I love Hello Worlds. So when I read the blog HelloWorld with JPA, TopLink and MySql I’ve quickly copied/pasted the code, downloaded everyhting and made it work. Good. But because I’m more a Hibernate user, I thought, let’s give it a try with the same example but using Hibernate EntityManager instead of Toplink. So here is the same simple example of standalone java application using … Continue reading HelloWorld with JPA, Hibernate and MySql

I’ve published an article about JUnit 4 on DevX : Get Acquainted with the New Advanced Features of JUnit 4. JUnit 4 has changed a lot and it looks like there is much more to come. This article shows you how to migrate from JUnit 3.8 to JUnit 4 and gives you an overview of JUnit 4 new features. An article is never written alone. … Continue reading Article on JUnit 4

Do you remember 6/7 years ago. EJBs were the big thing and with them came deployment descriptor written in XML. Then Webapp with their web.xml, and then Enterprise applications with their application.xml. XML was everywhere, XML was cool. Imagine, you can write your Java code, deploy it and after just twist bits and pieces in your XML files. XML, XML… Then we had SAX, DOM, … Continue reading Annotations are great ! Really ?

For people who have played with JAXB 1.x, JAXB 2.0 has the same beahavior: it can marshall/unmarshall object from/to XML. But the syntax is completly different. It uses all kind of annotations. This blog is just about writing and executing a good old Hello World with JAXB 2.0. First you need to download and install the binary. For the following example you will just need … Continue reading JAXB 2.0 Hello World

I‘ve been working in the IT industry for quite a long time now. Mainly in big companies, on big projects where you spend half your time in meetings and the other half writing meeting reports. Through this experience I‘ve met a lot of people who have had different experiences, different projects but I‘ve never met anyone who has had their ideal job during his/her career. … Continue reading What would be your ideal job?

When you run a weblogic cluster you have to deal with several messages BEA-0001xx . It is then difficult to figure out what is the normal behavior of a cluster and the normal messages to get. Imagine two managed servers ClusterServer1 (listening on port 4001) and ClusterServer2 (port 4002) running on a cluster and sharing heartbeats through the multicast address 237.0.0.1. ClusterServer2 is started first, … Continue reading Weblogic cluster life cycle

Last week we had a bottle neck on our application and it took us several days to find it. So, here is what you should not do. The architecture is as followed : 2 Alteons to spread the load 2 reverse proxy a layer of Firewalls 2 HTTP compressors 4 web server iPlanet (Sun Java Web Server 6.0) a cluster of 40 Weblogic server running … Continue reading Connection time out. Careful with your threads

Part of my company‘s job is to create tailored software for clients. They manage to deliver 5–6 a year and producing each one takes between 200–500 days. For the last 2 years they have developed around 80% using the .Net platform and the remaining 20% using Java. Last year I worked for 1 month with a .Net team trying to re-architect their software, but I … Continue reading God is a .Net Programmer

Am I the only one to hate HTML or is this « language » really a pain in the back ? Like many of you, I am a back-end guy : I love Java, I feel happy when I use hibernate, J2EE doesn’t scare me anymore, Struts has no secret… but behind the Strut’s Form lies the dark side of web applications : HTML (or … Continue reading I HATE HTML !!!

Sometimes, your job is really boring. And I’m not talking about a couple of hours or a day, I’m taking about weeks and even months of boredom. This can be due to several reasons: the project is delayed, the client has not really made up his mind, the budget has not been approved yet, the compliance team is still checking that the JDK 1.3 can … Continue reading 10 things to do when your job is really boring

J2EE has nothing new happening ! J2EE is a back-end language ! JCP is too heavy ! Java language is not open sourced ! Ruby on Rails is the next thing ! JRuby looks interesting ! Java is dead ! .Net is easier to develop than Java ! Ruby is more flexible than Java ! J2EE is too complicated when you want to do web … Continue reading And the winner is : COBOL !!!

In this blog I explain how I’ve migrated from Struts Tiles to SiteMesh in a AppFuse 1.5 project. I wanted to do that because I was fedup of dealing with Tiles aliases and also because I’ve used SiteMesh in other projects and it’s really easy to use. Metadata filter-mappings.xml In %ROOT%metadatawebfilter-mappings.xml add the folowing <filter-mapping> <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> <!– These are needed by Tomcat 5 for … Continue reading Migrating from Tiles to SiteMesh in AppFuse 1.5

Imagine that you have a Customer object that has an Address and a BankAccount. In other words, John lives in Los Angeles and has the bank account number 123456 (V1.0). Imagine then that John decides to move to New York (V1.1) and several months later changes bank accounts (V1.2). Tired of the city stress, he moves to Alaska (V1.3) where he closes his bank account … Continue reading An easy way to version your objects

For me, a computing language has to be aesthetic ! Like many IT people, I’ve used several computing languages through my life. With my Comodore 64 I’ve started developing in Basic followed by Assembly. Then I had to do a bit of Cobol for a living and jumped into C and Ada. During the client server era I used Visual Basic and then I had … Continue reading Is Ruby an aesthetic language ?

I’m still working for the same massive telecommunication company and trying to understand the tricky architecture of the expensive software they bought and are trying to use, see my previous post Today I’ve discovered how works a new piece of the architecture : the workflow. Their business rules are more or less these ones: managers arrive in the morning and dispatch the work through their … Continue reading You Need A Workflow ? Just Use Database Views !

Long time ago, client machines were so thin that they didn’t even have a hard drive or a floppy disk. The screen was black and green and all the work (even the display) was made on the server. Hardware became cheap, memory, hard drive… let’s put less pressure on the server and develop thick clients. VB, Power Builder and so on arrived. Internet arrived a … Continue reading How thick is a rich thin client ?