Production issue comes screaming at you at 2am. Red-eyed you open your laptop and check the server logs. You see only minimal logging. After checking other areas such as database, network, machine health, etc., you wish you could turn on more debug logs. Turns out your development team did not provide you a feature to change log levels on the fly. Only way you can do that is to restart the application servers. Ok developers don’t let that happen to you or your ops team. Continue reading
CruiseControl Setup
On a recent project I setup CruiseControl (version 2.5) as our continuous integration build tool. Some folks requested I show them how I set it up…so what better place than here. Continue reading
Agile What !!
One of the things on the hype train is agile development. We have started calling common sense development as agile development. Fair enough. We need to characterize and refer to this type of development model and the word agile fits. I am all in favor of agile development but what most people miss is that the success of an agile project not only depends on the development team embracing agility but also the business users and the client stakeholders doing the same. Continue reading
EJB3 Interceptors
Thought I’d give EJB3 interceptors a shot today. Only class level and method level interceptors are allowed. No rich AspectJ (or jboss-aop) style support. No rich pointcut language. Spring 2.0 is much better in this regards. But like I said before, for most applications what EJB3provides is more than enough. Even Spring prior to 2.0 had only limited AOP support (Method level). Continue reading
EJB3 With WebWork
The letters ‘E J B’ cause me to slouch back and say “oh no…”. But after a few encouraging words to myself, I gave it a shot. Continue reading
Java 6 – JavaScript Support
One of the new features in Java 6 is the ability to execute code written in scripting languages such as JavaScript. Java 6 will be released with the Mozilla Rhino engine for JavaScript. Continue reading
Code Analyzer – PMD
If you have a code review process in place, how do you make sure that the review is fruitful. The last thing you want is to spend many hours across different reviews pointing out the same thing over and over again. Continue reading
WebWork
WebWork is a much better framework compared to any of the action frameworks around. Read on to get started with WebWork. I will cover what is required to get started with WebWork and also how to integrate with Spring for a complete end-to-end solution. Continue reading
XSLT group-by
While doing some reading (or catching up) on new features in XSLT 2.0, I came upon a very useful addition. It is possible to implement this in XSLT 1.0, though rather painfully, but it’s a lot more intuitive in 2.0. Continue reading
Tapestry 4
Are there too many web frameworks out there? Well for those in the know the answer will be a resounding yes. Which one to pick up has become really a painful decision! Once you take one path you cannot just switch the framework mid-way. There is always the good old Struts framework. But that seems to be “oh not so fashionable nowadays”. Ah that ‘Ruby on Rails’ … and then you can sift through the web to find its java inspired half-brother. Or should we Seam with JBoss Seam? Though in all fairness JBoss Seam cannot be called just a web framework. It is a complete framework for front-end and back-end development. Continue reading