It’s Only Software

I’ve seen these antipatterns over and over again, and I thought it was time to write about them to help any folks who are new to Log4J out there. Senior developers – please share this with your junior peers and save yourself the pain of refactoring later! I’m interested in common mistakes or points of confusion that you’ve seen as well.

Read on to get a quick tutorial, or reference to point your developers at…

Continue reading “5 Common Log4J Mistakes”

… unix command-line tools, specifically for text processing. One of the most important learning experiences of my career was sitting down as part of my work at the CIIR and actually reading (cover to cover!) O’Reilly’s seminal book, sed and awk:

I followed up with a book on Unix shell scripting, and have literally used this knowledge countless times over multiple jobs and clients, in every imaginable situation. Every developer should take the time to learn these tools – the basics take only half a day – and then sit down and find something to use them on. You’ll wonder how you ever developed without them, and you can shock and amaze your Windows-loving colleagues with complex transformations and searches in a matter of seconds (of course, Windows-loving colleagues can always fall back on the venerable Cygwin suite).

What are tools that make you an efficient developer or designer? I’m not talking Eclipse or an IDE, but the stuff that wouldn’t immediately spring to mind. What esoteric (or not) learning experience has enhanced your productivity?

One of the reasons that I think Spring has become so popular in web applications is that there simply hasn’t been another widespread web application stack that (1) is free, (2) is not Java EE, and (3) doesn’t involve JSF.

Wicket (which I’ve written about in passing before) is a great component-based web framework that integrates nicely with Spring (and therefore Hibernate and/or JPA), making it a great choice for a web stack that looks like this:

• Wicket [web tier]
• Spring [transactional / business tier]
• Hibernate [data access tier]

But what other choice is there for a transactional / business layer if you (for whatever reason) don’t want to use Spring?

Fortunately, Dhanji Prasanna has been hard at work on a transactional framework for Guice called warp-persist.

Continue reading “Bleeding Edge Transactional Wicket Web Applications with Warp and Guice”

Yes, I’ve joined the podcast generation. I just started listening to a few podcasts and figured I’d share my brief thoughts so that you spend your listening time wisely. NB: I have only listened to one episode of each, so it is a distinctly small and statistically irrelevant sample size (although in the case of Ajaxian, it is 5% of the currently available audio content ).

• Audible AJAX – (Monthly:30 Mins) by the Ajaxian guys. I listened to Episode 20, regarding the Tamarin project.  Although Ben does a lot of apologizing about the audio quality (which I didn’t find bad, for a podcast), the content was great. Good interviews with a lot of stars in the web industry. About 30 minutes long. Recommended!
• Java Posse – (Weekly:60 Mins) I listened to Episode 105, an interview with Joe Winchester from IBM. I found the interview (clocking in at almost 60 minutes!) really long and, although interesting to listen to, I didn’t really feel like I learned anything. Based on the recommendation of a friend, I’ll revisit this again before making a judgement.
• Cranky Geeks – (Weekly:30 Mins) John Dvorak ranting for 30 minutes wih various guests. Think “Imus for Geeks”. I found some of the discussion hilarious (yes, I am a nerd). The only (big!) downside for me were the inclusion of ads! The ads showed up 3 times during the 30 minute podcast – really disappointing. Still, the content was humorous, and I actually learned a few things (or, about a few things, since it’s not really a show to “teach you stuff”). I’ll be back for another listen.

Anything else you’d recommend?

I’m attempting to work on a simple project as a test for learning RoR. I’m finding a distinct dearth of good, free reference material and examples out there. I have a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails that I’m working through, but it’s nice to have a good online reference available too. RDoc is fine and good, but a couple good, step-by-step tutorials would be even better.