Blog Insights

This article explains how to use SphinxSE, Sphinx real time indexing, and set up Sphinx in order to improve search query performance.   First some background about issues surrounding full-text search. Why does someone need a full text search engine? A MySql database with over a million records will take a...

Error handling is tricky. Not because it's especially hard to do, but because everyone (operations, the business team, fellow programmers) seems to have a different idea of how a particular situation should be handled. A web service is down? No problem. You should try again every five seconds, but no...

Now we will cover the fun stuff for which we've been waiting. In this post, I'll go over how to setup Sonar for a Java project that utilizes Ant for its build.  I'll go through the basic steps for installing and running a Sonar instance, and how to use a...

Please note that wherever required I'll be using the Apache Abdera project from the nemo instance to illustrate some features and functionality available in Sonar. To find the Apache Abdera project you can do one of the followings: Sonar and its metrics are about improving the code quality. That is, they are for positive...

If you haven’t heard of Git or don’t understand why you should use it, checkout the talk given by the author to Google (Torvalds, 2007). Git is an excellent version control tool for agile software development. But many of us may not have the luxury of using Git because our company has...

In my last post on Camel, I spent some time introducing you two of its biggest players, the Context and the Route, by means of a simple problem - processing data coming in via file. If all we had to do was move the file, we could call our job...

Recently I was asked to make a bot for a local user group. The bot would simply report new events into the topic of an IRC channel. After the bot was created I decided to write an article about it and publish the code. The code and article  can be found here: http://www.dsmwebgeeks.com/2012/09/creating-an-irc-bot-stephen-dunn/ Basically the bot will...

At home and at work, I find that the things that I have to do over and over are the most painful. At home, it’s the dishes; at work, it reading data out of a file or doing Hibernate mappings. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to escape...

In this post I am sharing different ways to create 'Custom Iterators' and how to control the behavior of that Iterator. Also part of this article focuses on how to apply different operations on a selected elements within a custom iterator. The way to do this is to implement a...

Forms in Django seem to be a relatively advanced topic if you want to do anything outside of models.  Case in point: I had to develop a multi-step form in django that would spit out a certain result.  There were only two forms that the user needed to fill out,...