The Arduino development environment is probably the preferred development platform for the majority of Arduino users. It is lean and relatively easy to use. Quite a few examples are at your finger tip and even for people without much programming experience, it is relatively easy to get started. You can write and upload your sketches (programs) without the need to ever leave the IDE.

I will write a series of blog to discuss what are the new features introduced in NIO.2 (JSR 203). The NIO.2 implementation is a part of OpenJDK project and we can alreay use it by downloading a copy of OpenJDK binary.  In the first entry I will just go through what are these new I/O features of Java 7, which help developer iron out better applications easier. ...

I couldn’t find the correct maven deps for db4o if you use transparent activation … so here you are: James Sugrue

A free and open source Flash player has emerged this week in beta.  The Lightspark beta is close to having full ActionScript 3 support and it even includes debugging and profiling tools.  The software uses hardware accelerated OpenGL-based rendering and works as a standalone player or as a Mozilla plugin.  Lightspark is 100% compliant with SWF specifications, say the developers, so no reverse...

Google unleashed Android 2.2 "Froyo" today during the second keynote of Google I/O.  Even though we knew about many of the coming features before this announcement, there were plenty of surprises as well.  Some of the most tantalizing features were the ones for future Android releases that were seen in demos.

The maven-release-plugin is used to automate a lot of the manual steps involved in releasing new versions of your software. The automation prevents mistakes which ultimately occur using a manual process. The amount of work the plug-in does is impressive – it will perform these basic operations. Subtitle:  Configuring Maven, Eclipse, CVS, &...

One of the biggest problems I find people have with Hibernate is just getting started. Hibernate and JPA are pretty mind-friendly topics, but if you can't get a simple connection to your database working, well, it can get pretty frustrating. To try and help alleviate that problem, I've put together a few video tutorials that show you how to get started with Hibernate, and how you can install all of the things you need in order to run something more substantial than a "Hello World" application.

"A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on." (Jim Dwyer, nytimes.com)

Google and VMware jumped into bed this week, outlining a partnership that will allow Java developers to build applications on Google App Engine.

Let's say you've found some new, good way to do business.JSON, for example. Or Agile Methods in general. Or TDD specifically. Or use of an ORM. You read up on it. You build a spike solution to show that it's more efficient. The First No-GateYou make The Essential Pitch. You keep it simple and direct.References Reference:  Technology...

I am currently writing a tutorial on Java NIO, and I have just updated the text on Buffers. About the design of Buffers, I have question to the Java community, but let me first describe the Buffer mechanism it is about:When you create a new Buffer, e.g. a ByteBuffer, it is in write mode. The Buffer has a limit saying how many bytes you can write into it, and a position of the next byte to write...

There's a famous quote from the United States Supreme Court a few years ago. They were trying to determine what was art and what was pornography. Lawyers being what they are, they were trying to quantify what pornography was so they could write it down... encode the definition into rules. Unfortunately this is a very difficult task. One of the judges expressed his frustration by saying that he...

As students graduate from their software development and computer science courses, what advice some of you in the community would give to them? While it might not be that easy to get a job, the variety of technologies and languages has never been better. Any companies that are hiring graduates will have high expectations, so for a start, graduates need to know more than just their course. Here's...

HtmlUnit is an open source java library for creating HTTP calls which imitate the browser functionality. HtmlUnit is mostly used for integration testing on top of unit test frameworks such as JUnit or TestNG. This is done by requesting web pages and asserting the results. Simple Example @Testpublic void testGoogle(){ WebClient webClient = new WebClient(); HtmlPage currentPage =...

When using image related tags in JSF we come across a situation where we need to display an image from the system which is not in the project directory. The images which are in the project directory are easily displayed using the relative path in the "src" or "value" attribute in these tags but displaying images using absolute path is not possible directly in JSF using these...

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I’m saying something really really important has happened for the future of the Open Web. Finally, it looks like there might be a solution to the video codecs and patent encumbered alternatives we have been dealing with. James Sugrue

With the first milestone release of Spring Roo 1.1.0, Project Lead Ben Alex says you can build a working web app with a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) front-end in as little as 200 keystrokes.  That's right, deep GWT support is finally here for Spring developers.  Alex explains some of the new features with this integration:  

Google and VMware speakers took the stage today at Google I/O to announce a new partnership between the two companies, and some exciting cloud and Spring-based integrations that have emerged from this partnership.  The focus of this partnership has been to couple Google tooling with Spring tooling to get Java applications onto various clouds.  The two companies gave Spring developers something...