth the effort.

I'm uncomfortable with the increasing number of build tools available for Java. At the beginning, everything was simple : Ant was here, and did its job. However, while Ant is very good at build customization, it had the cons of its pros: for each project, you had to copy parts of your ant scripts from another project, or create an Ant plugin. However, in every organization, or worse, every developer had its own way of building projects, organizing source code and so you could rapidly come with projects which used the same build tool, but in a totally different manner.

The Hibernate team made it official when they recently switched the Hibernate 4 master branch on GitHub over to Gradle for its builds. Now is as good a time as any to learn how the Gradle build system works in comparison to Hibernate's earlier build system, Maven 2. If you're still wondering why the Hibernate developers decided to switch from Maven to Gradle, all you can do is read these explanations and see what other developers had to say in this StackOverflow thread.

As "Web 2.0" takes over, the role of software engineer is being re-factored as well. Gone are the days of the grey beards sitting in the corner....replaced with the convergence of technology and social media. BarCamps, meetups, learning followed with a little bit of happy hour.

Find out what customers ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500's have known since 2001. TopCoder's global community and unique model of competition-based development delivers higher quality results, faster and less expensively than has ever been previously possible.

I may be a Spring fanboy but I’m also convinced a technology should embrace standards. Although Spring is now a de facto standard, it is in competition with other products, like Google Guice for example. It makes my work as an architect harder since my craft is to devise the most perennial solutions: standards are my allies in achieving this goal. CDI, formerly known as JSR 299, is an attempt at describing a true standard on Dependency Injection. What makes CDI appealing at first glance is that both SpringSource and Google took a seat in the specifications team.

But it turns out--somewhat unintuitively--that if you inherit from a class that has an injection point in it--even if the injection point is defined in terms of Java EE and not CDI--and if that abstract class comes from a jar that is not a bean archive, then dependency injection by the CDI provider will not be applied to its injection point until you make sure that its jar file contains a META-INF/beans.xml file. A simpler way to put this is that for any given inheritance chain, all jars in the chain containing classes with injection points must be bean archives.

The Current State Due to Spring’s early success and adoption, Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 were pushed to greatly simplify the Java EE programming model, increase developer productivity and become much simpler to use than previous versions. The current Java EE 6 solutions are thus just now achieving the ability to compete against Spring's programming model. Developers now are ready to ask the question "Why you would prefer Spring?" Here is my take:

Amazon has announced the new AWS SDK for Java this March. The aim of the new SDK is to simplify the development of java applications that are hosted on the Amazon EC2.

I know from personal experience that when I begin a web project it’s so easy to choose a Content Management System (CMS) that I’m already familiar with. Even more so, it’s easy for me to reach for the popular choice that’s already well established. Many times this reasoning works the best. In the past, I’ve tinkered around with Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, amongst a few others. All of them have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Recently, I’ve had a chance to give SilverStripe a test drive. While it’s not perfect, it is brilliantly developed and easy to use. In this post I’ll present 5 reasons why SilverStripe may be the best option for your next big project. * The Community * An MVC Approach * The CMS is Very Customizable * AJAX Style Site Tree * Quick Learning Curve

"One of the first questions a client will ask you when you are tasked to develop a website is “how can I maintain it myself”. It used to be a very daunting prospect to build in functionality allowing a novice to update their own website. Today, the only difficult part is deciding which CMS you want to use. When it comes to content management systems (CMS) and publishing platforms, there are more than enough to choose from and it all depends on what exactly you are looking to do. While many CMS’s are overly complicated and require a certain level of technical expertise you may not have, there are a growing number of light, scalable and intuitive content management systems that will help you develop a dynamic website your client can update themselves."

With Java 7 (Dolphin), we’ll have some concurrency and collections updates with the JSR166y, extension of the JSR166 of Doug Lea. This post delves into the Fork/Join Framework, the TransferQueue collection, and the ThreadLocalRandom class. As multicores become the norm, concurrency can no longer be a specialization, but needs to part of normal operations for all developers.

Drupal is great with not only its flexibility, but also with how easily it can be customized to your needs by adding a free module from drupal.org. However, it could be overwhelming for beginners to find the modules that best fit their needs. Therefore, here is a little help.

"There have been a number of language[s] coming up lately," noted James Gosling today at Sun’s World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City when asked if Java was in any kind of danger from the newcomers. "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems."

...thinking about what the perfect programming language should look like. So Rob Pike’s talk at OSCON on the reasons behind Google’s Go came at the perfect time.
One of the main things that struck a chord with me in the talk was about type safety. Defining and initializing variables feels like bureaucracy. It’s like triple filling a credit card application form. And really, why is that necessary? Can’t the compiler deduce this duplicate information? Programming Java in a modern IDE makes that abundantly clear. Over half of what you type is generated by the IDE (autocompleted initializers and calls; getters, setters, who writes those by hand these days?)

Those in the know are aware that a Java web application can't be clustered unless it is marked as 'distributable' and Grails applications are not by default marked as such. The easy solution is to add the element to the web descriptor, but you won't find a web.xml file in a standard Grails application. That's because Grails generates the web descriptor on the fly when it needs one. Fortunately, a web.xml that you can edit is only a command away.

Hibernate and the Java Persistence API (JPA) are two leading technologies for managing the persistence and object relational mapping (ORM) of Java EE and Java SE applications. Hibernate's open source, lightweight and transparent framework simplified ORM by mapping database tables to persistent classes in XML files and generating the SQL script at runtime. JPA then made XML-based ORM much simpler by replacing the traditional XML mapping files with metadata annotation, enabling developers to persist the state of their Java applications to relational databases through metadata.

An article showing you how to create a: * Spring 3.0.3.RELEASE application * that is a desktop application (no application server/servlet container required) but might be deployed to a server too * and that connects to a database (HSQLDB) * using JPA 2.0 * without using provider specific code (such as Hibernate) in Java files * and that allows for declarative transaction management (next article).

Well, I've worked on Seam and RESTEasy integration last year, so this would be the comfortable option. The problem is: I know this stuff, so it's a safe fallback - I can always use that combination if everything else fails. But the grass always looks greener on the other side. So I definitely want to look at other solutions first, see what they have to offer. Also, Bill just now started talking about a non-servlet deployment option for RESTEasy, which is what I'd use.

In this showcase you'll see the following in action: * The simplest possible @Controller * Mapping Requests * Obtaining Request Data * Generating Responses * Message Converters * Rendering Views * Type Conversion * Validation * Forms * File Upload * Exception Handling