10 things to do when your job is really boring

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

Migrating from Tiles to SiteMesh in AppFuse 1.5

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

An easy way to version your objects

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

Looking for a definition of an architect

On top of my J2EE consultancy work, I teach one evening a week at university. The topics I cover go from UML modelling, Design Patterns, Refactoring, Java APIs, Servlets, JSP, XML, EJBs, XML to Web Services . My students have to do a weekly exercise and therefore have to model and write lots of Java classes (and refactor them from time to time). At the … Continue reading Looking for a definition of an architect

You Need A Workflow ? Just Use Database Views !

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 !