Entries from September 2009 ↓

Assume that you on your desktop computer browse to a web page with the following page source Clicking on the first link you expect your browser to start a new tab and navigate to the url that was specified in the href. If you click on the second link you would expect that the browser [...]

For our new StreamFlow project I wanted to try and get management functions in properly right from the start, which basically means exposing configuration, service management and administrator functions through JMX. I figured that if I did that on my part the customer would simply be able to get a decent JMX console and get their work done efficiently through that.

But then yesterday I did some research into the current state of JMX consoles, and in particular downloaded and tested all the OpenSource consoles in Java. The end result of that is a realization that they all basically suck. There’s no point in naming names, and no point in going into detail, because they all seem to have the same basic problem: the developers haven’t talked to a domain expert.

The second presentation from JavaZone 2009 that I want to comment on is “På tide å kaste ut relasjonsdataben?” (Is it time to throw out the relational database?) by Trond Arve Wasskog, which continues the current trend of looking at alternatives to relational databases for persistence.

For myself, I have for some time argued that most people seem to be using relational databases for four separate things: storing objects, querying them, reports, and backups. In my view it is only really good at the reporting part and literally suck at the rest. The object-relational impedance mismatch is a well-known issue, that DDD values are hard to implement using OR mappers also seems to be common knowledge, and that backups are not exactly efficient or easy to make is also an issue.

The JavaZone 2009 conference is over, and although I couldn’t make it this year due to our project, StreamFlow, going into production soon, the Qi was definitely flowing there. I’ve been watching the videos from the conference (available here, and many kudos for making them available so soon), and there’s a number of presentations which either explicitly or implicitly relates to Qi4j. It seems that so many of the issues that Qi4j has been designed to deal with are things that are becoming known and annoying to a majority of developers. So, I’ll try to outline below just how the topics covered at JavaZone relate to Qi4j, and how Qi4j can help you deal with those problems.

Since I’ve started doing some stuff in Grails lately I’ve virtually been forced to start looking for an alternative IDE. I’ve been an Eclipse guy for the last five years or so; ever since I got out of the JBuilder swamp. Unfortunately, the only IDE with decent support for Grails seems to be Idea (yes [...]

This is a long article to follow up my talk at SSWC, so I will start with a summary for the lazy reader Summary With connected devices, JavaScript enabled web sites and the extensibility of the XMPP protocol, we are at the beginning of a new kind of applications that are operating in the social [...]