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[Tutorial] Amazon SOAP Product Advertising API from Java – Including Signing of Requests with WS-Security

pmularien — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:10:59 +0000

Amazon has made a lot of affiliates unhappy with their updates to the Product Advertising API (ex-Affiliate API). I first covered invoking this API a couple years ago – my, have things changed since then. On August 15, 2009, Amazon will be requiring all affiliates using the Product Advertising API to digitally sign their API requests. [...]

[Quick Tip] Printing out all matches in an Ant fileset

pmularien — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:17:10 +0000

This is one of those things that’s so handy, I can’t believe it hasn’t been posted before. I found a 2006 post from JavaLobby, where R.J. Lorimer writes about how to print out a classpath. Also useful, but the particular use case I ran into was – one of our build scripts uses a fileset [...]

5 Common Log4J Mistakes

pmularien — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:22:24 +0000

I’ve seen these antipatterns over and over again, and I thought it was time to write about them to help any folks who are new to Log4J out there. Senior developers – please share this with your junior peers and save yourself the pain of refactoring later! I’m interested in common mistakes or points of [...]

Flash Player Settings Manager

pmularien — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:00:33 +0000

For those who don’t already have this bookmarked, you can use the Flash Player settings manager movie on the Adobe Support Web site to adjust the following: Website privacy and storage settings (did you know that Flash keeps a list of all sites you’ve visited with Flash movies?) Global security settings (setting trusted locations, etc.) Also, remember there’s [...]

SourceForge-hosted PDFCreator Trojan/Toolbar Warning

pmularien — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:46:18 +0000

I decided to post this as a public safety announcement, since I (surprisingly) didn’t see this blogged elsewhere. I have, for many years now, used the free/open source PDFCreator software for simple PDF generation and testing. I recently updated to the most recent version (0.9.7) of the software (now hosted at pdfforge.org), and have made an [...]

Quote of the Day: for Software Architects

pmularien — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:37:03 +0000

Conveying a significant point about software architecture in 300 words is a challenge, particularly if those 300 words need to come from a software architect. — Barry Hawkins Seen at TheServerSide. Read more architecture goodness at 97 Things. Which of these precepts do you like? Which have you heard before from architects or teammates? [...]

[Tutorial] Accessing the TinyURL “API” from Java

pmularien — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:13:40 +0000

TinyURL is a service that has been around for a while, but recently regained popularity due to its widespread use on Twitter. Recently, I poked around and wrote up a simple Java method to, given a URL (TinyURL supports only GET requests), generate a TinyURL from it in Java. This is really the only “API” supported [...]

[Tutorial] Twittering from Java with Twitter4J

pmularien — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:18:09 +0000

Really, this is so easy it’s almost not worthy of a blog post. Twitter4J is a tiny library wrapping interaction with Twitter APIs. Creating a new tweet is as simple as: Twitter twitter = new Twitter("username","password"); Status status = twitter.update(title); The Twitter4J page has a series of simple examples covering timelines [...]

Corporate Blog Post: Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Twitter (Part 1)

pmularien — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:16:19 +0000

Cross-posting in case readers here are interested. Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Twitter (Part 1) addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mularien.com%2Fblog%2F2008%2F11%2F19%2Fcorporate-blog-post-building-a-collaborative-enterprise-twitter-part-1%2F'; addthis_title = 'Corporate+Blog+Post%3A+Building+a+Collaborative+Enterprise%3A+Twitter+%28Part+1%29'; addthis_pub = '';

Rerouting Spring Security 2 Login Page Through a Spring Controller

pmularien — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:13:25 +0000

Interestingly, a month or so after I posted my 5 Minute Guide to Spring Security 2, a commonly asked question was asked on the Spring forums. I figured I’d address it here, because (once again in Spring/Acegi Security integration) the answer wasn’t really obvious. Essentially, the question goes something like this: The examples I can find using [...]