\n KitKat just landed and the Nexus 5 buzz is real. Android Studio is in preview while many of us still ship apps with Eclipse ADT. Tools aside, the first wall new Android folks hit is always the same: what is an Activity, what is an Intent, and why does…
Year: 2013
Versioning and Queries in JCR
If you spend your days near a Java Content Repository you already know two topics keep coming back in standups. Versioning and queries. You either broke a branch of content and need to rewind time, or you wrote a query that looks smart but eats the CPU for breakfast. After…
The business of software: Price Like You Mean It
Everyone is talking about subscriptions. Twitter is warming up for an IPO, Adobe pushed everyone to Creative Cloud, and iOS got a full repaint. Feeds are full of new apps and new SaaS dashboards. The loud part is launches. The quiet part is making rent. This is about that quiet…
Hippo CMS in Practice: Channels and Components
Hippo CMS has a way of making late nights bearable. Picture this. Content editors ping me because the mobile home page looks nothing like the desktop one. They swear they moved a promo into the top slot. I open the Channel Manager, switch to the mobile channel, and there it…
The business of software: Raise the Bar or Get Buried
Context Apple pushed iOS 7 yesterday and every app on my phone looks like it went on a juice cleanse. Flat colors, cleaner lines, and a loud message to every product team out there. Raise the bar or get buried by the next update. Twitter just said they filed for…
Escaping, Encoding, and Boundaries
Escaping, encoding, and boundaries sound like small plumbing details, right up until your app starts printing JavaScript popups that you never wrote. If you ship code on the web, this topic is not trivia. It is daily survival. Apple just pushed iOS 7 and every team I know is racing…
AEM Workflows for Real Editorial Teams
AEM workflows are sold as the safety net for content. In real newsrooms and brand teams, they can also be the bottleneck. The trick is turning the out of the box models into something editors actually use when the clock is ticking. Today’s piece is about Adobe CQ5 slash AEM…
Testing Wicket UIs: Selenium and Beyond
Testing Wicket UIs sits in a weird spot. On one side you have WicketTester flying through component checks in milliseconds. On the other side you have Selenium clicking real buttons, waiting for Ajax, and catching the stuff that only shows up when a browser gets involved. If you ship forms,…
Shipping with HSQLDB: When Embedded Is Enough
When an embedded database is enough for shipping You want to ship. You do not want to babysit a server. For a lot of apps right now the right move is to bundle an embedded database and call it a day. That is where HSQLDB and its cousin H2 shine….
FreeMarker Templates for Clean Server-Side Views
\n Context \n\n\n\n This year keeps moving fast for web teams. We got new CSS toys, talk about Web Components on every feed, and more folks betting on client side frameworks like Angular and Ember. Node keeps getting love for small apps and build scripts. At the same time, most…