The client brief was pretty straightforward: “We need to persist this class to a Database”. No problem. Hibernate FTW. “Actually, we’d like to use JPA2 to do the heavy lifting”. No problem, we’ll annotate up the domain classes with a few @Entity statements and we’re off. “Oh, and the class we wish to persist is a graph of objects that are dynamically generated via JAXB”. Things are getting a little more complex now. Converting your [...]

Had a fantastic time last night with the guys at my local Canberra JUG giving a presentation titled “NoSQL – Life Beyond the Outer Join”. I’ll embed the slides further down. In the talk we looked at four different types of NoSQL options for Java guys: Simple Key/Value in-memory stores (Memcached), sophisticated distributed key/value stores (Voldemort), Document Databases (CouchDB), and Graph Databases (Neo4j). We also had a play with the common java clients that are [...]

Adobe Air ships with a sensational “Application Update” framework that makes deploying new versions of your application a snack. There’s even a fantastic blog post on how to get started using it. Typically it just involves throwing a few lines of ActionScript into your app’s startup: var appUpdater:ApplicationUpdaterUI = new ApplicationUpdaterUI(); appUpdater.configurationFile = new File(“app:/updateConfig.xml”); appUpdater.initialize(); Then throwing together a few lines of updateConfig.xml to set the period of the check and which error dialogs [...]

I has recently handed a truckload of client code all developed in Netbeans. In order to get a feel for the interdependencies, I thought I just fire up a clean copy of Netbeans and open it up. Unfortunately, when I tried to open the project I was greeted with the dreaded “unrecognized project; missing plug-in” dialog: Hmnmm… That’s ok, so I thought I’d just open it up as a “free-form” Netbeans project, but that’s no [...]