Software is too expensive to build cheaply... http://twasink.net/blog/ en Copyright 2008 Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:24:36 +1000 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.35 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss We apologised for the wrong thing Today our Prime Minister made an important step in Australian history, by apologising to indigenous Australians for past injustices. However, I think the focus on the so-called Stolen Generation was wrong.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/we_apologised_f.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/we_apologised_f.html Politics Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:24:36 +1000 RSpec, JRuby and Story Testing Java Code I've long been interested in decent ways of expressing tests in a human-readable format. Not just any humans, but BAs and business reps in particular - the kind of people who will not be interested in slugging through piles of language syntax. I tried Fit sometime ago, and was impressed, but when I came back and revisited it recently, it looked a lot like the community had kind of faded away. Accordingly, I looked around at what else was available, and stumbled across RSpec. Now, I want to test Java code, and RSpec is for Ruby (as the R kind of hints), but I was able to get this going under JRuby fairly easily. I couldn't find any examples of other people doing that, so I thought I'd write it up.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/rspec_jruby_and.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/rspec_jruby_and.html Java Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:37:05 +1000 Hibernate Query (Lack Of) Caching Hibernate has long had a feature known as "query caches" - you can run a query, cache the result, and thus avoid running it repeatedly. The only problem is that it doesn't do what you think it does.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/hibernate_query.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/02/hibernate_query.html Java Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:29:10 +1000 ... and sometimes they don't. I've spent most of the last year involved in an intensive project that really drained me - hence the lack of blogging. I want to blog in a positive fashion this year, so I'll start by getting a lot of gripes off my chest. :) Call it things that suck.

Here's a short list, before I define what I mean by "suck":

  • Maven2
  • EJB3 Persistence
  • Hibernate, caches, and the way they can kill your database.
  • Maven2 (it just sucks a lot!)
  • No Java 6 on the Mac
  • No "next/previous word" keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal
  • Mac Firefox, drop-down boxes, and tabbing

and I'm sure that there's more that will come to me. Today, I'm doing Maven - the rest will come later.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/01/_and_sometimes.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/01/_and_sometimes.html Java Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:16:27 +1000 Sometimes, things just work... 9 months of intense development later, our first big integration project, with Tourico Holidays, went live today, with an additional 1000-odd hotels appearing on our site (with more to come). A good example is Texas, where we had only a few hotels outside of the major cities and we now have about 90 (plus more inside the major cities, of course).

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/01/sometimes_thing.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2008/01/sometimes_thing.html Java Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:23:42 +1000 The rumours of Ruby's death are greatly exaggerated... Sheesh... it seems like every man and his dog is jumping on the latest TIOBE index figures showing a very small dip in the popularity of Ruby. Talk about lies, damned lies, and statistics...

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/05/the_rumours_of.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/05/the_rumours_of.html Java Tue, 22 May 2007 17:43:05 +1000 If it quacks like a startup, it is a startup... Mike Cannon-Brookes asks Is Atlassian still a startup? And when is a startup not a startup anymore?. Well, Mike, the answer's simple. If it still feels like a startup, it's a startup.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/05/if_it_quacks_li.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/05/if_it_quacks_li.html Agile Development Tue, 22 May 2007 17:33:22 +1000 Why external Maven repositories are a bad idea Bandwidth costs to mirror Maven repositories: $50
File server to store it on: $1500
Developer effort to access the internal repository: $200
Having 20 developers sit around idle because you didn't mirror the java.net repository: priceless

With apologies to Mastercard.

]]> http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/04/why_external_ma.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/04/why_external_ma.html Java Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:09:50 +1000 Using EJB3 with Spring In my previous entry, I talked about how you could easily use Spring from within EJB 3 beans, thanks to the magic of EJB interceptors. But what about the other way? How do you use EJB 3 from Spring?

Update: It looks like the Interface21 guys have had similar ideas - check out Project Pitchfork

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/02/using_ejb3_with.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/02/using_ejb3_with.html Java Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:43:07 +1000 Comments re-enabled I had to disable comments a little while back, due to excessive blog spam (the alternative was to have my ISP kick me off their servers). I've now made some changes to MT to do the CAPTCHA filtering earlier - hopefully it's a bit nicer now. We'll see.

]]> http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/02/comments_reenab.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/02/comments_reenab.html General Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:03:07 +1000 Using Spring with EJB 3 Back when we were planning the migration to Glassfish, I realised we would have two dependency-injection frameworks in use - EJB 3 and Spring. For obvious reasons, I wanted to know more about how these would interact. At the time (last July), I couldn't find anyone who had used EJB 3 and Spring together - even Ben Alex from Interface21 hadn't come across it. Six months later, and I still haven't heard of anyone using Spring from EJBs. Except for us.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/using_spring_wi.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/using_spring_wi.html Java Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:40:13 +1000 Testing EJBs without a container One of the more annoying aspects of testing EJBs has always been the fact you need to bundle them up in a JAR (and often an EAR) and deploy them to a server to thoroughly test them. This process drags out the development of unit tests, and makes life generally painful.

As of EJB 3, however, it's no longer necessary. instead, it is fairly trivial to mock out the container entirely (and safely!)

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/testing_ejbs_wi.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/testing_ejbs_wi.html Java Sun, 28 Jan 2007 07:57:49 +1000 Interfaces with EJB3 Starting last October, we went through a process of upgrading the main application at Wotif to be running under Java EE 5 (not just Java SE 5). The biggest part of this was upgrading from EJB 2 to EJB 3.

One of the things I noticed was that EJB3 gives you a lot of choices for how to implement and configure EJBs and their associated interfaces. There's a lot of "standards" on how to do it, many of them conflicting, but very little explanation of why. This is the set of standards I came up with (and was largely successful in getting implemented), and why I chose them.

]]>[more..] http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/interfaces_with.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/interfaces_with.html Java Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:54:49 +1000 Running on Glassfish Well, it took long enough, but it's finally done:

Response Headers - http://www.wotif.com/

X-Powered-By: Servlet/2.5, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1
Set-Cookie: PersistCountryCode=1; Domain=.wotif.com; Expires=Wed, 23-Sep-2037 22:11:45 GMT; Path=/
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 11520
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:11:45 GMT
Server: Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0_01
Connection: close

200 OK

Phew. Now maybe I can get those backlogged EJB3-based articles out.

]]> http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/running_on_glas.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2007/01/running_on_glas.html Java Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:12:14 +1000 Back again Sorry for the long absence; I've been inundated at work and in my personal life. To top it all off, I had to migrate my domain due to changes at my hosting provider.

However, I expect to start posting again soon - expect the regular stream of quality1 articles that I used to produce.

1 Remember - everything has quality. Sometimes, you can even put a nice adjective in front.

]]> http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2006/11/back_again.html http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2006/11/back_again.html General Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:43:46 +1000