WSDL and Contracts: Communicating with Care. SOAP is not flashy, but it runs a big chunk of serious traffic. While the REST debate keeps heating up, teams keep shipping SOAP endpoints on .NET with WCF, on Java with JAX WS, Axis2, and CXF, and behind appliances that love XML. I…
Year: 2010
Facelets and Templating: Cleaner JSF Views
\n \n\n A teammate pinged me close to midnight after wrestling with a messy JSF view. It was a JSP with scriptlets hiding in the corner and the header copied across six pages. We moved it to Facelets with a simple template, and the whole thing calmed down. No magic….
Page Mounting and URLs in Wicket
Clean URLs are not a luxury. They help search engines, make logs readable, and keep links friendly in emails and chats. In Wicket the default URLs can get wordy with those wicket bits. Time to take control with page mounting. Google rolled out Caffeine and is crawling faster than my…
Attribution without Illusions
\n Attribution without Illusions: analytics from a practitioner�s perspective with lessons that do not age. \n\n\n\n The room was warm and the whiteboard already packed with arrows. Someone had written EMAIL WINS in giant letters. We had a spike in sales after the newsletter, so the story wrote itself. The…
Integrating AEM with Commerce Platforms
Integrating AEM with Commerce Platforms: AEM CQ from a practitioner perspective with lessons that hold up over time. Dialogue Dev: Can CQ5 talk to Magento or ATG without turning checkout into a science project? Me: Yes. Let CQ handle content, layout, and campaigns, while the commerce engine owns pricing, cart,…
Tomcat in Production: Connectors and Threads
Tomcat in Production stops being about new features the moment real users hit it. It becomes about threads, queues, and the connector you pick. Right now everyone is juggling Apache httpd in front, mod jk or mod proxy, a mix of static files, REST calls, and session heavy apps. Oracle…
Effects with Restraint: UX without Annoyance
Effects are candy. Annoyance is poison. jQuery makes it easy to add slide and fade to everything on a page. That power is tempting. Ship a dropdown that swooshes. Animate icons. Nudge a panel into view. Then someone opens your site on a slow laptop with an old browser and…
Felix and OSGi in Practice
What if your Java app could load new code while it keeps breathing? That is the daily promise of Apache Felix and OSGi. We keep chasing modular code, faster deploys, and fewer production facepalms. Sun is now Oracle, app servers feel heavy, and the cloud buzz is loud. In the…
Spring for real-world teams: Dependency Injection that Scales
“Dependency Injection is not a fad. It is a long breath for teams that want code they can reason about on a Wednesday at 3 a.m.” Spring just keeps showing up in the places that matter. VMware owns SpringSource now, Oracle wrapped up the Sun deal, and everyone is watching…
Testing Faster with Groovy: Lightweight Builders and Specs
Do your Groovy tests feel slower than they should? I have been bouncing between Grails projects, plain Groovy libs, and some Java work, and the same theme keeps popping up. Tests get heavy fast once you pull in a database, fixtures, and a stack of XML. Groovy 1.7 landed with…