Mutterings

At Webify, we have three main subsystems of our applications: Hibernate for the database layer, Spring for the component container layer and Tapestry for the Web UI layer.
It’s relatively easy to unit test Hibernate and Spring code via JUnit, they both provide hooks so you can start them up by hand. Tapestry, on the [...]

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I received a rude shock this week when porting our new application from Resin to Websphere. The way we were doing asynchronous JMS messaging was completely forbidden in Websphere and requires a major rearchitecture of the application. As a side effect, we also need to use Websphere everywhere - not just in [...]

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I spent all day today teaching myself how to build a Web Service client using VB.NET. Webify’s technology is all Java-based on the server side but pretty much all of our customers are using .NET on the desktop to call our web services. Unfortunately most of them are not incredibly tech-savvy, especially when [...]

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I have set up a page for a tool collection have decided to make public. This is the set of tools I need to be productive on a machine and its the first thing I set up on any machine. Read more here.

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I’ve been using cvs at every single job for the last 5 years. It works and it’s really stable but it’s got some annoying “features”: most notably, it does not version file and directory names so if you just want to change the name of a directory or file, you need to delete the [...]

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Here’s an article on the new intelligent filesystem, WinFS, slated to appear in the next version of Windows. My favorite quote:
“From the user’s standpoint, items degrade the files’ physical storage location to the point of insignificance. Instead, Windows organizes the data according to content in virtual folders. In searching for these data, user-based criteria [...]

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I’ve been playing around with some new networking technoglogies (i.e. newer than Berkeley sockets). In no particular order:

Rendezvous - a simple but effective new technology from Apple. It allows a machine to discover other services on the network through the use of multicast packets broadcast to a well-known multicast group. Breaks service [...]

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This week at work was madness. We had a deadline Friday morning to demo a new application for a large customer. We knew it was going to be down to the wire to get everything working but we forgot about Murphy’s Law. We have four American developers and 6 Indian developers, all [...]

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Over the last 3 weeks I’ve virtually become an EDI expert. Believe me I have no desire to be an EDI expert. It’s an ugly protocol.
For those who do not know, billions of dollars of business are done through EDI. Health care claims, supply chain management between a retailer (like Walmart) and [...]

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Looks like someone already had the idea:
Who needs the phone company?

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