\n \n\n It was past midnight, the sprint board looked like a graveyard, and a client demo sat on the calendar with a red circle. I hit Rails scaffold, pointed it at the schema, and watched screens appear like popcorn. The room exhaled. A week later the real work began,…
Year: 2010
Security Prompts and User Trust: The Applet Tax
Security Prompts and User Trust are colliding in the browser. Every Java applet ships with a tiny toll booth. I call it the applet tax. You pay in clicks, in doubt, and in drop off. Why do security prompts feel scarier than the applet itself? A user hits your page…
Tagging Plans that Don’t Rot
Description: Tagging Plans that Don’t Rot: Omniture from a practitioner’s perspective with timeless lessons. Dialogue style intro “Why did our conversion rate drop after the redesign?” “Because half the new templates shipped without s.t calls and the rest are double firing event1.” “But the spreadsheet says we mapped everything to…
Sizing and Eviction: Keeping Caches Healthy
Caches get sick. They cough up outages, drop hit ratios, and eat more heap than they should. Last night in the war room someone asked me, “Is EHCache broken or did we break it?” I sipped coffee and said, “Neither. The cache is just the mirror. It reflects what we…
Retries, DLQs, and Idempotency
Retries, DLQs, and Idempotency: a night in the trenches My pager went off at 2 AM. Our nightly reports were stuck. The CRM team could not see yesterday’s sales. The queue depth graph looked like a hockey stick and the dead letter queue was blinking like a Christmas tree. This…
JavaFX for Desktop Apps: Beyond Swing
Swing still runs a lot of serious desktop software, and it is not going away tomorrow.But after a week living in JavaFX 1.3 land, I am convinced these scenes and bindings deserve a seat on our desktops. Why JavaFX for desktop apps right now Oracle now owns Sun and the…
JSF Validation in Practice: Friendly Errors
Why do our forms still feel like they are scolding us, and what would it take for JSF validation to sound like a friendly teammate instead of a compiler error? Most of us ship forms that catch mistakes, yet too many apps answer with vague red text and a full…
Securing WebStart Deployments: Signing and Sandboxing
Filed from a late night desk with too much coffee. Oracle badges are new at JavaOne, plugin popups are still a thing, and Web Start is how we ship desktop muscle without MSI drama. Dialogue Dev: Our Java Web Start app needs to save files, talk to a REST endpoint,…
Access Control in JCR Repositories
Dev: So we can share everything in the content repo and trust the app to hide stuff, right? Me: That is how you wake up on call at three in the morning. Put the locks in the repository. Let the app ride on top. Admin: Which locks? LDAP knows groups….
Funnels that Teach, Not Punish
Everyone is talking about funnels again. Google rolled out the faster Caffeine index, Facebook buttons are everywhere, and a lot of teams I meet want one chart to rule growth. We pour over step charts in Google Analytics, flag a scary drop at step three, then call it a day….