Category: Java

The Dating Game

Working with legacy code can present some, um, interesting challenges. I just hit a wonderful issue to do with dates and timezones, caused by a really piss-poor data model.

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Never use a working template

A common feature of many IDE are templates, which greatly speed writing code. People often create their own “cut-and-paste” templates as well.

An important rule to remember here is that no template should ever “work” out of the box. This way, if (for whatever reason!) you don’t fill it in, you know it will fail fast. This helps avoid bugs that can be quite subtle: template code which fails slowly. 🙂
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Automated Test Running

A neat little Eclipse plugin I’m playing with at the moment is the Continuous Testing Plugin for Eclipse The basic purpose of this plugin is to run your tests (or a selected subset) as part of the build cycle in Eclipse.
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Hibernate named queries rock

I’m now working on my second project with Hibernate, having delivered the first, and I’m playing with some of the features I didn’t have time to figure out last time. And I have to say: named queries rock, big time.

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Software is too expensive too build cheaply.

That’s the title for my blog, and it’s a philosophy I believe in 100%. Software, like many other areas of life, is not a place to cut corners (at least, certain corners). There are certain expenses you have to be willing to pay if you want a quality product that will stand the test of time; avoiding them simply pushes immediate cost now to bigger nastier costs later.
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Well, at least I’ve answered one question

I figured out why the web app I was trying to build before broken when I used the exported build script. Turns out that you need to run a setup script to get your environment “just right” before running the build.
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I’m not sure exactly why WebLogic Workshop bothers to make things customisable

It just makes things break!!

(Followup at end)
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Why do things have to be so bloody hard????

I did a silly thing last week. I’ve been avoiding being given a task for the last nine months, and then all of a sudden I ended up volunteering to do it, for all sorts of reasons. The task: work out how to use WebLogic Workshop as a real tool, in conjunction with our other standard practices (like, oh, source control unit tests command-line builds and daily/continuous builds And I’m realizing why I tried so hard to avoid it.
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Annoying issue with Javascript and arrays

Stumbled across this one recently. Stumbled as in I fell down, grazed my knees, and couldn’t get up properly for a couple of hours. Turns out that arrays in Javascript can have a length that is totally utterly wrong. 😦

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Getting FIT

No, it’s not an exercise craze (though I do want to get serious about losing weight soon). I’m talking about the FIT acceptance test harness. I looked into it recently, and this (rather extended) post describes what I found out.
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