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…
Bridged vs NAT: Networking Choices
\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…
From jQuery to Event-Driven Thinking
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…
Configuring KDevelop for Mixed-Language Workspaces
“The best editor is the one that gets out of your way once you set it up.” Creation date: 2010-03-11T01:41:47 KDevelop has been on my desk for a while, but this week I pushed it hard with a mixed language workspace. Think C plus plus with Qt, a bunch of…
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…
jQuery Plugins in Moderation
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…
Shortcuts and Navigation in KDevelop: Moving Faster
Shortcuts and Navigation in KDevelop: Moving Faster You write code, not click menus. The more you break your flow to hunt a file, a symbol, or a line number, the more your brain cools down. If your editor is KDevelop, you already have what you need to stay in the…