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...

In Continuous Delivery the authors talk about the danger of ultimate configurability… Configurable software is not always the cheaper solution it appears to be. It’s almost always better to focus on delivering the high-value functionality with little configuration and then add configuration options later when necessary James Sugrue

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

Wondering about the state of Java since Oracle's lawsuit against Google? Want to see where Oracle are going to steer Java? Well, on Monday Sept 20th, you'll probably get a better idea when Larry Ellison takes to the JavaOne stage with his keynote about "Java Strategy and Directions".

A decent amount of uproar was generated this week when JBoss developers indicated that the latest stable release of Hibernate (3.5.5) would have deprecated support for CGLIB as a bytecode provider.  Developers can still use CGLIB as the bytecode provider, but JBoss will not maintain the integration anymore.  This is because the developers of the CGLIB project (a separate project outside of...

Welcome to episode two 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...

This Flex Addon is a serious plugin for who is using Spring Roo in enterprise enviroment.References Reference:  Flex Addon for Spring Roo Mitchell Pronsc...

I've been playing around with maven 3 lately on our legacy maven 2 multi-module project via mvnsh. Like advertised, maven 3 is backwards compatible with maven 2. In fact, most everything worked out of the box when switching to maven 3. In this post, I'm going to highlight the required and currently optional items I changed so you can start preparing to migrate your project to maven 3. But...

Today we released Jetwick. With Jetwick I wanted to realize a service to find similar users on Twitter based on their tweeted content. Not based on the following-list like it is possible on other platforms: Subtitle:  How different is a quickstart project from production? James Sugrue ...

Rob Martin has become a fan of Clojure recently. Nothing wrong with that, Clojure has a lot going for it and if you’ve never had a chance to write code in Lisp, it’s probably the best way to begin these days. But then, Rob gets a little bit too emotional and he starts drawing all kinds of dangerous conclusions. Such as this one: Why is functional programming important? Because Moore’s...

I recently configured a domain object's security with Spring Security 3 and Oracle. Since I couldn't find much about that topic, I thought that I would share my solution. I assume that you are familiar with Spring and will not describe how to configure the base application.

The 3.0.4 update to Spring includes 80 different bugfixes and enhancements.  Some highlights include support for updated third-party tools like Hibernate Core 3.6, Hibernate Validator 4.1, EclipseLink 2.1, and Ehcache 2.2.  There are also several enhancements for SpEL, @MVC, and JSR-303 support.Firefox 4 Beta 4 has Initial Hardware Acceleration

Although 1.5's concurrency improvements have been around for yonks, they provide quite a handy means of parallel programming. A scenarioLet's say you have some web service that's exposed via an interface called 'UserStorageDAO'. A typical implementation of this would call a web service with your given POJO instance and return true/false on successful storage. A quick and dirty way of seeing how...

The OpenStack project has received an extraordinary amount of support from the developer community since its unveiling four weeks ago.  The open source cloud platform has no performance blocks or any other artificial limitations that are sometimes implemented by "open core" projects.  Simon Phipps said, "it's probably the most significant advance for open source cloud computing...

Illumos, the project to make a fully open source version of Solaris, couldn't have arrived at a more perfect time.  The Illumos project lead Garrett D'Amore, a former Oracle Solaris engineer and current Nexenta employee, is pretty certain that the leaked memo about OpenSolaris' demise is genuine.  That's why today, D'Amore announced that Illumos is officially a fork of OpenSolaris, and not a...

A while back, I ran a poll here on JavaLobby to find out why people became software developers. The answers were varied, from computer science being a convenient choice, to money. But the most common themes were that developers "knew" that it was right for them when they started writing programs, and that people were interested and excited by the future of technology.

Over a period of time I have managed to get my hands on some of the most wonderful books on software development. It gives me a great feeling to have read these books as they share the author's hard earned experience over several years. I feel that I am just plain lucky to have discovered so many tips and tricks (or pitfalls) of software development so early on in my career, just by reading these...

If you have a Maven project of any size, particularly involving many modules or large numbers of dependencies, you have probably come across issues when updating your version numbers. Of course the Maven Release Plugin does a great job for updating version numbers as part of the automated release process, but there are times when it doesn't quite fit the bill, and version numbers are not...