Why I stopped using Spring
Spring's culture of dependency injection encourages reuse, even at the expense of introducing coupling. If you had to choose between decoupling and reuse, where would you land?
Humble architects
Humility is not a very common trait with software architects. After having worked with a few awful architects and recently with a very pleasant one, I’ve compiled a few of my experiences in the way every architect loves: As a set of...
Announcing EAXY: Making XML easier in Java
XML libraries in Java is a minefield. The amount of code required to manipulate and read XML is staggering, the risk of getting class path problems with different libraries is substantial and the handling of namespaces opens for a lot...
Having fun with Git
I recently read The Git Book . As I went through the Git Internals parts, it struck me how simple and elegant the structure of Git really is. I decided that I just had to create my own little library to work with Git repositories (as...
Offensive programming
How to make your code more concise and well-behaved at the same time Have you ever had an application that just behaved plain weird? You know, you click a button and nothing happens. Or the screen all the sudden turns blank. Or the...
A canonical web test
In order to smoke test web applications, I like to run-to-end smoke tests that start the web server and drives a web browser to interact with the application . Here is how this may look:
Om å løse alt bortsett fra det egentlige problemet
“Problemet med Java er at det krever så mange abstraksjoner. Factories, proxies, rammeverk…” Min samtalepartner gjenfortalte inntrykket han hadde av de Java-programmerende kollegene sine.
A jQuery inspired server side view model for Java
In HTML applications, jQuery has changed the way people thing about view rendering. Instead of an input or a text field in the view pulling data into it, the jQuery code pushes data into the view. How could this look in a server side...
A canonical Repository test
There are only so many ways to test that your persistence layer is implemented correctly or that you’re using an ORM correctly. Here’s my canonical tests for a repository (Java-version):
Loud failures are better than silent, faulty behavior
Sometimes, small questions lead to big answers. Sometimes these answers are controversial. One such question is “What does this warning about serialVersionUID mean”? All the advice out there basically is for developers who don’t know...
Teaser: Bare-knuckle SOA
I’m working on this idea, and I don’t know if it appeals to you guys. I’d like your input on whether this is something to explore further. Here’s the deal: I’ve encountered teams who, when working with SOA technologies have been...
How changing Java package names transformed my system architecture
Changing your perspective even a small amount can have profound effects on how you approach your system. Let’s say you’re writing a web application in Java. In the system you deal with orders, customers and products. As a web...
The Architecture Spike Kata
Do you know how to apply coding practices the technology stack that you use on a daily basis? Do you know how the technology stack works? For many programmers, it’s easy enough to use test-driven development with a trivial example,...
Can we replace requirement specification with better understanding?
On larger projects, I’ve always ended up resorting to writing down a lot of detailed specifications, many of which are wrong, irrelevant or we might not be ready to answer them yet. On small projects, the dialogue between the customer...
What will Java 7 mean for you?
Oracle released Java 7 on July 28, 2011. This is nearly 5 years after the release of Java 6 in December 2006. The release received a lot of bad press, both because it is very meager on features , and because it shipped with a severe...
This dependency injection madness must end!
Or: Poor man’s dependency injection: Singleton-initialized field
Video: No-red refactoring
The more I code, the more I’ve learned to appreciate keeping the code clean even during complex refactorings. By “clean”, I mean that the code always compiles and the test always run. I often find myself in a situation where I have a...
Cross-cutting code, the homemade way
I though I’d do something different this time. Instead of describing something technical, I have recorded a five minute video that shows a very neat trick in Java: How to create a bit of code that wraps existing method calls to an...
Eclipse telepathy: Your IDE can guess what you want
Ctrl-1 is the magic “do what I think” button in Eclipse. Whenever I press it, Eclipse seems to come up with something that’s helpful in the current context. In this blog post, I illustrate 10 things that Eclipse hide under the ctrl-1...
How pair programming and test-driven development looks in real life
Pair programming and test-driven development are some of the practices that are most often talked about and least often actually understood. So I’ve decided to undertake the task to teach myself to program a simple, yet realistic...
