Software as a Business Part 4. Lessons from the trenches. A practitioner’s take that you can reuse tomorrow morning. A quick talk before coffee Founder: I have a small app that solves a real itch. Two people use it. One is my mom. Friend: You shipping or still polishing the…
Year: 2006
The business of software: Turn Launch Buzz Into Receipts
Software as a Business Part 4: Lessons from the Trenches Dialogue Founder: I shipped the beta. People like it. My downloads look decent. How do I turn this into a real business without burning the cash and my sanity. Mentor: Good. Now forget the launch buzz. Treat this like a…
What J2EE Gets Right and Wrong
\n \n\n\n\n The night the EAR would not die \n\n\n\n I was in a glassy meeting room, staring at a console that had too much gray. The app server was chewing on an EAR file like it had all the time in the world. Build with Ant, pack the EAR,…
Jakarta Taglibs: Reusable View Logic
\n A quick story from last night \n\n\n\n I was staring at a JSP that looked like a thrift store shelf. Mix of scriptlets, stray includes, and a generous sprinkle of out.println calls. A simple product list with paging and currency formatting had grown messy. The next feature request was…
Enhanced for loop in Java 5
I keep running into moments where the enhanced for loop in Java 5 turns a messy block into something I can read in one sip of coffee. J2SE 5.0 brought shiny stuff like generics and annotations, yet the quiet hero for day to day code is the foreach style loop….
New in Java 5: Generics
Generics just landed in Java 5 and they already changed the way my code reads in the editor. Before this release we lived with raw types. Collections gave back Object, so every read needed a cast and every cast was a tiny gamble. The code worked until it did not…
Migrating Struts to JSF: A Field Note
Why move from Struts to JSF at all Struts has been the workhorse for years. Action classes, forwards, Tiles, and a pile of taglibs got many of us to production. It still ships on every team server I visit. JSF is arriving with vendor love and a component story that…
Apache Ant for Legacy Pipelines
A quick story from the build room Yesterday a teammate spent an hour chasing a missing jar only to realize the classpath was set on his laptop but not on the build server. We moved the rule into Apache Ant and the next run just worked. No more tribal lore….
NetBeans vs Eclipse: Pragmatism over Plugins
“Pick the tool that gets you to working code by lunch, not the one that promises everything by next quarter.” NetBeans vs Eclipse is the coffee talk this season. I keep seeing the same pattern in teams I visit and projects I help clean up. One group swears by a…
About RAD and code generation, is it the future?
\n Code generation is beautiful, but it can be painful. \n\n\n\n Problem framing \n\n\n\n We keep coming back to the same itch. We want to ship faster. We want fewer bugs in the boring parts, more time in the fun parts, and fewer late nights cleaning up plumbing. That is…