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…
Category: Software Architecture
System design patterns, architectural decisions, and scalability strategies. Building robust, performant systems that stand the test of time.
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…
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…
Jetty as a Lightweight Alternative to Tomcat
\nI was on a client call where the team kept asking why our simple admin app took longer to boot than the database. We had a clean Tomcat setup, stock connectors, a modest set of jars. Still, every tweak meant a new WAR and another coffee break. Out of frustration…
JPA Essentials: Entities, Repositories, Boundaries
\n I was staring at a log window at midnight, sipping cold coffee, while a web page took forever to load a list of users with their posts. Each user opened a new query. Then another. Then another. It felt like the app was taking a stroll through the database…
Groovy on the JVM: Scripting that Feels Like Home
Last week a teammate pinged me near midnight. A cranky batch job needed a bit of glue around a Java library to massage some CSV files. My eyes did the usual roll when I pictured a wall of boilerplate. Then I reached for Groovy on the JVM. Fifteen minutes later…