Can we please put the whole term “Best Practices” to rest now? Apparently, according to this link (forwarded to me by John Dietz, thanks!), the very place where it originated (or was best popularized, depending on your interpretation of history) has now seen the whole concept basically debunked:References Reference:  Death to Best Practices ...

Let’s face it fellow developers, our applications tend to grow. And especially with new features and fancy features. And some of them are supposed to be hidden, unless the users are privileged to see its beauty. And to have privileged users you need a fancy login screen with various user roles behind. And as you already know Google Web Toolkit is the right choice to develop your...

It’s summer and since I’m hearing more and more the sound of waves splashing instead of the sound of keyboards typing, I’m providing you with quick tricks instead of well-thought deep articles. James Sugrue

In the world of automated web testing, Selenium 2/WebDriver is the new kid on the block, but it is also arguably the most compelling web testing tool around at the moment. Selenium 2/WebDriver is the result of the merging of two popular open source web testing frameworks: Selenium 1 and WebDriver, in an effort to learn the lessons gleaned from both of these older libraries. And the teams...

It's been a long time coming. Originally, I had thought we'd be producing Tapestry 5.2 six to eight months after Tapestry 5.1 ... instead, it's been more like 14 months just to get to the alpha release. Why? Well, in that time, I've personally changed jobs (back to an independent consultant), and I've been actively using the nightly snapshots of Tapestry 5.2 in two different projects for...

Apache Commons Lang 3.0 Beta was released on 4th August and the project has finally moved to Java 5. The API is now generified, varags are used where applicable, and some features which are now supported by Java itself have been  removed. All of this means that Lang 3.0 is not backwards compatible with the 2.x versions. Article Type:  How-to ...

Sure, maybe you didn't find a use for Google Wave, but a core group of loyal users sure did.  These users are now fighting to keep Google Wave from being shut down after Google announced last week that the project wasn't gaining any traction and they were going to abandon development.  There is a website, buttons, and t-shirts with which you can show your support for the "Save Google...

Oracle released another update for the 3.2.x VirtualBox line today.  The latest release of the desktop virtualization application for x86 hardware includes various stability improvements and a number of changes.  Today's version 3.2.8 improves upon the 3.2.6 update released in June.

My current project involves building a Lift web application and deploying it in our OSGi application container.  I've been working with Scala on and off for a while, and I've always been interested in Lift.  With the release of Scala 2.8 and Lift 2.0, I decided it was time to give Lift a real try on my current project.  References Reference:  ...

This case study describes how Last.fm uses HornetQ to improve the performance and availability of its streaming infrastructure. James Sugrue

Complex tools such as git or svn understand a whole set of commands, each of which with their own specific syntax:git commit --amend -m "Bug fix"Words such as “commit” above are called “commands” in JCommander, and you can specify them by creating one arg object per command. For example, here is a the arg object for the commit command: ...

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really...

Dave Astels mentions in his BDD paper that the way we use language influences the way that we write code, quoting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis James Sugrue

Tucked away in a tiny corner of the Firefox discussion forum is a quote from Alex Faaborg, a principal designer on Firefox.  The posting says that Firefox 4 will begin to include automatic updates for minor releases.  Only major updates (e.g. 4, 4.5, or 5) would have an update dialog box.  This feature, like many others in Firefox 4, will bring the browser in line with Google Chrome's feature...

Small to mid-scale virtualization can be done pretty cheaply in today's technology ecosystem.  There are many free and open source solutions that are perfect for tasks such as configuring a reusable development environment, or just basic personal use.  Virtualization methods can range from partial virtualization, to full virtualization, hardware assisted...

The question of "customization" and "extension" is a common one. For example, "non-technical users to be able to extend with simple scripts".Read this question on Stack Overflow: "Programming / scripting language aimed at non-technical people".References Reference:  End User Programming -- Solution or...

Yesterday I wondered if the copyFile method in JTheque Utils was the best method or if I need to change. So I decided to do a benchmark.So I searched all the methods to copy a File in Java, even the bad ones and found the following methods : James Sugrue

Recently I attended a local rheinJUG meeting in Düsseldorf. While the topic of the session was Eclipse e4, the night’s sponsor itemis provided some handouts on Xtext which got me very interested. James Sugrue

Security analysts from F-Secure.com are concerned about the JailbreakMe.com exploit that allows the site to jailbreak iPhones and iPads.  In an easily understandable Q&A they answered questions about this vulnerability and the risks it poses to every iPhone user, not just jailbroken phones.  Any malicious PDF file could potentially exploit this vulnerability.  F-Secure analysts say they...

Today, while working with arrays I came accross a Java puzzle which made me wonder WHY IS THIS PIECE OF CODE NOT WORKING? Java PuzzleCan you guess whether this Junit test case will pass?