42 Lines blogs

A programmer parable: A broken clothes dryer

cpopetz — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:11:01 +0000

It's pretty obvious that the principles behind good software engineering are not domain specific, but today I was reminded that they aren't even specific to programming itself. They're engineering principles, and beyond that, they're principles of problem solving that we observe in daily life. For example, let's say your clothes drier stops working, like mine did, oh...several months ago. The lessons are in italics, and though they are obvious, it's the obvious things that need re-iteration. At least for me :)

Integrating hibernate validator and wicket

cpopetz — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:13:46 +0000

I've made some code public that integrates Hibernate Validator with Wicket. The code is available via anonymous svn via:

svn co https://svn.42lines.net/public/examples/wicket/hibernate-validator-example

and I'll go through how it works in this post.

AWS adds monitoring/loadbalancing/scaling

cpopetz — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:32:36 +0000

It looks like AWS has recognized that turnkey scaling as provided by GAE is a competitive advantage, and has added that to their set of core services, as well as load balancing and monitoring.

The deployment KISS

cpopetz — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:49:35 +0000

In this post on the seam framework list I reiterate a point that I think a lot of J2EE folks miss when they're designing apps.

KISS applies to deployments too.

Is integration testing a Bad Thing (tm)?

cpopetz — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:59:23 +0000

J.B. Rainsberger has recently been railing against intgeration testing, and I find myself agreeing with that argument a great deal. Our integration tests always take too long to run, are astable with respect to changes to the UI layer, and are probably sucking time that could be better spent unit testing.

Types everywhere

cpopetz — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:58:34 +0000

As we migrate more of our code away from JSF and towards Apache Wicket, I'm struck again by how nearly every architectural change we've made has been toward more strong typing and thus away from anything that a compiler can't verify. I'm getting pretty religious about this.