I’ve seen my fair share of projects migrating from Ant to Maven, and, for a complex project, this migration path can take some time. You have to worry about dependency management, project structure, and retraining an existing team to use Maven and understand the core concepts behind the tool. When you make the shift, you are often affecting development infrastructure for an existing...

The previous version of the Knappsack Maven Archetypes included archetypes for creating projects using JSF, JPA, CDI and Bean Validation that can run in a servlet container such as Jetty or Tomcat. In order to put it through its paces I decided to create a little test social bookmarking application that lets users create accounts, and when logged in, add bookmarks and tag them. Users that...

The software industry is constantly trying to find the next-generation tools and methods that can make development, testing, and production more efficient.  It's a core part of the developer's inner drive to try and envision how things could be better.  At ReplaySolutions, CEO Jonathan Lindo has watched the industry struggle with testing infrastructure and developer/operations...

In a recent blog entry, Adobe's open source and standards director David McAllister remarked that “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so," in Silicon Valley.  McAllister criticized Oracle's handling of OpenSolaris and its recent lawsuit against Adobe's mobile buddy, Google.  "I have no problem making money from open source code," he said.  "I have no...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found out this week that another one of their top 10 "Most Wanted" patents was shot down by a jury in Eastern Texas District court.  The Most Wanted list includes the original 10 patents mentioned in the foundation's Patent Busting Project, which seeks to identify and weed out the worst software patents in the US.  

CountDownLatch is one of the classes that was added to the Java 5 concurrency package. It allows one or more threads to wait until a set of operations being performed in other threads are completed. In this article, I will talk about two use-cases where CountDownLatch can be used: Article Type:  How-to

JBoss principal Software Engineer Pete Muir posted a progress update for the upcoming third version of the Seam development stack.  Only four modules need to reach alpha status before a beta of the Seam 3 distribution can be released.  Project developers expect this release within the next few weeks, but they will only say for sure "it will be ready when it is ready!"

In this article, excerpted from "Flex on Java," (Manning, Sept 2010) authors Bernerd Allmon and Jeremy Anderson show you how to rapidly prototype data-enabled Flex applications using Groovy and Grails in combination with the Flex plugin for Grails. The article starts by defining the domain in Grails and exposing some services for your Flex application to use, and the Flex application...

When Google announced their new Go programming language, I was quite excited and happy. Yay, another language to fix all the world’s problems! No more suckage! Suckage sucks! Give me a good language that doesn’t suffer suckage, so that my daily routine can suck less!References Reference:  I Don’t Much Get Go ...

If you're using Eclipse as your IDE every day, you've probably got certain tasks that you do regularly such as getting projects from version control or writing unit tests, as well as normal coding tasks. This tip shows how you can customize what shows up on your File/New menu for a certain perspective. Some of the commands that you use might be buried under the File/New/Other.. menu. This brings...

One of the first Seam 3 Modules to appear is the Seam Faces module which provides additional functionality to JSF. While there aren’t many pain points left in JSF, one of the biggest is the issue of data converters for entity objects. This article will take a look at how Seam Faces takes the pain out of writing JSF converters. Download Download the Seam Faces Demo Source for Maven ...

I used my holidays to concentrate on the reading of my latest book : Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz (with Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes and Doug Lea). This book is, in my point of view, the reference for the development of concurrency programs in Java. James Sugrue

The SecBrowsing blog noted a major change in the speed at which users updated their Flash version during the last patch.  The blog measured the number of visitors using Chrome with an updated version of Flash over the span of a couple weeks.  For the June 10 update the shift was slow and gradual, but for the August 10 release, about 70% of Chrome users had updated their version of Flash within...

Welcome to episode three of our series "The Seven Wastes of Software Development." In episode one, we introduced the concept of eliminating waste from our software development efforts. Waste elimination can be traced all the way back to the the mid-1900's, the birth of lean manufacturing, and the Toyota Production System (TPS). This is how Taiichi Ohno, the father of the TPS, described...

For fear of being too sensationalist or sounding biased, I didn't use the 'B-Word' in my headline, but I'll say it now: Is anyone planning to boycott JavaOne because of recent events?  That's the sentiment that I wanted to gauge based on the reaction to today's news that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison would be delivering the keynote.I'm not sure how many Android...

Last week, I wrote a post about my experience with oDesk. The purpose of the post was to share my experience, so other entrepreneurs can learn from it, and provide feedback to oDesk and contractors in general. While some people found the value, I got some pretty angry comments on reddit. It is worth clearing up some of the issues discussed there.References Reference:  ...

DZone just released my latest refcard today, which aims to provide developers with a useful desktop reference to UML.  I think that UML is a topic that fits very neatly into the Refcard series.

I’d like to share my experiences with the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (SCEA 5) certification. There was a couple of unclear things regarding the assignment and its deliverables and I’ve learned some interesting things. James Sugrue

In today's post, I am going to discuss about the observer pattern. This is one of the most widely used patterns in J2EE applications. I say this because of the inherent simplicity of this pattern and the the fact that it is highly possible that you are already implementing this pattern without actually being aware of it! This is something that certainly cannot be said about other patterns like...

Writing mathematical formulas on web pages just got easier if your page is being read by a WebKit browser such as Chrome or Safari.  The WebKit developers are now releasing nightly builds that support the MathML XML language, which allows you to type in mathematical formulas and edit them instead of having to use an image.  Supercomputing Smartphones