Arjan Tijms wrote a nice article on what’s going on in the development of JavaServer Faces 2.2 (JSR 344). Pretty interesting stuff! I just hope we don’t have to wait for Java EE 7 to put those useful features into action…
Site moved and updated
In an effort to consolidate our family’s websites to a single hosting provider and because I was not satisfied with my previous blog hosting, I have moved my blog to a new hosting facility. In the process, I’ve also done a redesign of the entire site. Read on to learn more about the technical details…
JFall 2011
Last Wednesday, I visited JFall 2011. As expected, it was a very good conference again. I tried to tweet about some sessions I attended, but I had some weird problem with both of the Twitter-apps I have on my iPhone… So, instead I’ll give my take on those sessions here, in retrospect. Continue reading
Developing Java software on a Mac: file management
For a developer, file management is an essential task. More than the average computer user, the location and name of a file matters to a developer. Often, (sets of) files have to be copied, either on the local machine or to or from a network share. Sometimes the command line is very fast and efficient for file management tasks. However, as directory structures get more complex, I prefer a visual file management tool, as it gives me a better overview of the structure. Continue reading
Developing Java software on a Mac: text editing
For the largest part of the Java development work, I use of course an IDE. As I mentioned in the previous article in this series, the major IDEs, such as Eclipse and NetBeans, run on a Mac without problems. But apart from an IDE, a lightweight but capable stand alone text editor comes in handy quite often. Of course OS X comes with TextEdit, that is comparable to WordPad on Windows. It’s a simple word processor with the capability to edit plain text files. It can do the job, but it lacks some programming-oriented features. Continue reading
Developing Java software on a Mac: command line
As a developer, I have to use the command line every now and then. In fact, that was one of the reasons for me to chose a MacBook Pro over a Windows machine. Even on the most recent versions of Windows, the command line application still uses some MS-DOS-derived command shell. Admitted, they implemented auto-completion, but it’s still a pretty limited environment. Mac OS X on the other hand is a Unix-based operating system. Hence the Mac OS X Terminal has the same super powers as many other Unix and Linux command lines. Continue reading
Developing Java software on a Mac: copy & paste
I recently got a new job and my new employer gave me the opportunity to chose a MacBook Pro as my development machine. I already had pretty good experiences with my iMac at home, so I didn’t have to think very long about this choice.
However, after years of developing Java software on Windows and Ubuntu boxes, I had to adapt some habits, reprogram my muscle memory and find some new tools. The good news is of course that nearly all Java software runs smoothly on a Mac. For the major Java IDEs, special Mac installers are available, doing a great job to integrate with the Mac OS X platform. After a few weeks of working on the Mac, I have also found some pretty nice additional tools that make the life of a (Java) software developer a lot easier. This is the first of a series of articles dedicated to (Java) software development on a Mac. Continue reading
Back from Vienna
I returned from Vienna yesterday evening. After the CONFESS_2011 conference, I enjoyed the city for two days before heading home. I’ve just unpacked my stuff, so now I have the time to post my slides online at Slideshare. The source code of the demos is already online at my Google Code project. (You can just download the MeetingRooms folder from the trunk, that contains the state of the project as it was at the end of my presentation.)
If you attended my talk in Vienna, I hope you enjoyed it and that I’ve convinced you to start using ExtVal in your Java EE projects.
ExtVal talk @ CONFESS this Wednesday
I will be giving an interesting talk this Wednesday at the CONFESS conference in Vienna, Austria. I will be talking about ExtVal and how it can help us to prevent repetitive validation code in Java EE 5 as well as Java EE 6 applications. Of course, the talk will contain many interesting demos. And… I’ll give away some free ebooks during my talk!
CONFESS starts tomorrow. There are a lot of very interesting talks about Java EE and JSF. I’m looking forward to meeting many JSF enthusiasts!
Book review in Java Magazine
Recently, my book got reviewed in the Dutch Java Magazine. It was a very positive review, I got 4 ‘dukes’ out of 5. A scanned version of the original review (in Dutch) can be downloaded here. An English translation is posted below. Continue reading