\n �People do not read reports. They scan them. Your layout decides what they see.� \n\n\n\n Why pixel perfect still matters in JasperReports \n\n\n\n I have been living inside JasperReports all week and it reminds me of print days. Kerning, grids, white space, all of it. We ship to PDF,…
Year: 2006
Partial Page Updates: Fast without Flash
Partial Page Updates: Fast without Flash. That was the pitch I made to a product manager this week after watching a full page reload grind through a simple rating widget. Click. White screen. Spinner. Repaint. The moment had all the drama of watching paint dry. We do not need it….
Eclipse Tricks that Save an Hour a Day
My morning started with a cold coffee, a failing JUnit, and a product manager pacing behind my chair. The kind of day where your editor either saves you or buries you. I opened Eclipse, stared at the red bar, and almost went for a rewrite when a tiny move saved…
Polyglot on the JVM: When to Reach for Another Syntax
\n \n I was in a late sprint this week, laptop fans howling, when a teammate pinged me with a small feature that was all string glue and reflection. My Java code was clean but noisy and the clock was not kind. I rewrote the spike in Groovy just to…
Custom Tags in JSP: When and How to Write Them
Custom Tags in JSP are not magic. They are just a cleaner way to say the same things we keep repeating in views. Today I want to cover when they are worth writing and how to pull them off without pain. This is day to day stuff from the trenches,…
DTOs versus Entities: Drawing the Service Boundary
DTOs versus Entities keeps coming up in hallway chats right now. Java EE 5 just landed with JPA baked in, Hibernate keeps powering along, and Spring is everywhere in our projects. We are wiring services, exposing remote calls over EJB or SOAP, maybe flirting with REST, and we want clean,…
Code Generators for real-world teams: Where They Shine
Code Generators in the Enterprise: Where They Shine. RAD Codegen from a practitioner’s perspective with timeless lessons. Dialogue PM: We need the customer portal stood up fast. The board wants a demo next week. Lead dev: We can either hand write data access, DTOs, services and the same five patterns…
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling is not the flashiest topic for a Friday night, yet here I am past midnight with cold coffee and a grumpy app server. A teammate pings me on IM asking why our JSF page refuses to bind to a backing bean. I crack open Oracle JDeveloper…
Migrating Away from Applets: Why WebStart Was Our Bridge
We just moved our biggest app off applets and onto Java Web Start, and I want to capture the why while it is fresh. The browser keeps changing under our feet. IE still rules on desktops, Firefox keeps sneaking into developer machines, and everyone is excited about Ajax after Google…
Tuning Classloaders and JDBC in WebSphere
A late night fix that saved a release The deployment finished just before midnight. We had pizza, a green light from QA, and a room full of tired grins. Fifteen minutes later the pager went off and the logs shouted ClassNotFoundException for a library that had worked on every developer…