DigitalHobbit

Over the past 5 years or so, the hype around web services has grown continuously. At the same time, the complexity of the relevant specifications has steadily increased. Just think of all the buzzwords like SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, etc. Now it seems like many developers are taking a step back and thinking of simpler [...]

One of the Java programming questions I like to ask in interviews is: “Is Java pass-by-value or pass-by-reference?”

A surprising amount of Java developers get this wrong, generally because the variables you mostly deal with in Java (other than primitives) are actually references to objects, rather than containing the objects themselves. Most developers blurt out something [...]

I just came across Java Web Parts, a collection of open source, lightweight web components such as servlet filters, custom taglibs, utility classes etc. I still need to take a closer look at it, but it looks like there’s some useful functionality.

(via TheServerSide.com)

If you are a Java programmer and you’re interested in Ruby, you should read this presentation about 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby.

This blog entry also has some nice Ruby information for Java developers.

About the most dangerous thing about Ruby is how more elegant and less verbose it is. And this is [...]

The final version 0.7 of the Eclipse WebTools Platform (WTP) was released a few days ago. I’ve been using the recent milestone releases for a few months now, and they’ve already been very stable and functional. If you’re using Eclipse 3.1 or planning on upgrading to 3.1, I highly recommend that you install WTP as [...]

I came across this nice collection of web service frameworks, tools, and resources for Java.

The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project has released WTP Milestone M4 yesterday. It was built against the Eclipse SDK 3.1M6 release, which was released about a month ago.

A few months ago, I tested WTP M3 in conjunction with Eclipse SDK 3.1M5, but it wasn’t quite there yet… Two weeks or so ago I installed [...]

I’ve been reading up a little on the Spring Framework, which seems very impressive. It can be used in several tiers of a typical web application, and depending on where it is used it either cooperates or competes with other established frameworks. For example, Spring comes with its own MVC imlementation that competes with Apache [...]

I finally got an opportunity to work with web services. I had of course read about these in the past and in fact implemented web service like applications prior to the emergence of SOAP, but I had never really had a chance to actually work with web services on a project. On my current project, [...]

Just a few comments on Gentoo and Java. Of course, Gentoo includes many Java packages. For the most part, installing a Java application works the same way as installing a native application, using the “emerge” tool. The source code for the application is downloaded, compiled using the appropriate settings, and installed, along with any dependent [...]

I had previously mentioned JDocs on my blog. JSourcery provides a similar service. The site currently comprises the Javadocs for several common APIs (such as the Apache Commons APIs), as well as the actual J2SE Javadocs (although I suspect it is only a matter of time before SUN will force JSourcery to take these down, [...]

I recently came across XWiki, a relatively new, Java-based Wiki. For anybody looking to deploy a new Wiki, this looks like a great option. It has an extensive feature list and seems to combine the best features of other Wiki engines as well as add a few unique Features of its own, for example scripting [...]

I was looking for an API or (preferably) custom tag library to handle pagination and sorting of lists in JSP, when I came across the display tag library, and I have to admit that I’m very impressed.

This tag library is surprisingly easy and intuitive to use, while at the same time being extremely powerful, flexible, [...]

SUN has recently created a new Portlet Community website. It looks like it contains some interesting articles and links.

This is a follow-up to my previous posting on several Eclipse shortcomings, mostly regarding JSP support. As I was confused by the relationship between the official M1 release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project and the various initial contributions, I did a little more research on this.

It turns out that quite a few people [...]

In the last 4 months or so, I have made several posts on Eclipse, which I had started to use at my previous job. Overall, my experience with Eclipse up to now had been fairly positive, with the exception of some minor quirks. Unfortunately, this has changed significantly in the last two weeks, at my [...]

Here is a nice tutorial for Hibernate, a Java-based ORM (object-relational mapping) tool. In the last couple of years, I’ve been fairly removed from the database layer, as the applications I have worked on all had some kind of proprietary database abstraction layer, and most of my work was on the application layer above. It’s [...]

Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? If you’re a Java developer, I’m sure you’ve often run into class not found exceptions and had a hard time chasing down the missing JAR file. Jarhoo provides a simple search page that can identify the JAR file or package that corresponds to a particular class. Its growing [...]

IBM has published a series of articles that compare Eclipse to various other IDEs. The three articles are titled “Migrating to Eclipse…”, which makes it pretty clear that there is an obvious bias towards Eclipse. Nevertheless, if you are familiar with one of the other IDEs, this might be a worthwhile read.

Eclipse vs. IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse [...]

IBM has published another article in their alt.lang.jre series, this time on JRuby. JRuby is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby language. Ruby is often described as an object-oriented scripting language, and it combines the pure OO features of Smalltalk with powerful scripting features along the lines of Perl or Python.

I have used various [...]