What did we really build with Java applets? Why did teams pick a browser plugin that spun a mini JVM next to HTML and JavaScript when AJAX and Flash felt like the path of least resistance? What did we learn from projects that started with a proof of concept and…
Category: General Software
Industry trends, platform evaluations, migration strategies, and systems thinking. The broader context of software development and technology choices.
Parameterised Tests: Cover More with Less
Tests are a safety net when the circus is in town. Make the net wide without adding more rope than you need. Why I stopped copy pasting tests and slept better This week I stared at a wall of green JUnit bars and felt nothing. The suite was huge and…
Simplifying J2EE: Patterns that Actually Help
I walked into a client room where the whiteboard already looked tired. Boxes, arrows, and the usual EJB question marks. The team kept repeating the same wish. Make J2EE simple. Not cute. Just less painful. We pulled the plug on a few heroic ideas, cut the XML sprawl, and shipped…
Query Tuning with HQL and Criteria: A Field Guide
Dialogue Dev: My page takes five seconds. The query looks innocent. DBA: Your logs show 412 selects. Nothing innocent there. Dev: But I am using Hibernate with HQL and Criteria. It is supposed to help. DBA: Tools help if you aim them. Right now you are spraying the database. If…
Designing Pixel-Perfect Reports
\n �People do not read reports. They scan them. Your layout decides what they see.� \n\n\n\n Why pixel perfect still matters in JasperReports \n\n\n\n I have been living inside JasperReports all week and it reminds me of print days. Kerning, grids, white space, all of it. We ship to PDF,…
Partial Page Updates: Fast without Flash
Partial Page Updates: Fast without Flash. That was the pitch I made to a product manager this week after watching a full page reload grind through a simple rating widget. Click. White screen. Spinner. Repaint. The moment had all the drama of watching paint dry. We do not need it….
DTOs versus Entities: Drawing the Service Boundary
DTOs versus Entities keeps coming up in hallway chats right now. Java EE 5 just landed with JPA baked in, Hibernate keeps powering along, and Spring is everywhere in our projects. We are wiring services, exposing remote calls over EJB or SOAP, maybe flirting with REST, and we want clean,…
What J2EE Gets Right and Wrong
\n \n\n\n\n The night the EAR would not die \n\n\n\n I was in a glassy meeting room, staring at a console that had too much gray. The app server was chewing on an EAR file like it had all the time in the world. Build with Ant, pack the EAR,…
Jakarta Taglibs: Reusable View Logic
\n A quick story from last night \n\n\n\n I was staring at a JSP that looked like a thrift store shelf. Mix of scriptlets, stray includes, and a generous sprinkle of out.println calls. A simple product list with paging and currency formatting had grown messy. The next feature request was…
About RAD and code generation, is it the future?
\n Code generation is beautiful, but it can be painful. \n\n\n\n Problem framing \n\n\n\n We keep coming back to the same itch. We want to ship faster. We want fewer bugs in the boring parts, more time in the fun parts, and fewer late nights cleaning up plumbing. That is…