\n \n I was in a late sprint this week, laptop fans howling, when a teammate pinged me with a small feature that was all string glue and reflection. My Java code was clean but noisy and the clock was not kind. I rewrote the spike in Groovy just to…
Custom Tags in JSP: When and How to Write Them
Custom Tags in JSP are not magic. They are just a cleaner way to say the same things we keep repeating in views. Today I want to cover when they are worth writing and how to pull them off without pain. This is day to day stuff from the trenches,…
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,…
Code Generators for real-world teams: Where They Shine
Code Generators in the Enterprise: Where They Shine. RAD Codegen from a practitioner’s perspective with timeless lessons. Dialogue PM: We need the customer portal stood up fast. The board wants a demo next week. Lead dev: We can either hand write data access, DTOs, services and the same five patterns…
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling is not the flashiest topic for a Friday night, yet here I am past midnight with cold coffee and a grumpy app server. A teammate pings me on IM asking why our JSF page refuses to bind to a backing bean. I crack open Oracle JDeveloper…
Migrating Away from Applets: Why WebStart Was Our Bridge
We just moved our biggest app off applets and onto Java Web Start, and I want to capture the why while it is fresh. The browser keeps changing under our feet. IE still rules on desktops, Firefox keeps sneaking into developer machines, and everyone is excited about Ajax after Google…
Tuning Classloaders and JDBC in WebSphere
A late night fix that saved a release The deployment finished just before midnight. We had pizza, a green light from QA, and a room full of tired grins. Fifteen minutes later the pager went off and the logs shouted ClassNotFoundException for a library that had worked on every developer…
The business of software: Ship First, Polish Later
Software as a Business Part 4. Lessons from the trenches. A practitioner’s take that you can reuse tomorrow morning. A quick talk before coffee Founder: I have a small app that solves a real itch. Two people use it. One is my mom. Friend: You shipping or still polishing the…
The business of software: Turn Launch Buzz Into Receipts
Software as a Business Part 4: Lessons from the Trenches Dialogue Founder: I shipped the beta. People like it. My downloads look decent. How do I turn this into a real business without burning the cash and my sanity. Mentor: Good. Now forget the launch buzz. Treat this like a…
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,…