Daily del.icio.us for May 18th through May 20th

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Vinny

Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog – In the small, generic plastic box that is the new Netflix Player made by Roku, I think you can see the future of video.
Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World – It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the
Should we discard Interfaces? | Learning by Experience – Is a class that only has interfaces as dependencies easier to test then classes that have implementations as dependencies? Most of us are eager to say yes, but in fact, frameworks like EasyMock enable us to mock (non final) classes.
Graeme Rocher’s Blog: Grails.org now powered by Grails – We've just launched a re-write of the Grails.org site in Grails. Previously the site was powered by Confluence (the Atlassian wiki), now in the spirit of eating ones own dog food it is a fully Grails powered site.
IntelliJ Tips & Tricks – Listen to Neal Ford, the software architect at ThoughtWorks and a fabulous speaker, giving you some hints on improving productivity through the intensive use of keyboard shortcuts for carrying out various tasks while coding with IntelliJ IDEA.
WEB4J – Minimalist Java Web Application Framework -> Criticisms of Spring, PHP, and Rails – The Spring Framework is popular. It has also met with a disturbing lack of criticism. The following remarks are based on Spring 2.0.
US billionaire Buffett backs Obama for president – Yahoo! News – Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, is backing Barak Obama for US president and thinks current US economic policy will push the dollar lower against other global currencies
Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource – The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editi
A conversation Clinton was having…: RE: Java haters, gtfo – Well everyone's favorite potty mouthed blogger is back, slinging poo and doing nothing much to help anything. That said, I've met Hani, and he's actually a pretty cool and down to earth guy.
Firefox 3 RC 1 full review – Mozilla Links – A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.

Daily del.icio.us for April 22nd through April 25th

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Vinny

Bonus Quote of the Day — Political Wire – "The Clintons know that she can?t win this. But they?'re hell-bound to make it impossible for Obama to win."
Thank you, Javascript – The Daily WTF – Javascript supports octal numbers. Any number starting with a zero is octal, even if it can't be an actual octal number. In certain languages, like Perl, trying to use a non-octal number as an octal number results in an error. In other languages, like Jav
Screencast #1 – Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ | Elastic Grid Blog – Here is a screencast demonstration the use of the Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ IDEA
a little madness » Ext Discovers Step 2 of the Slashdot Business Model? – The saddest part about this is that the Ext team really have built a fantastic library, and a vibrant community around it. The library had all the hallmarks of an open source success story. Now, however, Ext have committed the cardinal sin of an open sour
Application Development Trends – SpringSource Enterprise Edition Now Live – The new SpringSource Enterprise Edition product is specifically designed to support large organizations, providing enterprise-class tools and features. The product aims to meet enterprise requirements by being "certified, warranted and indemnified,".
Sun looks to free up the rest of Java | The Industry Standard – By freeing these up, Java can be fully open-source and thus be packaged more easily with Linux distributions. In conjunction with this activity, Sun is talking with Linux distributors, including OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Fedora to have them offer an updated ve
Windows Server 2008 Now ‘PHP Ready’ – Microsoft and Zend have worked together on Zend Core, Zend's tested, certified and supported version of PHP. Zend Core and PHP are now certified for Windows Server 2008.
InfoQ: Comparing JEE Servers – When picking which JEE server to use for your application, you have a number of choices to select from. Knowing which application server is the best is key. Jonathan Campbell took a handful of JEE application servers, and came up with surprising results
Ext JS – Blog – Ext JS is pleased to announce the latest release of the Ext JS toolkit and the introduction of a new product, Ext GWT 1.0 (beta 1). The Ext JS version has been updated to 2.1 and includes new components, performance improvements, bug fixes and more.
Ajaxian » Ext JS 2.1 Released – Ext JS 2.1 has been released. In this point release the featured changes are: Full REST support, Added Ext.StatusBar Component and Samples, Ext.Slider Component and Samples, Example to demonstrate Remote Loading of Component Configs, Grid Filtering Sample

Books I am currently reading

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Vinny

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 Nov 02 through Nov 23, 2007

Posted on November 24, 2007 by Vinny

InfoQ: Prototype and Script.aculo.us: spending weekends at home again – Script.aculo.us creator Thomas Fuchs gives an overview about the concepts and functionality of both Prototype and the script.aculo.us libraries, provides advice on what and what not to expect and gives pointers and hints on how to get started.
Enterprise Java Community: Spring Loaded Observer Pattern – This article describes an easy process of implementing the observer pattern in the Spring framework
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark] – An analysis of the Amazon Kindle only as Mark Pilgrim or maybe John Gruber can do:) Must read – very thought provoking
InfoQ: Article: What’s New in Spring 2.5: Part 1: Annotation-Based Configuration – The newly released Spring 2.5 features annotation-driven dependency injection, auto-detection of Spring components on the classpath using annotations rather than XML for metadata, annotation support for lifecycle methods, a new web controller model for ma
InfoQ: DDD: putting the model to work – This talk will outline some of the foundations of domain-driven design:How models are chosen and evaluated;How multiple models coexist;How the patterns help avoid the common pitfalls, such as overly interconnected models;How developers and domain experts
JavaRanch Journal – November 2007 Volume 6 Issue 2 – Spring offers a few helper classes to do some scheduling in your app. In Spring 2.0, both the JDK’s Timer objects and the OpenSymphony Quartz Scheduler are supported. Quartz is an open source job scheduling system that can be easily used with Spring.
What is the Google Collections Library? – Kevin Bourrillion & Jared Levy are the two primary creators of the Google Collections Library, which aims to provide an extension to the Java Collections Framework. They discuss what the library is all about, its genesis, and how it will be useful to you.
InfoQ: Scrum and XP from the Trenches – The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP
InfoQ: Starting Struts 2 – Struts2 is the latest manifestation of the popular Struts Java web application framework. Like its predecessor, its goals are to make web application development faster, easier and more productive than ever before.
InfoQ: Homer’s Odyssey or My Life as an Agile Consultant – In this offbeat presentation from Agile2006, Jean Tabaka compares impediments and obstacles encountered by an Agile mentor with those detailed in Homer’s classic.
TSS Video: Christian Bauer on JBoss Seam – In this presentation, Christian Bauer discusses how JBoss Seam simplifies the handling of stateful conversations, multi-window operations and concurrent, fine-grained Ajax requests & integrates Facelets, Hibernate, jBPM, Drools, Groovy, iText and Lucene.
Seam 2.0 has been released – Seam 2.0 was released this week. JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework for building next generation Web 2.0 applications by ntegrating Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), EJB3, Java Portlets and BPM.
Asual | SWFAddress – Deep linking for Flash and Ajax – SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.
Adobe – Developer Center : Designing for Flex ? Part 5: Designing content displays – Content displays are the key element of Flex application design. Application chrome exists only to support these displays, if indeed it must exist at all.
Henrik Stahl’s Blog: BEA videos on YouTube – There are some short clips covering BEA technologies on YouTube. My favorite is the Predictable Java video. I wish my coffee machine was that well-behaved!
Hybridizing HTML – How to create Flex forms within HTML pages to easily achieve cross-browser and cross-platform functionality.
alphaWorks : IBM Personal Presenter : Overview – A simple, serverless means of producing and distributing rich media content consisting of video, audio, and slides from the originator’s computer to multiple clients.
Interface21 Team Blog » The Spring Web Flow 2.0 Vision – The goal of 2.0 is to evolve Spring Web Flow into a complete controller engine capable of handling all types of user interactions, stateless and stateful alike, with support for multiple view technologies and asynchronous event handling (Ajax) natively
gwt-ext – Google Code – GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more
xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project – An XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 Renderer – The Flying Saucer team announces Release 8pre1 of the Flying Saucer 100% Java XHTML+CSS renderer, including support for table pagination, margin boxes, running elements, named pages, and more:
It’s Only Software » 5 Minute Guide to Spring and JMX – I recently augmented a Spring-based project to expose some of the Spring-managed beans via JMX. Spring makes this very easy, and even if you?ve never used JMX before, this quick tutorial will let you set up your Spring beans to be viewed (and edited!) t
Android’s SDK Now Available – Android, Google’s mobile platform, is finally open to the developers. Now you can download the SDK and start to develop great applications in Java. Google launched a competition that offers $10 million awards for the most interesting apps
Microsoft Sync Framework != Google Gears (even if the press wants to make it look that way) on Dion Almaer’s Blog – saw Microsoft?s Answer to Google Gears popup in my news feed, along with Mary Jo?s piece itself: Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform.
Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world examples – Recently I have undertaken upgrading to Prototype 1.6.0. I will now show you some examples of what I?ve done, how I did it and why; you might find this writeup useful when doing the same in your application.

Daily del.icio.us for Jun 13, 2007 through Jun 20, 2007

Posted on June 20, 2007 by Vinny

iBATIS Plugin User Guide – The iBATIS plugin is a plugin to accelerate iBATIS development in the IntelliJ IDEA environment
KimchyBlog – Shay Banon Blog » Blog Archive » Spring One – Keynote – Java IDE world has two solutions, Eclipse as the major one, and intelliJ IDEA where they keep innovating and keeping Eclipse honest
Max Poon’s Blog: Extending the NetBeans Tutorial JSF-JPA-Hibernate Application, Part 1 – Adding Query View Based on Criteria from Inter-View Parameter Passing – The follow-up tutorial “NetBeans Wiki – UsingHibernateWithJPA” further shows usage of JPA as well as Hibernate-specific facilities, including : * addition of data validation using JPA Annotations and Hibernate Validator framework * retrieval of Hibernate
Tech Per: Flash for Java Programmers: Lesson 4 – ActionScript and organizing large flex code bases – Steps on learning to develop Flash, with a Java developer focus… This is lesson 4 in my series of posts on what I learn about developing filthy rich flash apps using flex2
blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in – In this post, I provide an overview and analysis of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched. To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet

Daily del.icio.us for May 30, 2007 through May 31, 2007

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Vinny

Google Gears API Developer’s Guide (Beta) – Architecture – During development of Gears, we experimented with many different architectures for offline-enabled web applications. In this document we briefly look at some of them and explore their advantages and disadvantages.
InfoQ: A Wicket User Revisits JSF – Peter recently took a 2nd look at JSF after developing most recently with Wicket. The evaluation was prompted by his recent writing on migrating from Spring MVC / Webflow to Wicket.
Google Gears – Enabling Offline Web Applications – Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
Jakarta POI – Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files – After quite a wait, version 3.0 of Apache Jakarta POI has now been released. The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating files based on Microsoft’s OLE 2 Compound Document format using Java. In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java
Spring 2.1: TheServerSide Video Interview Part I – We ran into Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework, at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Rod talks to us about Spring 2.1, Spring Web Flow, and Spring Batch in part I of this interview
How Agile Development Can Lead to Better Results and Technology-Business Alignment – Agile?s ascendancy is in direct response to IT?s dolorous history of software project failure, cost overruns and the concomitant business dissatisfaction with traditional IT design and development?the waterfall methodology

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 20, 2007 through Apr 25, 2007

Posted on April 25, 2007 by Vinny

Spring 2.0.1 and BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 Integration – Over a year ago we described the integration the Spring framework 1.2.x with WebLogic Server 9.2. Since then we have certified further versions of Spring and WebLogic Server culminating in the combination of WebLogic Server 9.2 against Spring 2.0. Both th
Google Code – Updates: Google releases patches that enhance the manageability and reliability of MySQL – The high availability features include support for semi-synchronous replication, mirroring the binlog from a master to a slave, quickly promoting a slave to a master during failover, and keeping InnoDB and replication state on a slave consistent during cr
Coding Horror: Where Are All the Open Source Billionaires? – The lack of open source software billionaires is by design. It’s part of the intent of open source software — to balance the scales by devaluing the obscene profit margins that exist in the commercial software business.
Python up, Ruby down: If that runtime don’t work, then its bound to drizzown – This past week, I switched from programming in Ruby to programming in Python. Why did I do that? Well, that?s a story with a bunch of background.
HandBrake – HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
The Healthcare IT Guy » Resume Driven Development (RDD) – This concept, which I call RDD (resume driven development), is very real and it?s actually a fairly widespread problem.

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 03, 2007

Posted on April 3, 2007 by Vinny

From Java EE security to Acegi – The right way to protect your Web applications – This article is an in-depth introduction and comparison of Java EE security and Acegi. They both offer a variety of security services to make application security programming easier. The declarative and annotation-based programming methodologies let devel
Microsoft Watch – Games & Consumer – What Apple DRM-Free Means to Microsoft – Apple will offer EMI music free of DRM for 30 cents more a track; album prices will remain the same. Apple makes the EMI catalog more attractive than other iTunes music in two ways: No DRM and higher encoding
BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-30 | By Paul Krill – WebLogic Server builds on Spring internally, said Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and CEO of Interface21. "The architecture that they’ve adopted, building on Spring, enables them to move to a situation where Spring components can be deployed natively to We
The Aquarium: GlassFish Components in BEA’s WebLogic Server 10.0 – BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Media Viewer – Tim Berners-Lee explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data.
JScrape – Simple Java & Xquery based HTML Scraping API – JScrape is a simple yet powerful java api for scraping (aka screen scraping) data from a web page using XQuery. This API makes it simple to pull data from other sources and maintain them in a simple way
Dev2Dev Editor’s Blog: WebLogic Server 10! WebLogic Portal 10 and Workshop for WebLogic 10 too! – BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA WebLogic Portal 10 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10 are all available now
Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This article, co-written by Patty Chi, is the third in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance
Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed! – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the first in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Blogbody: IDEA Really is That Good – I consistently find myself trying to explain why IDEA is so good. This is my attempt to explain my favorite "features". I say "features" because many of these aren’t the type of bullet-point features you might see in a direct comparison (ie: "EJB3 Support

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 19, 2007

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Vinny

These are my links for Feb 19, 2007:

Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 – Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron’s Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron’s Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 – O’Reilly ONJava Blog – Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
dmiessler.com | study | lsof – lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing – She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things – Engadget – When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you’re using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you’ve probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites – Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
Upselling your architecture – The Pragmatic Architect – As an architect, you’ll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it’s worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users – Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … – Static code analysis doesn’t just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
Java Power Tools: Home – "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
Rod Johnson » Sun’s GlassFish Embracing Spring – I think part of what’s making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what’s happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007