Building Monolithic Apps (Django?), Not So Fast.

Jan

5

2013

Over the past few years (in my personal life) I’ve built a handful and launched a handful of web applications, predominately built using Django.   Professionally, I’m a JVM developer who’s witnessed the shift from Java to alternative JVM languages like Groovy (I’m a big time fan), and a growing disfavour with full stack frameworks like ...
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Java

Upgrading to Hibernate Search 3.2.0 (w/ Seam)

May

31

2010

A couple weeks back I set out to upgrade the version of Hibernate Search that one of our applications was using. The boys at JBoss had recently released Hibernate Search 3.2.0 and it looked pretty sweet. The possibility of performance improvements around indexing was enough to make me upgrade. Unfortunately, like most software frameworks, Hibernate ...
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Open Source Software

Maintaining OEM’d Source

Sep

7

2009

Background The company I work for made the decision to OEM a product from a partner, rather than invest valuable development time to build something that has essentially been commoditized. Development resources are at a premium and we consciously don’t want to spend any more time on this code base than we have to, we’re ...
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Java

DeveloperForce.com : Initial Thoughts and Experiences using the Platform

Jul

8

2009

The team and I have recently kicked off a rather ambitious project.  In an attempt to help accelerate the early development activities, we’ve made a decision to build a series of one-off implementations using the DeveloperForce.com platform (salesforce.com sans the sales CRM portions). The objective is to learn enough about the platform during these initial ...
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Open Source Software

Hibernate Scalability Talk

Jun

20

2009

Good talk from Emmanuel Bernard and Max Ross on the subject over at InfoQ. Both Hibernate Core and Shards are covered, as well as Hibernate Search. Particularly interesting for me was his overview of the different mechanisms by which you can support multiple customer schemas securely and with decent performance.  The product I’m actively working ...
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Open Source Software

Framework misuses are still your bugs.

Mar

3

2009

I spent a few hours tonight trying to diagnose a problem we were running into tonight with some web application code. That was on top of the better part of a day that was spent by another developer digging into the code. Development ain’t easy, and frameworks for all their glory strive to make the ...
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Open Source Software

“No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better.”

Feb

18

2009

Interesting little article over on InfoQ talking about Alan Cooper’s book About Face.   Few key points: Design for Intermediates Users Use Tools that Help Beginners to Become Intermediates Less is More Design for the Probable, Provide for the Possible Eliminate Errors or Confirmation Dialogs   There’s an interesting closing comment discussing the need (or ...
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Java

Good ANTLR Resource

Sep

12

2008

I was playing around with ANTLR today and was at bit overwhelmed at both the detail and lack of detail in various documentation and resources I was able to find. Plenty of grammar examples kicking around but some more recent tutorials that used ANTLR v3 would have been helpful. The problem I’m trying to solve ...
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Java

Testing with Unitils

Aug

30

2008

I was doing some reading and came across Unitils (1.1 was just released). Unitils is an open source library aimed at making unit testing easy and maintainable. Unitils builds further on existing libraries like DBUnit and EasyMock and integrates with JUnit and TestNG . Unitils provides general asserion utilities, support for database testing, support for ...
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Java

Seam + Groovy + Maven : Nice Simple Hibernate POJOs

Jul

1

2008

Being a long weekend, I had a couple hours yesterday to mess around with my Maven build in the hopes of integrating Groovy and ridding myself of a lot of Hibernate boilerplate (you know, all the annoying getters/setters). I’m currently working on a Seam-based prototype and Groovy is certainly applicable to aspects other than Hibernate ...
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Java