\n \n \n �Make it easy for people to do the right thing, and the right thing tends to happen.� \n \n \n\n \n A coffee fueled wake up call \n I walked into the office with a lukewarm latte and a pager that would not stop blinking. A partner�s…
Year: 2007
BlueJ in Education: Teaching Objects Clearly
BlueJ keeps popping up in my inbox this month. With NetBeans 6 freshly out, Eclipse Europa still going strong, and Sun pushing Java hard in schools after freeing the source, a lot of teachers are choosing tools for the next semester. The question sounds simple: what should a first time…
Separating Content and Presentation with FreeMarker
The web is buzzing with new frameworks and shiny toys. Rails keeps the volume up, Facebook apps are everywhere, and in Java land teams are split between JSF, Spring MVC, and Struts 2. In the middle of that mix there is one topic that keeps showing up in client calls…
Updating and Autoloading Modules: A Practical Guide
Updating and Autoloading Modules sounds like something only the platform team would love. Truth is, if you are shipping on the NetBeans Platform, it is your daily bread. With NetBeans 6 and its shiny Plugin Manager, the whole story got more approachable, but the ideas have been around for a…
The business of software: Writing Software vs Running a Business
Software as a business is not the same sport as writing software. I say this after a long night of shipping a tiny feature, answering support at odd hours, and staring at a graph that refuses to climb. If you are coding your heart out and still feeling stuck, this…
The business of software: Pick One Job and Charge For It
Software as a Business is not a theory. It is a daily grind of choices that look small in the morning and decide your month by night. I have been shipping and selling software long enough to know the difference between a cool demo and something a customer will pay…
RESTful Resources: Nouns, Verbs, and Clarity
Every week I run into web APIs that read like a to do list for servers, written in a hurry and hard to explain.Let us trade mystery verbs for RESTful resources where URLs wear nouns and HTTP methods carry the verbs. REST from a working seat is refreshingly simple once…
Internationalization in Java: Resource Bundles without Pain
\n\n \n\n\n\n Shipping a Java app to more than one country should not feel like pulling teeth. The pieces are there. We just need to wire them in a way that does not punish the team. \n\n\n\n Here is a straight path to ResourceBundle that avoids the usual traps and…
Deploying to WebSphere: A Survival Guide
Deploying to WebSphere should not feel like a rite of passage. It is just a server with knobs. The trick is knowing which ones to turn before the pager goes off. If you are shipping on WebSphere Application Server, base or ND, this is a field guide from the trenches….
Validate, Compress, Parse: Commons in Production
Description: Validate, Compress, Parse: Commons in Production: Apache Commons from a practitioner’s perspective with timeless lessons. Problem framing You can feel it on every release cut. More features, less time, one production box that must not fall over. We are all picking our battles right now. New browsers ship often,…