Well, I’ve been doing tons of reading on exception handling to try and develop a standard set of practices. I’ve got two immediate problems that I need to address and haven’t found much advice on: 1. Exceptions Crossing Tier Boundaries: Many of our systems are n-Tier and exceptions visible in the most remote layers aren’t necessarily available in the presentation tier. What to do? I want to preserve the stack trace if at all possible, [...]

This post is just a placeholder so I can google for this SAX error later and remember how I fixed it. You get one of these errors from SAX when you have an XML document that uses a relative reference to its DTD. So, say you’ve got a filter-config.xml which contains something like: <!DOCTYPE security PUBLIC “-//Bytecode Pty Ltd//Spam Filtering Components//EN” “filter-config.dtd” > And you’ve put filter-config.dtd in the same directory as filter-config.xml. Fair enough. [...]

Been there, done that, got the stick pin. I’m now officially a Java Certified Programmer – and I’ve got the card to prove it! It was certainly a fun exam, and it took me the whole two hours just to get the thing finished. I probably should have studied harder, but hey, I passed, and I’m very happy. Also learned a lot more than any man should about scope rules relating to inner classes, and [...]

I used to be a hardcore DOM-style man, and dom4j remains my favourite XML API, but these days I’ve been doing a lot of performance and load sensitive stuff in the middle tier, which means that I tend to go for streaming solutions like XML pull and SAX. My basic lesson has been that streaming = performance. I mean, the numbers just don’t lie – we’re talking at least 3 times faster than any DOM-based [...]

I’ve just spent the arvo moving my data over from MoveableType to Pebble, and after some gotchas it should all be good. I took a longer route than most since I had to go via phpMyAdmin to get an XML dump of my MT data first (since I don’t have shell access to the mysql box, and I can’t get to it from remote hosts). The basic operation was: Work out the naming of Pebble [...]

This year I’m really making an effort to get Bytecode’s image up to scratch as an Aussie Java company, so I’ve tracked down a sensational Aussie Web Designer – Cameron Adams to help lift our image. First stop was getting the corporate id sorted out. Cameron has put up with my incessant tweaking and come up with something that I just love. You read it first here! Check it out (the black is his recommended [...]

I’m now hosting my blog on my own Linode which is basically a hosted Unix service where you have root access. Fantastic stuff. I’ve installed my own DNS and mail servers, an instance of Tomcat, my wiki (a JSPWiki) and now some new Java blogging software – Pebble. If you’re looking for Java hosting … and don’t mind getting dirty with a little Linux, you can’t do better than root access! Ultimate flexibility. Now, the [...]