I’ve recently been developing some concepts for a client that needed to be a cross-platform rich client app. By nature I’m a Java guy, but because of the target environment, getting a JRE on the target platform was going to be problematic. So we were looking into other cross-platform alternatives, and the install/update experience with Air seemed to fit the bill (I would *love* to be doing it in Griffon, but the JRE install experience [...]

I’m never been much of a fan of ebooks – “But I prefer paper…. I can read a real book in bed… blah blah”, but I’ve never given the whole ebook thing a real solid shake. So this year, I’ve made a decision to *only* purchase ebooks for a year. No exceptions. So how’s the experiment going so far? Great! Things I’ve learned so far… How do you handle the “screen only” reading thing? Not [...]

I’ve long been a big fan of our local Canberra Java User Group, so when Peter McNeil said he was keen to put together a little travelling Java roadshow, I jumped at the chance. He’s even got a basic flyer in place. So here’s the deal: a few of the guys from our local JUG will be running free Java info sessions during lunchtime in Belconnen, Civic, Woden and Tuggeranong over the next few months. [...]

I’ve been having a ball playing with Gaelyk for developing Google App Engine applications in Groovy. One thing that Gaelyk lacks (for now! It’s only 0.3.x) is any kind of layout engine like Sitemesh. No probs, just add then the Sitemesh filter to your web.xml and you’re off, right? <filter> <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name> <filter-class>com.opensymphony.sitemesh.webapp.SiteMeshFilter</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> Well that would be wonderful! However Sitemesh 2.4.1 has some integration points with JNDI that will bring you [...]

Continuing my fascination with all things mercurial, I’ve converted over a few of my googlecode projects (including groovyblogs and gravl). Google code has supported mercurial for a while, but it was initially piloted on just a few projects. These days the floodgates are open Google provides you with a Step-by-step guide on converting your project from Subversion to Mercurial. In the best case scenario, just do a “hg convert http://projectname.googlecode.com/svn hg-version-of-my-projectname” and you’re in business. [...]

I’ve been learning Mercurial over the past two weeks and I’m really loving it. I’ve used git before, and had a bunch of issues with merges (my fault, not git’s – but troublesome none the less). I thought I’d have a good look at Mercurial to see what it offered. I’ve got to say the learning curve with Mercurial has been awesome. I bought a copy of the book, which has helped with the headshift [...]

I’m sitting here sipping on a decaf and hacking on a large C# codebase. What has become of me? Don’t worry, I’m not losing my religion, Java will always be my perfect dish (along with Groovy and Grails for the condiments). But often my consulting work takes me places where exotic dialects are spoken. Lately I’ve helped a client with a bunch of C++ and C# integration work on Win32. It doesn’t feel like home, [...]

You’ve just got to love the Maven Enforcer plugin. Anything with a byline of “The Loving Iron Fist of Maven” has got to endear you, no? The Enforcer is a collection of configurable rules that will force your build to stop if certain preconditions are not met. One of the common ways I’ve been using it lately is to ensure that a certain JDK (1.4 in my case – don’t get me started on Websphere) [...]

People who follow opencsv will find this hard to believe — but it actually happened! Thanks to a whole lot of work from Scott Conway, a whole slew of patches have been applied to opencsv 2.0 is out in the wild! Scott has fixed heaps of the outstanding issues, so if you’ve opened something, make sure you check back to see if it made it in (it probably did!). We’ll have some formal release notes [...]

I’ve been wanting to have a look at memcached for a while. A lot of people swear by it for distributed caching, and it’s now part of Google App Engine’s infrastructure, so I figure it was worth taking a look what’s doable. If you’re coming from a Java background, you’re probably familiar with ehcache or some similar caching library – basically a key/value store of elements which timeout after a certain period. Memcache provides a [...]