Category: General Software

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…

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: 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…

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…

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….

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…

\n Context: Bridged vs NAT on your VM \n\n Virtual machines used to live in the server room. Now they ride along on laptops and desktops. I have friends running Ubuntu Server in VirtualBox on Windows 7, others on Snow Leopard with VMware Fusion, and quite a few on Linux…

We do not wire clicks to elements. We teach our app to listen. notes from my editor at 2 AM jQuery is everywhere. It is in themes, in admin panels, in little widgets your client sends you at midnight. With 1.4 and the fresh 1.4.1 out, the library got faster…

Everyone loves jQuery plugins. Copy a script tag, paste an example, boom, a carousel appears. It feels like cheat codes for the front end. I have been living in the trenches with jQuery since it edged past Prototype and MooTools in mindshare, and I get the rush. But there is…

Your database is sweating, the app servers are yawning, and the product owner wants pages to feel instant. That is the moment you stop fiddling with SQL and start thinking cache. With EHCache growing up fast and shipping solid features, two patterns keep popping up in reviews and late night…