Category Archives: Java

The pain of redeploying makes for better TDD

Dions thought provoking blog entry on Refactoring tools are fantastic and overrated inspired me to think more in-depth about the deploy/redeploy nature of Java web development. He makes the point that while tools like IDEA have great refactoring, that other … Continue reading

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Testing DAOs and Business Facades

One of the tough decisions many people face regularly with DAOs and business facades is how best to test them. At work our current solution is that we let DAOs interact with the database which we've prepopulated with DBUnit and … Continue reading

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Forking a dependency with a patch

Dion (whose blog I enjoy) wrote an interesting blog entry about forking a dependency in Java versus Ruby. For example say you need to patch Hibernate or ActiveRecord with a fix that hasn't been released yet. Then you want to … Continue reading

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Zero downtime deploys with Tomcat

One of our systems administrators at work setup our zero downtime deployment solution with Tomcat which so far has worked pretty well for us. We needed a zero downtime deployment solution because we strive to practice agile development and therefor … Continue reading

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One artifact/file per build process

Building on my most recent post, another objective we have at work is that each build process (which maps to one CVS module) generates one and only one artifact (e.g. a single WAR, plain old Jar, or a Javaapp Jar). … Continue reading

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One WAR for development, staging/QA, and production

One of our objectives at work with our build process is that whichever artifact (jar/war) gets built, that it can be exactly the same everywhere, whether it's running on your workstation, cruise-control, qa staging server, production, etc. In other words, … Continue reading

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Changing a URL without changing all your HREFs

When writing JSPs using Spring MVC and Struts I've found myself hard-coding URL's and it just doesn't feel right. Later when I decide to change the URL of a page I have to go through and search replace that URL … Continue reading

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Search Engine Friendly URLs in Java

At work I’ve been looking into doing search engine friendly URL’s in Java. For those not in the know, a search engine friendly URL is of the form http://www.domain.com/foo/value1/value2 as opposed to the more typical approach of http://www.domain.com/foo?param1=value1&param2=value2. In my … Continue reading

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Two additional Ruby features I wish were in Java

I’ve been tinkering with Ruby a little, mainly so I know what I’m missing since a lot of people really seem to dig it. Ruby has a lot of nice features that I like including mixins, closures, Rails scaffolding, active … Continue reading

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Only crazy people redeploy a webapp after editing a class or JSP

I tell ya, one of the things I love about Ruby, Python, Perl, etc… is that when you make a change to a the code or presentation layer, all you do is hit refresh in your browser. With java and … Continue reading

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