Blog Insights
One good reason why Git makes sense
When I first heard about distributed version control systems and Git about a year and a half ago, I was very much a Subversion user both at work and at home. I knew how to setup Subversion, it's ACLs and make it available over http via Apache. You could say...First Glance at PowerShell
A couple days ago I had the surprisingly excellent opportunity to learn and use Windows PowerShell... What? Don't look at me like that. I disapprove of Microsoft just as much as the next Linux fanboy, but seriously, this was cool. Just give me a chance to explain. I swear, I...Incrementing Oracle Sequences Without Permissions
If you are ever working with a database where data is consistently being imported, dropped, and/or restored; sooner or later you will find yourself in the situation where the primary key of a table is no longer synchronized with the sequence used to generate it. If you have the appropriate permissions,...Google Analytics Data Export API
When Google exposed its Data Export API, it endeared itself closer to developers and to customers of Google Analytics. Data Export API allows us to develop client applications to retrieve data from existing analytics profiles of authorized users. At this point, Google offers 2 solutions: a Java and a JavaScript client....MySQL Master/Slave configuration with EJB3 and JPA
Well this turned out to be quite an exercise. The goal: scalable reads with MySQL in master-slave configuration, writing to the master, and reading from N slaves, load balanced in round-robin fashion (or something). The problem: using JPA (Java Persistence API) instead of direct JDBC calls. Turns out the MySQL ReplicationDriver (used...Rendering Global t:messages After Redirect
A common problem when working with JSF is getting global info messages via <t:messages globalOnly="true"> or <f:messages globalOnly="true"> to display messages set in the previous request when you have a <redirect/> in your faces-config for a particular page You will not see your <t:messages> that are set on the previous...
Developing a multithreaded test harness
You can't ignore the fact that web servers are multithreaded. We can hide as much as we want, but sooner or later you'll find yourself in the situation where your application works fine during development and testing; but once it hits production you start hearing about "funny" things happening. While...Simple Subversion Branching and Merging
Branching and merging in Subversion is a great way to work on large new features without disrupting mainline development on trunk. However, it has a reputation for being so difficult that many developers never take advantage of it. In this post I'll show just how easy it really is thanks...Environment Specific Properties in Spring
On many occasions I want to be able to inject environment specific property values into my Spring managed beans. These may be things like web service endpoints, database URLs, etc. Values I know for each environment at build time, but I want to use the same WAR/EAR file in each...Java EE 6 and Scala
Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything...