log4p

Today the autobuild failed reporting us that our trial license of clover had expired. Instead of buying a $1500 license I decided to check cobertura.

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Last friday I had a talk with the head of my unit about my future career. We talked a bit about Sun Certifications (yes, I will FINALLY have to get a programmers certificate). But he also introduced me to something called ‘Java Black Belt‘:

JavaBlackBelt is a community for Java & open source skills assessment. This is the place where Java developers have their technology knowledge and development abilities recognized. It is dedicated to technical quizzes about Java related technologies.

Sounds cool to me, becomming a ‘Java Black Belt’ is exactly what I had in mind for my future!

Last week I spend some time on the basics for securing the myfaces/spring/ibatis application I’m working on. Since the default j2ee container managed security isn’t particulary flexible I decided to have a look at Acegi.

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As you might have noticed I finally replaced the default wordpress header image with something more personal. The image used to create the header from was taken by me; it is a close-up of my beloved espresso machine The picture was manipulated using the Gimp (2.2.8).
(I will probably have to write a post about the machine and why it rocks in the near future!)
After updating the templates I decided to actually check my weblog in M$IE… THE HORROR! The page wasn’t rendered correclty at all. After a short search I discovered some openoffice residu in the post about continuum… after removing it the site rendered (almost) correctly in M$IE again… bummer, can’t blame M$IE…

Today I bought myself a new book: Rapid J2EE development – ‘An adaptive foundation for enterprise applications’ by Alan Monnox.

The book covers iterative development, model-driven architecture (MDA), code generation tools, aspect-oriented programming (AOP), test-driven development and much more!

Most of the stuff discussed isn’t new to me, but the amazon reader reviews mentioned:

Think of this as a well thought out and documented series of brainstorms on faster development approaches.
Initially I discounted some of the approaches (UML, AOP). As I read the book, I found that it did make me rethink some of the assumptions that I’ve built up over the years. And Monnox gives enough examples to whet my appetite to experiment some more.

The text is fairly readable and many sections might be useful to give to a manager as a way of getting support to try out a new approach.

sounded more useful than yet another book on yet another framework/technology/languageI’ll keep you posted if I discover new ‘insights’!
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Serverside reported ADF to be donated to the Apache Software Foundation… can’t wait to have all those components availlable in MyFaces!

[from the announcement]

Why should J2EE / Web application developers care?

This is going to give a boost to the JavaServer Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code comes with great functionality out of the box such as: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, internationalization and accessibility. This donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been thoroughly tested and come with high quality documentation.

[/from the announcement]

You might have noticed a short outage today… at the end this seemed to have been caused by the fact that someone updated the DNS settings with my new settings (I renamed the virtualhost I use for my database server).

Today my system overheated…. and died while doing some heavy compiling.  Somehow this totally managed to screw up my harddisk (reiserfs). After downloading RIP

I tried to fix the problems using the fsck reiser utilities… but it kept on complaining, and telling me to buy a new harddisk. Since I figured reinstalling ubuntu was going to be less work than trying to fix the disk… I reintallend and am up and running again… on ext3 now.

Next reboot I’ll run fsck to see if there if it still reports errors; but sofar, so good.

Brainstorming a bit on creating e-mail templates I remembered I had seen people use Velocity to do this. Together with Spring it seemed ideal for the job!

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Last week I tried Spring IDE 1.2.6 which is basically a set of plugins to support Spring development in Eclipse. The IDE provides excellent features like autocompletion (on class and property level) and a graphical view of the bean stack.

A big downside is the stabillity. Allthough some colleagues don’t seem to have problems, my Eclipse install started to throw errors (xml parser related it seems) at unpredictable moments.

While browsing arround, looking for a way to solve the problem I discovered that the IntelliJ IDEA (5.0) has build-in spring support. Allthough I’ve always been quite fond of eclipse I decided to give it a go… can’t be a bad thing to know the ‘competition’.
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