Code Monkeyism

Using Cassandra with Scala and Akka

2009-11-03T13:53:42Z

With all this talk about NoSQL and new programming languages, I though I’d try getting Cassandra to work with Scala. Always being interested in productivity, I wanted to know how easy and concise an integration would be. One option was to use the Java client for Cassandra, as using Java libraries in Scala is rather [...]

As a Manager: What I value in developers

2009-10-27T16:10:32Z

There are many traits a good developer has. Focus. Sense of Quality. Interest in what he does. Knowledge of programming languages and skills in software development. An opinion. Team player. Update see comments: Being creative and innovative. Propose ideas. But the things I most value are professionalism and getting things done. Those are similar to the [...]

What is Trans-Scrum?

2009-10-21T12:22:58Z

There is the well established notion of what Scrum-But is. There is also a clear definition of Scrum – although people still argue if someone is doing Scrum or his process is only Scrumish. But more or less, territory is known. At least in the two dimensions, black and white about Scrum or not-Scrum. After many [...]

Is this functional programming?

2009-10-19T10:29:58Z

Recently I’ve read a blog post by Keith Dahlby. It was titled “Is Functional Abstraction Too Clever?”. The title sounded more rhetoric because clearly Keith was very satisfied with the code he presented. But it got me thinking again. After some time with Lisp at university, some Haskell and some functional thinking in Ruby, I’m deep [...]

ORMs are a thing of the past

2009-10-17T13:01:05Z

ORMs are a thing of the past. Hold your anger! I always thought ORMs were the next best thing after sliced bread. I was so convinced about ORMs that I wrote some of them on my own in Ruby and Java – not very good, mind you – during the 90s. Later I switched to [...]

Going to NYC

2009-10-04T14:14:31Z

Due to my visit of NYC next week there will be no posts and no moderation of comments.

The dark side of NoSQL

2009-09-30T14:33:14Z

There is a dark side to most of the current NoSQL databases. People rarely talk about it. They talk about performance, about how easy schemaless databases are to use. About nice APIs. They are mostly developers and not operation and system administrators. No-one asks those. But it’s there where rubber hits the road. The three problems [...]

Real JSON vs. XMLish JSON

2009-09-28T17:02:33Z

Recently I came to the conclusion, while playing with data formats that XML and JSON cannot be converted into each other nicely. Both data formats miss something in relation to the other. Good JSON misses root types and types for arrays – which XML both has, while XML misses list types – which JSON has. [...]

Agile isn’t low quality – a rebuttal to Mike Brunt

2009-09-25T11:26:02Z

Mike Brunt quotes an email on his blog. The mail exposes a very negative view of agile. Although the email is not written by Mike, he is “posting this here because it states my reservations very well”. So address him directly because my experience with Agile over the last years is contrary to his experience. 1. [...]

How your application becomes enterprisy

2009-09-24T16:19:25Z

Your application is going to be an enterprise application soon. Prepare for it. There is a certain disdain for enterprise applications in the new world of dynamic languages and frameworks like Ruby/Rails or Python/Django. Mostly this is associated with the world of Java and C#. Developers think they are immune from enterprise woes. Think again. Enterprise [...]

Is Java dead?

2009-09-24T12:16:58Z

Is Java finally dead? There has been much discussion about the end of Java. As a developer, do you need to care? How do you need to change your decisions in the case that Java is dead? I have pounding this question for the last several years, beginning with my adventures into Ruby at the [...]

Essential storage tradeoff: Simple Reads vs. Simple Writes

2009-09-19T06:57:45Z

Photo by Robert Scoble When I studied computer science with a focus on databases, the holy scripture said only to use normalized data. For my exam I had to study 2NF and 3NF. And now it seems this is all wrong for large scale operations. From my education, I still have a strong feeling towards the [...]

My Astonishing Compete.com Graph

2009-09-18T05:30:16Z

Just checked compete.com for CodeMonkeyism. Astonishing. Never would have thought that. Thanks to all my readers, I’m humbled.

The high cost of overhead when working in parallel

2009-09-09T15:58:47Z

Photo by SanyamStudios Astonishingly most companies I know work projects in parallel. This seems a good idea, because no stakeholder has to wait before his projects starts. All are a little busy. As I’ve written in my free eBook 12 Things You can do to Shorten Your Lead Time, working in parallel is a terrible idea. It [...]

Development Dream Teams

2009-09-09T10:50:56Z

Photo by Budslife “busy” Over the years I’ve build some teams. The size and composition most often was determined by the company I was working for. This meant the team was developer only, at least some teams were cross-functional. I wished to have the freedom to create an optimal development team, a dream team. In modern [...]

5 Practices Better to Change in Your Scrum Implementation

2009-09-02T15:11:37Z

Photo by royskeane Scrum saw a big increase in adoption last year. Everyone who is doing Scrum, does it differently as Scrum is a framework, not a process. One needs to inspect and adapt, mostly through retrospectives and daily improvements. I’ve been an agile proponent since learning about XP in the 90s and had the [...]

Developer Motivation and Satisfaction

2009-09-01T18:22:55Z

Photo by pdam2 I’ve been to lots of management trainings, each new company feels the urge to send me to a several days workshop. One of the topics in each of those workshops is employee motivation and satisfaction. But after years I reckoned developers do not need to be motitvated, they are motivated when they start working [...]

Clojure vs Scala, Part 2

2009-08-31T20:40:17Z

Photo by PhillipC There are two languages stirring up the Java World: Clojure and Scala. Clojure a Lisp dialect on the JVM, powerful and pure and the Scala language a tight integration of object and functional programming. Which should you learn? Matt is wondering: The two leading candidates in the JVM/concurrent/multicore arena seem to be Scala [...]

The James Iry Java Class

2009-08-22T18:57:22Z

James Iry has posted a mind blowing article on his blog “ONE DIV ZERO” again. He is famous in Scala circles and beyond. As a tribute I present the strangest Java class, the James Iry Class (taken from his article): public class Foo { public Foo foo(){ System.exit(1); return null; } public Foo bar() [...]

7 Bad Signs not to Work for a Software Company or Startup

2009-08-18T16:22:23Z

Photo by mundo resink There is a job offer, you’re on a job hunt or a headhunter calls you. With the ending recession this scenario becomes more likely again. What are signs that you should not sign up with a company? As someone who did a lot of recruiting and talked to many developers, I’ve prepared a [...]

Go Ahead: Next Generation Java Programming Style

2009-08-12T06:24:29Z

Photo by Stuck in Customs Many companies and developers move away from Java to new languages: Ruby, Python, Groovy, Erlang, Scala. You might be trapped with Java. Even if you’ve trapped, you can change your programming style and reap some of the benefits of those new languages. In the last 15 years Java programming style has [...]

A/B Testing Download Landing Pages in Wordpress

2009-09-18T06:44:51Z

Recently I’ve published my first eBook about reducing time to market in software development. This was a good chance to start some A/B testing. With A/B testing you have one (or several) alternatives of a landing page and measure which one performs better. Changes can be small, but have huge results, as the recent 37signals [...]

Releasing eBook: 12 Things to Reduce Your Lead Time and Time to Market

2009-07-29T09:55:16Z

I’ve finished the final version of my “12 Things You can do to Shorten Your Lead Time in Software Development” eBook. Woooha! Thanks to all who gave feedback after reading the final draft (several thousand downloads!). This Book is about shortening the time to market of your software development – the time from having [...]

Finished draft for my first free eBook: 12 Things to Shorten Your Lead Time

2009-07-29T15:58:31Z

Update: Released the final version. Yesterday night I’ve finished the first draft of my first eBook (hurray!). The book is about reducing the lead time of your software development. “12 Things to Shorten Your Lead Time” helps with concrete actions you can take to shorten the time it takes from the first idea to the [...]

Why the Toyota Product Development System is a thing of the past

2009-06-29T18:29:28Z

This post tries to explain why website/app development is Production and should use the Toyota Production System (TPS) and why classic software application development is product development and can use the Toyota Product Development System (TPDS). photo credit: drewgstephens Recently there has been a conundrum in parts of the agile and lean community: Obviously the Toyota [...]

New Version of my Simple Kanban Board Application

2009-06-15T10:09:15Z

Over the weekend I’ve worked on my Simple-Kanban application. Simple Kanban is a small Kanban board application in one Html file. New features are a data mode that displays the data in raw format for easier cut & paste and drag & drop support for moving stories around. There is a website now! I’ve [...]

Micro Book Review: Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great

2009-06-11T08:30:43Z

Title: Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great Author: Esther Derby / Diana Larsen Pages: 165 What the book is about The book is about leading retrospectives. Retrospectives came into fashion with agile software development, especially Scrum has retrospectives every sprint. The beginning of the book motivates retrospectives, explains them, shows how to lead them and establishes the concept of [...]

Kanban Board Application in One Html File

2009-06-09T10:29:20Z

For some years I’ve been interested in lean software development and how to reduce waste. While introducing lean practices, I’ve needed a small, simple Kanban Board application. Thought I’d write one. You can download a very first alpha here or see it in action here. Suprised? The application is just one HTML file, no installation needed, [...]

Top 5 Things to Know About Constructors in Scala

2009-04-23T04:46:16Z

I’ve been toying with Scala for some months now, one thing I’ve struggled with coming from Java are constructors in Scala. They are comparable to Java, but the syntax is different. credit: .Paolo. To help get you going faster in Scala, the top 5 things to know about constructors. Here we go: How to do constructors [...]

7 More Good Tips on Logging

2009-02-24T06:06:39Z

Logging in web applications is important – to know what’s going on, for performance tuning and incident analyis. This is my second post about logging. The first post “7 Good Rules to Log Exceptions” was specific to logging exceptions, ths is about logging in general. What makes your logs more useful to you? credit: schoschie 1. No [...]

Better Null Handling Strategies for Java

2009-02-04T10:25:32Z

Uploaded a presentation on “Better Null Handling Strategies for Java” to SlideShare. Enjoy. View more presentations from Stephan Schmidt. (tags: java null)

Scrum is not about engineering practices

2009-08-13T05:16:18Z

Scrum is not about engineering practices – which is a good thing. Martin Fowler writes: They adopt the Scrum practices, and maybe even the principles After a while progress is slow because the code base is a mess and connects Scrum failure to missing engineering practices. This completely misses the point. Scrum is not about engineering practices, [...]

Micro Book Review: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta

2009-01-28T09:57:09Z

Title: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability Author: Ari Zilka (Terracotta CTO) and his team Pages: 368 What the book is about The books is an introduction about Terracotta which helps you distribute -transparently- the Java Virtual Machine memory over several JVMs. The main part of “The Definitive Guide to [...]

ScrumMaster and ZenMaster: The joke of certification

2009-09-18T06:43:30Z

Many people object to ScrumMaster certifications: It’s a money making machine Scrum Masters do not learn anything during classes The certification is nothing worth – because nothing is certified I have been a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and a Scrum practioner for some years. People who object to the certification do see it from the wrong angle. You need to [...]

Feedburner trouble: Lost 70% subscribers and feed not migrated – HELP!

2009-01-19T12:39:27Z

Google is migrating Feedburner account to Google. During their migration I’ve lost 70% subscribers to the feed and when logging into feedburner.google.com my Feed doesn’t show up – it wasn’t migrated. Any ideas? Similar experiences? It also looks different:

Book Micro-Review: Blog Blazers

2009-01-18T10:01:38Z

Title: Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets Author: Stephane Grenier Pages: 232 What the book is about The books is a collection of interviews with 40 top bloggers. The author askes the same questions about how people define success, what websites they recommend to bloggers or how they did market their blogs. The answers are very [...]

Relevance of ‘Atlas Shrugged’

2009-01-17T17:21:25Z

photo credit: igb I’ve finished reading “Atlas Shrugged” again, mostly inspired by the references in the Bioshock game. I’m no objectivist, but I found again a lot likable in Atlas Shrugged. I was astonished about how the book is relevant even today. There are many good quotes in it, like this gem: Did you [...]

ActiveMQ vs. Jabber

2009-11-08T08:35:24Z

If you have or plan an application with synchronous communications over an external API, it will sooner or later break. Why do we need asynchronous communications? Matt Tucker is clear about that: Take, for example, Twitter. High Scalability recently covered the load stats on Twitter reporting that they average 200-300 connections per second with spikes that [...]

Want Erlang concurrency but are stuck with Java: 4 Alternatives (+1)

2009-01-07T08:36:10Z

You’ve by now have read a lot about Erlang style concurrency. In Erlang actors are sending messages to inboxes of other actors and react to messages in their own inbox. The advantage of this approach with immutable messages is that you can’t get as easily in a deadlock as with basic Java concurrency with synchronized [...]

British Pound Down Against EUR, buy at Amazon.co.uk

2008-12-31T12:02:44Z

The pound is rapidly going down and will go down even more next year (some say to 0.90 EUR). Comparing a Nikon D700 on Amazon.co.uk vs. Amazon.de results in 1571 EUR vs 2054 EUR That’s a 25% difference for electronics (p&p etc not taken into account).

Ioke 0 released

2008-12-24T07:35:44Z

Congratulations to Ola Bini for releasing Ioke, with an astonishing amount of documentation for a 0 release. Great job. Ioke is a dynamic language targeted at the Java Virtual Machine. It’s been designed from scratch to be a highly flexible general purpose language. It is a prototype-based programming language that is inspired by Io, Smalltalk, Lisp [...]

Concurrency Rant: Different Types of Concurrency and Why Lots of People Already use ‘Erlang’ Concurrency

2008-12-23T19:50:48Z

People talk a lot about concurrency. With the rise of multi-core processors, concurrency becomes more important. It’s sad that developers don’t know much about concurrency – and most of them just parrot what they have read in other blogs. I wanted to write this post for quite some time to shed more light into concurrency. [...]

1046 RSS subscribers! Major Milestone!

2008-12-19T19:46:15Z

Thanks to all of you for following. I do my best to write interesting – somtimes provoking – blog posts to keep you interested and amazed how wonderful software development is :-) The Feedburner stats which describe your rising following: (as people asked: The jump was on October 1st, from 481 to 674, there was no jump [...]

7 Good Rules to Log Exceptions

2008-12-17T18:50:03Z

I’ve been helping to debug some nasty problems and bugs lately. It occurred to me that some best practices on how to log exceptions go a long way towards easier debugging. Some of the best practices I’ve learned to log exceptions are compiled in this post. 1. Only log technical exceptions not user exceptions User exceptions are [...]

Dynamic typing as safe as static typing is based on wrong assumption

2009-01-18T18:59:30Z

Update 3: Because I got stalked, I change the tilte of the post from “The unit testing lie aka dynamic typing testing lie”. I like this blog, but it’s not worth it. The view that dynamic typing and static are equally safe is based on the assumption that dynamic developers do more unit testing (what [...]

250.000 Comment Spam Mark Approached Update: Reached

2008-12-13T10:00:45Z

Currently the counter is at 249.000 commentes blocked by Akismet on this blog. With a rate of 500 spams/day the 250.000 mark is approaching fast. Not sure how to celebrate :-) Update: 250.433 SPAM comments caught!

Best Take-Away Pizza in Berlin

2008-12-10T21:55:13Z

The best take-away pizza in Berlin you can get is the one at Dirty Harrys, Schivelbeinerstr (right across the street where I live). 23cm, fresh, very good taste, full of toppings, very friendly, 2 EUR. Go there if you’re visiting Prenzlauer Berg. Only bad thing about Dirty Harrys: Closed on Sundays :-(

Another Good (Java) Interview Question

2008-12-04T13:07:38Z

I’m always on the search on good interview questions as I’m doing a lot of IT recruiting. Sometimes in interviews I talk about books the candidate has read recently, to gain some insight into his interrest and enthusiasm – Amazon looks into enthusiasm as an indicator for good candidates. Another approach to gain some insights [...]

Iphone and Complete-M in Germany

2008-12-04T13:10:06Z

I have an Iphone with an edge data flat and a 300mb limited HSDPA plan. As a curious guy I want to know how much I have used of those 300mb HSDPA. Calling T-Mobile for 3 times results in three different opinions: Callcenter person 1: I should wait for the next month, then I will see [...]

Added Xbox Live Avatar

2008-11-29T10:47:13Z

Added Xbox Live Avatar to the sidebar, Microsoft did a good job (this out of my mouth!) with the avatar generator in the new Xbox 360 console.

Native Type Support In Scala? Wish for 2.8

2008-11-27T09:03:18Z

I wish Scala would have native support for types. Currently in Scala you need to write classOf[Person] for the Java Person.class expression. It would be nice to have something easier than the noisy classOf e.g. when using Google Guice. Because using Guice with Scala looks ugly. I know I could do DI without Guice/Spring in [...]

Revisited: No future for functional programming in 2008 – Scala, F#

2009-10-19T21:18:56Z

In January this year I’ve written about the future of functional programming in 2008, specifically about Scala and F#. Now that the end of the year nears, I’m going to look at my predictions and see how I fare. In 2007 lots of people claimed that this year would be the year of functional programming languages. [...]

TIOBE Index: Java on top, Python up, Ruby down and no longer in Top 10

2008-11-20T16:05:39Z

Looked at the current November 2008 TIOBE programming language index, found via Cedrics Twitter. Java still on top, very slow slide, Ruby down by 2 places, no longer under the Top 10, C++, C# and especially Python up, PHP still 5th, Erlang at 31st, Scala at 43rd ;-) F# not listed in Top 100. Other interesting [...]

A symbiotic relationship: managers and consultants

2008-11-19T09:26:53Z

Why do management consultants get so much money? Why do managers hire consultants? From my experience both as someone who did hire consultants and someone who was hired as a consultant, there are (beside lots of other reasons) three major reasons for hiring consultants. You hire consultants because you need people for a job (fast or [...]

Unit Testing, TDD and the Shuttle Disaster

2008-11-19T05:41:16Z

I was reading the Feynman report about the Shuttle disaster: “Appendix F – Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” and I was freaked out by the similarities of military engine development and bottom-up, test driven development. There is a small passage in the report about how military engines are built: The usual way [...]

Experimenting with new layout

2008-11-13T06:58:29Z

I’m playing with a new blog layout. Much simpler than the last, more whitespace. With an urgently needed upgrade of my Wordpress version and some new features like Twitter integration. I’m not yet satisfied with the results, the balance doesn’t look right yet. But overall it’s the right direction, especially with more vertical space [...]

On Twitter

2008-11-12T07:24:52Z

You can now follow me on Twitter, at last :-) http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism

2nd downtime

2008-11-11T09:13:40Z

My hoster needed a second downtime, to remove the old harddisk (160gb), not sure why he needs that and why it couldn’t stay in the server. Sorry again. And there will be a 3rd downtime, because my hoster found a RAID controller in my server which shouldn’t be there. And he wants to remove the [...]

9 (ego) shooters I’ve played more or less recently

2008-11-13T12:42:42Z

Some of the ego or third person shooters I’ve played more or less recently (2 years?) and how I liked them, the best one first. If you’re only interested in programming, stop reading. Half Life 2 + Episode 1 + Episode 2Best shooter (ever?): Very good story, nice graphics, atmospheric (landscape), memorable scenes (Nova Prospekt, sea [...]

Downtime

2008-11-09T07:31:16Z

Sorry for the downtime, the hardware upgrade and Debian to Ubuntu migration didn’t work as expected due to mistakes by my hoster. Thanks for coming back.

Grails vs. Rails: A fun comparison

2008-11-04T16:48:59Z

I currently think about the question: “Is Java dead?” with some introspection into what dead means, what Java means, jobs, market and everything else. Playing with Google trends and Indeed, a fun comparison: rails, grails Job Trends rails jobs – grails jobs Inspired by Obie. Another one I found interesting (Ruby growing in sync with Rails): rails, ruby Job Trends rails [...]

W-Jax 2008 in Munich

2009-09-02T09:07:24Z

Currently attending the Java/Enterprise/Agile/Osgi/SOA W-Jax 2008 conference in Munich. Really nice up to now.

JavaRebel supports Guice now

2008-10-31T17:27:47Z

Good news: “Google Guice Plugin 1.0 M1. Supports discovering new Google Guice (implicit) components, adding/removing implicit setter and field dependencies and reconfiguring @Singleton’s.”

6 reasons why my VC funded startup did fail

2008-10-27T16:49:36Z

Sorry for the inconvenience, got slashdotted by reddit. Never thought so many were interested. And no, scaling was not one of the reasons the startup failed ;-) No ssh from my work so it took some time to fix it. Thanks for coming (back) During the dot com boom I founded a software startup with some friends [...]

Scalaris?

2008-10-28T12:34:45Z

Looks good on paper, my first try results in Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dumpinit terminating in do_boot() without any understandable error message. Should try CouchDB. PS: Rebuilding everything on Debian from source. We’ll see PPS: Didn’t help :-( PPPS: CouchDB won’t compile, it’s not finding an Erlang kernel header file. This is why I love Java and hate C. [...]

Comparing Java and Python – is Java 10x more verbose than Python (LOC)? A modest empiric approach

2009-09-02T15:27:59Z

In my last post about “50k lines of code considered large?” I’ve wondered about large code bases and the different perceptions on what a large code base is. I came to the topic because of a blog post: “The Maintenance myth” by Ola Bini. One minor point he makes about maintanence is lines of [...]

Google App Engine to Support Java Now?

2008-10-19T17:48:15Z

According to this blog post: “In the recent event Google Developers Day, Bangalore, the Keynote speaker Prasad Ram said that Google Appengine will now support Java. [...] “Java”, said the other speaker, “was chosen based on the community feedback.” Splendid! I hope this includes Scala somehow. This would at last be an easy way to deploy Java [...]

50k lines considered very large?

2008-10-22T07:14:30Z

Ola Bini considers 50K of lines as very large: “I know several people who are responsible for quite large code bases written in Ruby and Python (very large code bases is 50K-100K lines of code in these languages).” This explains a lot. And the blog post made me think. We’ve written >50K code bases in Python in [...]

David Pollak was right about XML and JSON

2008-10-14T07:36:13Z

David Pollak was right about XML and JSON, but perhaps in a different way. XML cannot be converted to (clean) JSON. Suppose we have a shopping cart in XML which we want to convert to JSON: <cart> <items> <item><name>one</name></item> <item><name>two</name></item> </items> </cart> One representation in JSON would be (cart could [...]

Scala is a ghetto?

2008-10-23T07:26:47Z

Tim Dysinger wrote some time ago about his unpleasant experiences in a Scala chat channel. My experiences with the Scala community has been nicer. There sometimes is a little bit of FP zealotry but mostly people are willing to help. Perhaps it was his attitude towards the language with “the syntax is verbose, ugly and [...]

David Pollak (from Lift): “There’s no way to convert from XML to JSON because XML contains sequences not expressible in JSON”

2008-11-21T15:27:10Z

Hmm[*]. Not sure if this is true (with CDATA, #Text and @attributes handled in some converters). For me the problem is more that there are too many ways to convert XML to JSON. For exampe the Badgerfish convention. Or the the Google and Yahoo versions. Or the XML.com way. And the Parker convention. But the [...]

The future: web development without web frameworks – my slides from the first Berlin Java conference

2008-10-09T09:16:35Z

Together with one of the senior developers on my team I gave a speech at the the first Berlin Java conference called Berlin.JAR. The topic was about how to develop applications for the web without a (traditional serverside) web framework. There is a wave towards rich AJAX applications with GUI logic in Javascript. Two forays [...]

scala.xml.Node, text/xml and Jersey: How to do REST with Scala

2008-10-08T09:44:31Z

Scala has native support for xml in the language via scala.xml.Node val message = <message>Hello world</message> There is an excellent book called scala.xml on XML and Scala so this post won’t go into more detail. Using the XML support in Scala makes it easy to write REST applications with Jersey. I’ve shown how to create JSON with a [...]

The secret problem with DSLs

2008-10-08T05:25:58Z

There is a lot of holladi about DSLs (in Ruby and Scala and everywhere). The secret problem with DSLs that nobody talks about is easy to explain: Growing and designing a language has been shown to be hard. Most people who think they could solve a problem with a DSL are not good language designers [...]

Metric for concurrent users/server?

2008-10-04T07:03:31Z

When looking at server numbers from Facebook, Youtube or Linkedin, it would be nice to have a metric to compare concurrent users/server over several architectures (becnhmarking). Is there something like that?

Scala vs. Clojure

2008-10-06T11:47:36Z

There are some discussions about Scala vs. Clojure – which one could replace Java on the VM. I think the object oriented features of Scala make the language more usable for real world applications. But the idea of Clojure – tight integration with Java through Iterable and Iterator, implementing Java interfaces, but keeping immutable structures, compared [...]

Pretty Printer for JSON in Java?

2009-09-18T06:46:06Z

… with output as HTML in color? Any ideas?

American vs. European style of Software Development

2008-09-27T08:56:41Z

There are two different cultures in the US and Europe. The US is more about freedom and power, one can get to the top alone, gun slinger mentatlity. Europe is more about security and safety, about making it as a group. This can be seen in foreign policy, gun laws, social security and health care [...]

Short Book Review on “The Definitive Guide to Terracotta” by Apress

2008-09-26T08:51:57Z

Some small notes: The book was kindly supplied by Apress. The review was lost, tried to be rescued, not found and finally written again from my notes, all because my MacBook crashed ;-) A short review of the Apress Book “The Definitive Guide to Terracotta” by Terracotta Inc. I didn’t do reviews before so this is [...]

Higher Order Objects

2008-10-12T08:40:44Z

With all this talk about higher order functions: Nearly all OO programming languages support higher order objects! (Which are objects that take other objects to perform a task) Higher order functions might be a big “Ah” moment in FP, but the concept is really very simple and basic in OO. Update: Dear Dzone readers, there is not much [...]

Site was down

2008-09-23T09:21:40Z

The site was down on Sunday and Monday, sorry for that. Thanks for coming back.

Difference between Spring and .NET as a plattform?

2008-09-20T10:45:48Z

Not much. Both are written only by one company which makes the source available. Really. But you have to pay for Spring.

JsonBuilder for Scala, REST and Jersey

2008-09-18T08:21:14Z

How to generate Json for REST? If you’re suspicious of automatic generation like me?* I’ve created a markup builder which can be used with Json and made a look into the future in my post “The best Markup Builder I could build in Java”: “Closures in Java 7 will make it much easier to write [...]

Scala and Netbeans

2008-09-17T05:38:52Z

Compared to my IntelliJ IDEA experience, Netbeans works much better with Scala (but worse with Maven). Netbeans does recognize correct code compared to IDEA – but recognizes illegal code as legal too. For example it doesn’t tell you if you implement all methods from an abstract class. And lots of other things are missing from [...]

Scala, Maven and Jersey

2008-09-15T18:50:40Z

As a small side note, I’ve got import javax.ws.rs.{Path, GET, ProduceMime} @Path("/hello") class HelloResource { @GET @ProduceMime(Array("text/html")) def hello() = "Hello World" } working with Maven2, Jetty and Jersey. Took some time but was interesting. Any ideas for Array("text/html") (Scala does’t support varags the same as Java does) Perhaps a clever implicit? Need to think more.

Scala and IntelliJ IDEA

2008-09-16T12:00:42Z

I’ve played around with the latest Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and I consider it alpha quality at best. It’s hard to get compilation going and it gets often confused with parsing (for very basic files, 10 lines of Scala with annotations for Jersey this time). It feels like Eclipse which will also present errors [...]

Immer wieder Ärger mit Lichtblick

2008-09-10T06:00:41Z

Nach unserem letzten – langen – Ärger mit Lichtblick, der sich nur mit Drohung von rechtlichen Schritten lösen lies, nun erneut Ärger: Nach einem Umzug haben wir zwar eine Endstromstand bekommen mit einer Gutschrift, diesen Monat aber wurde 2x unter 2 Vertragsnummern der gleiche Monatsbetrag abgebucht. Wieder Ärger, wieder Telefonieren, wieder drohen mit Rechtsmitteln. Dabei [...]

Functional design patterns and cargo cult blogging

2009-09-18T05:57:37Z

Again, I’ve found someone. I considered stopping last time. But this one is too good. I will only pick some parts of the post, there is not enough time to fight all stupidity there is in the world – I need to choose my battles. As the last two posts, I’ve again chosen someone who [...]

Direct access 300 times faster in Java?

2008-09-03T11:19:29Z

Dear DZone and Reddit readers: Some test might result in a great difference between direct access and getters. Running a modified test with -server is 20 times faster for direct access compared to getters. If more stupid benchmarking is involved, this can increase. I suspect the server JVM is optimizing a lot. If you want [...]

Funny, some Rubyists are stupider than a piece of wood

2008-08-28T15:55:37Z

This one for example. He proposes a simple way to make Java developers angry, by showing them some code. His example is File.open('server.cert').readlines[1..-2].join.gsub(/\n/, '') and throws a challenge: Anyhoo, all you have to do now is find someone who uses a big stupid language and throw an example like above to their face and tell them [...]

Sharding destroys the goals of your relational database

2008-08-26T07:31:13Z

Sharding does destroy your relational database – which is a good thing. The idea behind sharding is to distribute data to several databases based on certain criterias. This could for example be the primary key. All entities that keys begin with 1 go to one database, with 2 to another and so on (often modulo [...]

400 reader milestone

2008-08-21T09:07:25Z

After my 200 reader milestone in January and 300 in May, this blog has reached the 400 FeedBurner reader milestone. Thanks to all the regular readers of this blog for listening :-)

Who wins the Olympics?

2008-08-20T12:31:29Z

Considering the fact that the swoosh is the most shown icon of the Olympics, guess who has won?

My MacBookPro is kaputt

2008-08-11T18:57:48Z

… since several days :-(

Hg gets rebase

2008-08-11T07:43:35Z

Hg gets rebase. Though from the comments it’s not yet up to git, add “Killer features for Git are git rebase [...] ;s/Git/Mercurial/g” to the Mercurial part of my comparison post and remove “[...] no rebase [...].”.

Response to the critique for my last post and OneElementIterator

2008-08-09T16:16:53Z

I’ve wrote an update to the post where someone suggested in a trackback to use the JDK for an one element iterator. I got interested in aa OneElementIterator, which optimized – not sure how fast try is – could look like this: public class OneElementIterator[T] implements Iterator[T] { private T element; public OneElementIterator(T element) { [...]

“For” hack with Option monad in Java

2008-08-08T07:30:14Z

There has been some discussion going on in the blogosphere about monads, and especially about the Haskell Maybe monad or the Scala option class. Those are ways to prevent problems with NULL and NPEs that Java lacks. Java returns NULL form many methods to indicate failure or no result. Suppose we have a method which [...]

Hg versus Git – and why I did chose Hg

2008-07-31T10:01:13Z

After my unpleasant experience with setting up Git, I’ve had some time to play around with Git and use it in a project. Git is really nice for a DVCS. What I like was the git status view, especially with colors turned on. Grouping added and modified files is much nicer than the Subversion style [...]

I want to meet Cameron Purdy ;-) Who do you want to meet?

2008-07-30T18:01:23Z

Partially because of the good discussions on TSS about Coherence and the knowledge he has, but mostly because of this recent presentation. It’s about “The Top 10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Application Scalability and Reliability”. I’ve enjoyed the video very much and laughed several times so loud my colleague looked up. Cameron made a [...]

“Yahoo will go down in flames”

2008-10-24T06:33:45Z

Funny, I wrote that more than a year ago. Update 10/24/08: Looks more and more likely