Category: technology
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Poorly Formatted Code Costs You Money
After nearly 10 years of working on complex systems I think I have nailed down why poorly formatted code annoys me so much. It wastes time. Complex logic requires whitespace in order for the reader to make sense of it in the same way that punctuation is used in sentences. If the whole thing looks…
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Unit Testing the Database Tier
Unit testing database code is a bit of a funny problem. Most developers can pretty easily get their heads around unit testing a piece of Java code using interfaces and mock objects. When it comes to database code or DAOs, it suddenly becomes particularly difficult. But why, what is so difficult about testing stuff against…
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Weak, Soft and Phantom References
Bob Lee posted yesterday about one of his sessions at Javapolis (viewable at Parley’s), that covered heaps of good stuff about dependency injection and API design. At the end he mentions weak and soft references. What? Who? Not exactly a language feature that I have come across in the day to day, so I did…
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Home Cooked vs Open Source. Or, Don’t Build Your Own Workflow.
First thing’s first. I love open source. I think that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. That thing that we were always told about since computer science, that of the open marketplace for components to be shared and reused HAS happened. Just not in the “buy this billing component” kind of way. It’s even…
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How crap is your code?
Now you can find out with Crap4J. Can wait to run some projects through it. I’m curious as to what the code quality looks like on some of the larger Open Source projects (Dom4J looks pretty good though). I love stats. I don’t know what it is. They’re like horoscopes, or something. Pinch of salt…
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Unit testing made simpler(!)
What is simpler than writing a JUnit test? Getting someone else to write them for you! The really nice people at Agitar Software have developed a couple of tools as part of their “No Java Class Left Behind” programme, that will write JUnit tests for your existing code to prove that it works as expected.…
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If we can do this, anything is possible
Holy cow. We did it! Three months ago a couple of guys in a bar were talking about how cool it would be to do a Java conference in Dublin. Many sleepless nights and countless emails later, 350 people attended the inaugural IJTC! The response was overwhelming. We had a world class lineup, the logistics…
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Opening night
Yesterday’s event worked out really well. We had about 100 people in the theater take part in opening evening. My welcome speech was nothing to be worried about – I forgot half of what I was going to say, but that’s OK – it just gives me some opening words this morning. Joel’s keynote presentation…
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Tonight is the night!
I am about to head off to the IJTC. It’s an incredible feeling to know that we have managed to put together a conference in only 3 months! We are expecting well over 200 delegates this evening, and even though I am MCing the event this evening, I am not in the least bit nervous.…
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Rich UI -> Component Based
A client of mine is developing a web application. The framework decision was made up front – Spring Webflow/MVC. I like Webflow. Its state machine based continuations concept is very cool. It lets you easy deal with things like back buttons, switching into a side piece of application flow (think needing to log in before…