programming

Managing your own skepticism is a major part of being a software developer. It’s important to be skeptical sometimes.It’s always tempting to spend all your time playing with new tools, frameworks, and technologies.But that’s not what you’re getting paid for, and you can only spend some much of your own time learning.On the other hand,...

Instead of working on the conversion of the blog to Webby, I spent much of the day playing withjQuery and JavaScript. A good portion was mostly wasted time attempting to make the loading of thesyntax-highlighting scripts more dynamic. While this ultimately failed, it did get me to re-learn a lot of JavaScript and jQuery.Rather than...

So, I stayed up way too late last night uploading version after version of this website. I updated the version of thesyntax-highlighter I used on the one code sample I’ve posted. Nothing specialthere, but the fall-back when Javascript isn’t enabled is nicer, as it’s a pre-tag, instead of a text-area like before.I fixed all the...

I have released EasyMock-PropertyUtils 1.1, and it’s availablein the Maven repository or fordownload directly. If you have issues,post them at the Google Code site, or ask at theGoogle Group/Mailing List.The main changes from 1.0 are: Ability to match against an object Static matcher methods are renamed to propEq

I’ve released EasyMock-PropertyUtils 1.0, and it’s availablein the Maven repository. If you have issues,post them at the Google Code site. If you use it, just post a comment here to let me know.

I’ve recently finished reading all of Steve Yegge’s blog-rants. The overarching theme isSteve searching for ways to do better at software development. For instance,Being the Averagest on why many programmers aren’t trying to get better, andPracticing Programming on how to get better for those who listened and decidedthey want to try. He also chronicles his...

I’m looking for feedback on my XPath Replacement Maven Plugin.It’s barebones right now; please send me any ideas you have on how to make it better, or just let me know if you’re even interested in it.The goal of the plugin is to allow you to do configuration (similar to normal Ant/Maven filtering), but without...

Here’s the promised example of how to use my EasyMock-PropertyUtils library.It’s a TestNG test class with two test methods. The first, testSayHelloTo() uses the single-property matcher test. The second,testSay() uses the multiple-property matcher test by supplying a Map of property names to property values. If you haven’t used EasyMockbefore, this should also serve as an...

I’ve created a new open-source project: EasyMock-PropertyUtils.Basically, this library allows you to use JavaBeans-style property matching for arguments when using EasyMock.I plan to add some end-user documentation and blog some more about both EasyMock and this project soon. This is being done separately fromEasyMock because it’s use of non-refactoring safe strings doesn’t fit the philosophy...

I’ve created a project on Google Code Hosting. It’s really just aplace for me to put code I’m playing with so that it’s version-controlled and accessible anywhere. Right now it has a simple command-linedraw-the-high-card game that I’m using to try to learn Ruby.While there may be valid reasons that Google Code Hosting isn’t good enough...

The Abdera Apache Incubator project is now up and running. The project is to provide tools forThe Atom Syndication Format andThe Atom Publishing Protocol. Right now I’m mostly contributingby maintaining the Maven build configuration for the Java implementation. I hope to be able to do a little morelater (especially once the World Cup is over…)I’m...

I attempted to make a Maven 2 build for the proposedAbdera project. I’ve never made a patch before, so I attempted it by checking in thecontents of the original tar into my local-file-system SVN repository, and then made mychanges against that, and finally generated a patch using theSubclipse tools. In case that isn’t good enough,...

I just found this bug today in EXO's portlet taglib implementation. I also hit the same problem when developing custom tags for the first time. So, I thought I'd discuss, and hope that people having problems might stumble across this post.The hardest part is recognizing the problem. As a consumer of the taglib, I spent...

I've decided to go with the Atom format for syndication of data in the web application I develop at work. Inside the content tags, I'm placing inline XHTML (not escaped). I then wanted to use an XSLT to show the feed more nicely in the browser. Simply using <xsl:copy-of select="atom:content"> worked for Internet Explorer, but...

I was having a major problem with this, and was going to post here and ask for help. But in my attempts to document what I'd been searching for already, I found what I hope will prove to be the answer. I'll find out tomorrow if it helps. Feel free to take a shortcut to...

I hate spending a whole day trouble-shooting something, only to find that the problem was something little and dumb.In this case, I was trying to set up an Oracle connection in Tomcat 5.0 (using the ojdbc14.jar thin Oracle JDBC driver) as a DataSource for access via JNDI. As you can guess from all that, there's...

How important is it for an application to be consistent with the native Operating System? And exactly what does that mean?This is brought on by work on a new default theme for Firefox, in a peripheral fashion. In a lot of the talk I read about User Interface design focuses on having the app be...