Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

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 [...]

At work, we are a heavy user of ehcache. Well, we would be… it was initially written at Wotif, to overcome problems with the Jakarta JCS project. I recently had to sit down and figure out exactly how it works, and thought I’d take a moment to write it up.
*Update*: I tested the Hibernate serialization [...]

Cedric’s got an interesting post on obtaining extensibility via interfaces As usual, he makes a lot of very good points, and (again, as usual when I link to Cedric’s posts), there are a couple that I think could be elaborated on.

Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting article which had a brief history of Hungarian notation, amongst other things. Cedric Beust’s picked it up and made the claim that We are all Hungarian Notation users. I’m not buying it.

I rediscovered this article while doing some research. It gives an extensive list of reasons why your code sucks.

When declaring a FactoryMethod put identifying parameters first.

Stumbled upon this beauty today (minor changes to protect the guilty)

Meaningful names for variables, methods, and classes go a long way to making uncommented code possible. However, meaning is not conveyed simply by length.

Been seeing this pattern a lot today. I’m working with integration tests, which have a lot of test fixtures around to do common tasks (such as inserting data into the database). These test fixtures propagate exceptions. In many cases, they simply declare that they throw java.lang.Exception. Ouch.

I’m currently working my way through Michael Feathers Working Effectively With Legacy Code. Damn good book, BTW. Anyway, this was this section on “programming by difference” that got my thinking while reading it.