- facebook-java-api – Google Code – A Facebook API client implemented in Java – The purpose of this project is to provide a high-quality, more up to date version of the Facebook API client for Java developers, and to allow it to be maintained regularly over time.
- The Mythical 5% – So you must learn continuously and teach yourself new technologies, but it’s not that simple. It’s definitely good to learn more about programming, but you can’t just learn more about programming
- The Secret to Raising Smart Kids: Scientific American – Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort?not on intelligence or ability?is key to success in school and in life
- O’Reilly — ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not? – The code doesn?t have to reside in classes. Variable datatypes don?t have to be declared, even in the strict compilation mode. The language is designed to provide as much or as little structure and flexibility as the task at hand requires.
- Free SQL Server tools that might make your life a little easier – This list will grow as I find new tools. So if you know of some not on this list do post them in the comments.
- Simplify Your SQL with Variables and Derived Tables (or Common Table Expressions) – As with any programming language, it is important in SQL to keep your code short, clear and concise. Here are two quick tips that I find are very helpful in obtaining this goal.
- Webwereld | Six enterprise application trends to watch in 2008 – If 2007 was any indication of what’s to come, the one thing companies using expensive enterprise applications-ERP, CRM and supply chain management systems-is that more change vendor alliances, pricing schemes and software innovation is on the way in 2008.
- Checklist/Tuning Guide for Optimizing the JRockit JVM – The goal of this document is to provide information for tuning the BEA JRockit JVM using a checklist approach. A lot of territory is covered, from esoteric command-line options to iterative performance testing
- Red Hat and Alfresco Join to Deliver an Open Source Enterprise Collaboration Solution – Red Hat and Alfresco have collaborated to build an integrated collaboration solution – The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is designed to bring advanced collaboration and social computing.
- InfoQ: An Introduction to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools – clipse’s Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project is an open source project based on the popular Eclipse IDE and is used to build and deploy reports in a Java/J2EE environment.
- InfoQ: Interview: Bruce Johnson discusses Google Web Toolkit – Google Web Toolkit (GWT) tech lead Bruce Johnson discusses the design of GWT, how GWT converts Java into JavaScript, community involvement with GWT, new features in GWT 1.4, and the philosophy behind GWT.
- Apache News Online: 30 December 2007 – Apache Jetspeed 2.1.3 Released – The Apache Portals Jetspeed team is pleased to announce the release of the version 2.1.3 of the Jetspeed Enterprise Portal. Jetspeed is an Open Portal Platform and Enterprise Portal, written in open source to the Java Portlet API standard
- Generating JUnit Tests for Legacy Java Applications – Unit tests give us the confidence to change applications, even legacy applications that we didn’t write ourselves. To avoid the drudgery of writing a test case for every edge and boundary, we can let JUnit Factory generate a large set of tests for us.
- IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.x Helps Avoid Conflicts – If somebody else has already modified the same file and has committed changes to the repository, IntelliJ IDEA detects the newer version in the repository and displays a banner on top of the editor
Monthly Archives: December 2007
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 26, 2007
- Advanced Topics in JPA – Parleys – Parleys.com – a Belgian Java User Group initiative – In this talk we will introduce a few of the common features and use them as a platform on which we can discuss some of the higher order JPA topics. We will show how to use multiple persistence units, define and tune identifier generators, create and invok
- SpringSource Team Blog » Is it a Tomcat, or the Elephant in the Room? – In the era of open source, the traditional API-led sale for application servers has been replaced by a QoS sale
- Samples Updated for AIR Beta 3 | Kevin Hoyt – What started as a couple dozen examples has also now grown to be over forty (40) AIR samples, to include a number of full applications. That being said, I?m happy to announce that the samples update for AIR Beta 3 is complete, and are available for down
- High Performance Ajax Applications » SlideShare – High Performance Ajax Applications presentation at Yahoo by Julien Lecome. Topics include * Developing for high performance, High performance page load, High performance JavaScript, High performance DHTML, High performance layout and CSS, High perfor
- The Google Enigma – In his new book, The Future of Management, London Business School professor Gary Hamel calls Google ?a modern management pioneer? that ?has much to teach us about how to build companies that are truly fit for the 21st century.?
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 24, 2007
- Stevey’s Blog Rants: Code’s Worst Enemy – Bill Gates, Dave Thomas, Martin Fowler and James Duncan Davidson have independently reached the same conclusion: namely, that bloat is the worst thing that can happen to code. But they all got there via painful things happening to them.
- Coding Horror: Size Is The Enemy – Remember: size really is the enemy. Right after ourselves, of course.
- coding, by Derek Young: Java coding decisions I struggle with – Little coding decisions come up again and again with any project, and they?re not new. You?ll write code more efficiently if you think about these decisions and decide The Right Way to solve them
- Meera Subbarao’s Java Blog: EJB 3.0 and 4 different Application Servers – Good, bad or ugly. – I wrote a simple, really simple Stateless Session Bean with one method in it and published it as a web service to JBoss, WebLogic,Glassfish and Oracle AS. It’s up to you to decide which ones are good, bad, and ugly.
- Farata Systems » A dozen of 2008 predictions – The year of 2007 was a good one. The IT job market was stable. While there were no any revolutionary changes in the ways software was developed, I believe that this was a year of rich Internet applications and Web 2.0. What?s the next big thing in IT?
- Ext JS Blog – » Ext Rises in Popularity – The exciting news is that the Ext framework, for the first time, was added to the list and in it?s first year demonstrated it?s popularity. Of the 2,619 respondents, 22.5% were using the Ext framework ranking it 3rd overall.
- http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204204063 – By leveraging predictive analytics and pattern analysis technologies, financial services firms are able to understand their customers, their operations and their markets in greater detail. Perhaps more important, they are able to identify and react to tre
- 2008 IT Budgets Up More Than 10% for Financial Services Firms by Wall Street & Technology – If the confidence of financial services firms was shaken by this year’s subprime mortgage lending crisis, it certainly isn’t reflected in their IT budgets for 2008, judging by a survey of securities firms, banks conducted by Wall Street & Technology
- DHTML Snowstorm: Javascript snow effect using PNG with GIF fallback – So, you want Javascript snow on your web site, eh? SnowStorm is a Javascript-driven snow effect that can be easily implemented into web pages.
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 23, 2007
- BitNami :: BitNami Stacks – BitNami stacks make it incredibly easy to install your favorite open source software. Application stacks include an open source application and all the dependencies necessary to run it, such as Apache, MySQL and PHP or Ruby. All you need to do is download
- Sriram Krishnan: Amazon SimpleDB – Technical Overview – Structured storage was one of the missing pieces in Amazon’s cloud services jigsaw puzzle (the other has to be the ability to host a site completely on EC2 without using dynamic DNS hacks) and Amazon is plugging that hole today with the launch of SimpleDB
- Remember The Milk – Services / Remember The Milk for Gmail – Remember The Milk for Gmail is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail (complete, postpone, and edit tasks), add new tasks (and connect them with your emails, contacts, and Google Calendar events), automatically add tasks for sta
- Eventually Consistent – All Things Distributed – Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the concept of eventual consistency in the context of data replication. In this positing I would like to try to collect some of the principles and abstractions related to large scale data replication and t
Books I am currently reading
As I’ve said before, I am a voracious book collector and (usually) reader as well. I love books and could spend hours reading. With a demanding job, a wife and a young daughter, I’ve built up quite a backlog and hope to get to most of these books in the next few weeks. Here are the books on my current ‘reading’ list:
Technical Books
Scripting in Java: Languages, Frameworks, and Patterns
By Dejan Bosanac
Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0321321936
Publication Date: August 2007
Price: $49.99 $25.97
Rating: 
(Total Reviews: 2)
Sales Rank: 355093
Spring in Action
By Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
Manning Publications
ISBN: 1933988134
Publication Date: August 2007
Price: $49.99 $28.43
Rating: 
(Total Reviews: 43)
Sales Rank: 6432
iText in Action: Creating and Manipulating PDF
By Bruno Lowagie
Manning Publications
ISBN: 1932394796
Publication Date: December 2006
Price: $49.99 $31.06
Rating: 
(Total Reviews: 4)
Sales Rank: 30402
Next Generation Java Testing: TestNG and Advanced Concepts
By Cédric Beust, Hani Suleiman
Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0321503104
Publication Date: October 2007
Price: $49.99 $29.94
Rating: (Total Reviews: 2)
Sales Rank: 140707
Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!
By Christophe Porteneuve
Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 1934356018
Publication Date: January 2008
Price: $34.95 $23.07
Rating: 
(Total Reviews: 0)
Sales Rank: 49628
Non-Technical Books
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
By Nicholas Carr
W. W. Norton
ISBN: 0393062287
Publication Date: January 2008
Price: $25.95 $17.13
Rating: (Total Reviews: 1)
Sales Rank: 1672
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Doubleday
ISBN: 0385516401
Publication Date: September 2007
Price: $27.95 $16.22
Rating: (Total Reviews: 67)
Sales Rank: 9
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 09, 2007 through Dec 11, 2007
- iBatis vs Hibernate – Mark Richards — an Architect at IBM — talks about the decision criteria behind choosing iBatis or Hibernate for your Java persistence needs.
- InfoQ: The Seven Fallacies of Business Process Execution – The architecture of Composite Solution Platforms, as described in this paper, also offers a cleaner interface between SOA and BPM. It gives SOA the opportunity to build truly reusable services: the Resource Lifecycle Services which can be reused across pr
- InfoQ: What’s New in Groovy 1.5 – Groovy, the Java-like dynamic language for the JVM, has reached the next major milestone with the 1.5 label. With it, come several interesting novelties that we will examine in this article
- InfoQ: AntiSamy 1.0 Released – Protecting web applications from malicious HTML and CSS – Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is a major security issue facing developers. A new project on OWASP known as the “AntiSamy” project, aims to offer a comprehensive, policy driven, API that validates and sanitizes input, as well as providing user feedback on the
- Neal Ford on what JRuby has that Java doesn’t – Neal Ford and Andrew Glover are both well respected Java developers, as well as big fans of Ruby. In this in-depth discussion, Ford talks about why he believes Ruby is the most powerful language you could be paid to program with today, and explains the pa
- InfoQ: Presentation: Werner Vogels on The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation – Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels explains how Amazon has become a platform provider. From an SOA perspective, it is interesting to note the degree to which Amazon.com has adopted a pragmatic approach to service-orientation, with a service as a cohesive unit o
- Tug’s Blog: Working on a large XML or SOA project: think about “separation of concerns” – The same way that today we are using SSL accelerators to deal with SSL encryption/decryption, we can put XML appliance to deal with the intensive CPU processing operation: XML validations, transformation, Ws-Security enforcing point
- Henrik Stahl’s Blog: How fragmented is my Java heap? – One major cause for long GC pause times is heap fragmentation. How problematic this for an application depends on its allocation pattern
- iBatis Tutorial – iBatis – Its low barriers to entry, transparent utilization of SQL, cleanly divided separation of responsibilities, and elegant integration with Spring, the strengths of iBATIS within today’s computing environment are self-evident.
- In Relation To… JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 released – I’m proud to report that we released JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 (formerly known as Red Hat Developer Studio) earlier today. The feature highlights of the Developer Studio are: * Out-of-the-box configuration of Eclipse Web Tools, JBoss EAP incl. Seam * JBo
- Martin Fowler on GroovyOrJRuby – Currently there’s quite a debate raging over the relative merits of Groovy and JRuby as scripting languages running on the Java virtual machine. Curious minds want to know – which of these languages will win this upcoming language war?
- Martin Fowler on GroovyOrJRuby – Currently there’s quite a debate raging over the relative merits of Groovy and JRuby as scripting languages running on the Java virtual machine. Curious minds want to know – which of these languages will win this upcoming language war?
- » Microsoft creates GWT clone | Ed Burnette?s Dev Connection | ZDNet.com – If Volta had been released two years ago it would have been revolutionary. At this point, though, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google and Adobe. Volta also sends a confusing message to .NET developers targeting the browser
- Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ IDEA – This plugin allow developers to have complete control over their Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Available from IntelliJ IDEA official plugin repository
- Home | Email Standards Project – The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email
- Alagad: Data Warehousing Part 2 Dimensional Modeling – Dimensional modeling is a somewhat abstract principle and one that is very requirement specific; needing to be created for specific business-organizational user needs.
- Spring Web Services 1.5.0 M1 released | Springframework.org – I’m pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 M1 has been released and includes support for WS-Addressing, WS-Security for the client-side and Java 1.4, @Endpoint component scanning, and more.
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 08, 2007 through Dec 09, 2007
- » Microsoft creates GWT clone | Ed Burnette?s Dev Connection | ZDNet.com – If Volta had been released two years ago it would have been revolutionary. At this point, though, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google and Adobe. Volta also sends a confusing message to .NET developers targeting the browser
- Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ IDEA – This plugin allow developers to have complete control over their Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Available from IntelliJ IDEA official plugin repository
- Home | Email Standards Project – The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email
- Alagad: Data Warehousing Part 2 Dimensional Modeling – Dimensional modeling is a somewhat abstract principle and one that is very requirement specific; needing to be created for specific business-organizational user needs.
- Spring Web Services 1.5.0 M1 released | Springframework.org – I’m pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 M1 has been released and includes support for WS-Addressing, WS-Security for the client-side and Java 1.4, @Endpoint component scanning, and more.
- The 53 Places to Go in 2008 – New York Times – What?s on your travel itinerary in the new year? From a new luxury hotel in Laos (where you can take in the view of ancient temples from a chaise lounge by the infinity pool) to the waterfront night clubs of Hvar
- Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! – Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that?s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes. We?ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean
- PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes — Linux — InformationWeek – A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal
- Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications – The Ajax View approach is to insert a server-side proxy in-between the web servers and the end-user’s browser. This proxy captures the web apps JavaScript code as it is being sent to a browser and rewrites the code to insert extra instrumentation code
- Developer’s Guide – Google Chart API – Google Code – The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. It returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, labels
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 06, 2007 through Dec 08, 2007
- The 53 Places to Go in 2008 – New York Times – What?s on your travel itinerary in the new year? From a new luxury hotel in Laos (where you can take in the view of ancient temples from a chaise lounge by the infinity pool) to the waterfront night clubs of Hvar
- Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! – Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that?s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes. We?ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean
- PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes — Linux — InformationWeek – A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal
- Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications – The Ajax View approach is to insert a server-side proxy in-between the web servers and the end-user’s browser. This proxy captures the web apps JavaScript code as it is being sent to a browser and rewrites the code to insert extra instrumentation code
- Developer’s Guide – Google Chart API – Google Code – The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. It returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, labels
- PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes — Linux — InformationWeek – A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal
- Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications – The Ajax View approach is to insert a server-side proxy in-between the web servers and the end-user’s browser. This proxy captures the web apps JavaScript code as it is being sent to a browser and rewrites the code to insert extra instrumentation code
- Developer’s Guide – Google Chart API – Google Code – The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. It returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, labels
- Roller: free and open source Java blog software – Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download. This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and other small fixes.
- infinitest – Google Code – Infinitest is a continuous JUnit test runner designed to facilitate Test Driven Development. Infinitest helps you learn TDD by providing feedback as you work, and helps you master TDD by reducing your feedback cycle from minutes to mere seconds
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 04, 2007 through Dec 06, 2007
- Roller: free and open source Java blog software – Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download. This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and other small fixes.
- infinitest – Google Code – Infinitest is a continuous JUnit test runner designed to facilitate Test Driven Development. Infinitest helps you learn TDD by providing feedback as you work, and helps you master TDD by reducing your feedback cycle from minutes to mere seconds
- dev2dev: Using Asynchronous Servlets to Deal with Hung Threads – BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 and later versions expose an Abstract Asynchronous Servlet class, which allows you to decouple receiving a servlet request from sending its response. The class also provides a Future Response Servlet, which lets the server handle s
- Yahoo! Flash(R) Blog » Blog Archive » YUI Got a Little More Flashy Today! – Yahoo! releases version 2.4.0 of the YUI Library and they have been working with the Flash team to help them introduce a new component that leverages the power of Flash Player. The experimental YUI Charts widget brings the Yahoo! Astra Flash Charts
- Yahoo! Developer Network – Flash Developer Center – ASTRA Flash Components – Charts – Charts is a set of visualization components that represent two-dimensional data structures (tables, arrays of values, etc.) in a variety of ways (bars, graphs, pie charts, etc.)
- Yahoo! UI Library: Charts – The YUI Charts Control visualizes tabular data on a web page in several possible formats including vertical columns, horizontal bars, lines, and pies. Features include support for the DataSource Utility, customizable serie, axes, mouse-over datatip
- Ext JS LiveGrid Component – The Ext JS LiveGrid Component is a user extension that’s build upon the wonderful Ext JS Framework. The component allows to read chunks of data from an underlying storage (common use case: a database) without the need of paging. Means: You can virtually d
- Ext JS Blog – » Ext 2.0 Final Released – The Ext team is proud to announce that the official release of Ext v2.0 is available for download. Ext 2.0 is a dramatic step forward from all previous versions of Ext, providing increased performance, ease of configurations, flexibility and UI capabiliti
- Adobe Debuts Flash Media Server 3 – Slashes Price – The Flash Media Interactive Server includes the debut of streaming HD video. FMS3 will offer H.264 video streaming, as well as support for High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio that can be streamed to Flash player, AIR applications, or Adobe’s Media Player a
- NetBeans Magazine – To coincide with the launch of 6.0, this latest issue of NetBeans Magazine features 62 pages of in-depth articles. NetBeans IDE 6.0 features Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails support, enhancements for improved Swing development, a new Visual Game Designer, updated
Daily del.icio.us for Dec 03, 2007 through Dec 04, 2007
- Ext JS LiveGrid Component – The Ext JS LiveGrid Component is a user extension that’s build upon the wonderful Ext JS Framework. The component allows to read chunks of data from an underlying storage (common use case: a database) without the need of paging. Means: You can virtually d
- Ext JS Blog – » Ext 2.0 Final Released – The Ext team is proud to announce that the official release of Ext v2.0 is available for download. Ext 2.0 is a dramatic step forward from all previous versions of Ext, providing increased performance, ease of configurations, flexibility and UI capabiliti
- Adobe Debuts Flash Media Server 3 – Slashes Price – The Flash Media Interactive Server includes the debut of streaming HD video. FMS3 will offer H.264 video streaming, as well as support for High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio that can be streamed to Flash player, AIR applications, or Adobe’s Media Player a
- NetBeans Magazine – To coincide with the launch of 6.0, this latest issue of NetBeans Magazine features 62 pages of in-depth articles. NetBeans IDE 6.0 features Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails support, enhancements for improved Swing development, a new Visual Game Designer, updated
- Setting up a GWT project in IntelliJ IDEA 7 – IntelliJ IDEA 7 has built in support (in the form of a bundled plugin) for GWT projects. This tutorial will walk you through the steps of creating a GWT project in IDEA 7.
- Marc’s Musings: Spreadsheet Component – I’m working on a spreadsheet like component for AgileAgenda that I might end up turning into a general-purpose flex component at some point.
- Tech Per: 10 Tips on JPA Domain Modelling – This post is a collection of tips on what I think is good advice, when domain modelling in Java with JPA as ORM mapping technology.
- Scal v0.2 Documentation | Scal – Scal is a simple, javascript calendar/date picker based on the Prototype js library
- Ext JS Blog – » Extended Filtering Using the Grid Filter Plugin – Steve Skrla has created the Grid Filter plugin which has quickly become one of the most popular user extensions in the Ext community
- Datejs – A JavaScript Date Library – Datejs is an open-source JavaScript Date Library with a ton of syntactic sugar
Vinny Carpenter's blog 