Archive for the ‘Development’ category

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One good reason why Git makes sense

September 16th, 2010

When I first heard about distributed version control systems and Git about a year and a half ago, I was very much a Subversion user both at work and at home. I knew how to setup Subversion, it’s ACLs and make it available over http via Apache. You could say I was committed (pun intended). And then all this noise about DVCS and in particular Git and I was wondering why in the world would anyone give away control over their code repository. If I wanted to work disconnected from the network (say on the airplane like everyone seemed to want) I would just work and worry about checking things back in when I connected to the network next.

In spite of being a non-believer I stayed with Git and what seemed like the hype around it. I read up on it and I even got myself an account on github and setup a few projects there. Git seemed interesting but it wasn’t really solving any problems for me that Subversion wasn’t already. And then I had my first ah ha! moment yesterday.

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Google Analytics Data Export API – Part 1

March 30th, 2010

When Google exposed its Data Export API, it endeared itself closer to developers and to customers of Google Analytics. Data Export API allows us to develop client applications to retrieve data from existing analytics profiles of authorized users.

How does it work?
The Data Export API provides read-only access to all available analytics data. Any data that is displayed in the analytics web interface can be accessed through this API. Nice isn’t it? You can get all your analytics data, for all your monitored websites and use it as you please.

» Read more: Google Analytics Data Export API – Part 1

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Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 4

March 10th, 2010

This is the last and final part on my SpringOne 2009 experience. It’s late catching up to the 3 earlier posts but it’s here now. This post summarizes the sessions I attended from day 4 and wraps up with a summary of my take aways. If you want to catch up here are the three earlier posts:

  1. Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 1
  2. Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 2
  3. Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 3

Read on for day 4.

» Read more: Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 4

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Posted in Development, Java, Uncategorized

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Rendering Global t:messages After Redirect

March 8th, 2010

A common problem when working with JSF is getting global info messages  via <t:messages globalOnly="true"> or <f:messages globalOnly="true"> to display messages set in the previous request when you have a <redirect/> in your faces-config for a particular page You will not see your <t:messages> that are set on the previous page.

The Problem

For instance, say you have two pages – page1.xhtml and page2.xhtml. In your faces-config.xml, you will have 2 entries.

» Read more: Rendering Global t:messages After Redirect

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Posted in Development, Java

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Developing a multithreaded test harness

March 5th, 2010

You can’t ignore the fact that web servers are multithreaded. We can hide as much as we want, but sooner or later you’ll find yourself in the situation where your application works fine during development and testing; but once it hits production you start hearing about “funny” things happening. While there are plenty of tools that can be used to simulate multiple users, they aren’t always the easiest to run locally and they seem to take to much time to modify while hot on the trail of a multithreading bug. Here I’ll discuss the approach I took when I was recently faced with this situation.
» Read more: Developing a multithreaded test harness

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Posted in Design Patterns, Development, Java

Simple Subversion Branching and Merging

March 3rd, 2010

Branching and merging in Subversion is a great way to work on large new features without disrupting mainline development on trunk.  However, it has a reputation for being so difficult that many developers never take advantage of it.  In this post I’ll show just how easy it really is thanks to some newer features in Subversion and Subclipse (a Subversion plug-in for Eclipse).
» Read more: Simple Subversion Branching and Merging

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Java EE 6 and Scala

February 22nd, 2010

Last weekend while pondering the question “Is Scala ready for the enterprise?” I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything in Scala (it was easy).  Another was to document the process for others journeying down the same road (the entire project is on github).  Finally, I wanted to identify advantages of using Scala instead of Java that are specific to Java EE apps (I found several).
» Read more: Java EE 6 and Scala

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Running a Technical Book Club – Take 1

February 18th, 2010

Last year I coordinated a technical book club here at Source Allies. This was my first experience doing one and I wanted to share my experience for the benefit of others who may be looking at starting one.

The fact that we even started a book club was a big positive because it is one great way to geek out with very smart people. You get the opportunity to voice your opinion on a certain topic and hear counter-points or similar views that expand your own perspective. » Read more: Running a Technical Book Club – Take 1

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Posted in Development, Uncategorized

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Replacing and Patching Java Application and Core classes

February 15th, 2010

Why would you ever need that?

Say you get a jar file. After using the jar for a while you realise that there is a bug in a class in the jar file. Unfortunately you also find out that the jar is no longer supported and there is no way you will get a fix from the author (who is long gone fishing).

In order to solve this issue, you first need to get the source of the class. If you are lucky enough and the author did not obfuscate the class file you can decompile it with a decompiler (my favourite one is JD-GUI).

» Read more: Replacing and Patching Java Application and Core classes

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IP Addresses in PHP/MySQL

February 12th, 2010

I’ve been working on a web-based tool that stores, among other network-related things, IP addresses. When I first started I stored each IP address as four TINYINTS (0-255 for each octet):

mysql> DESC ipaddresses;
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| FIELD    | Type                | NULL | KEY | DEFAULT | Extra          |
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id       | int(10) UNSIGNED    | NO   | PRI | NULL    | AUTO_INCREMENT | 
| A        | tinyint(3) UNSIGNED | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
| B        | tinyint(3) UNSIGNED | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
| C        | tinyint(3) UNSIGNED | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
| D        | tinyint(3) UNSIGNED | NO   |     | NULL    |                | 
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
5 rows IN SET (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> SELECT * FROM ipaddresses WHERE id=1
+----+----+----+----+-----+
| id | A  | B  | C  | D   |
+----+----+----+----+-----+
|  1 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 131 |
+----+----+----+----+-----+
1 row IN SET (0.02 sec)

As I started manipulating these addresses I found it awkward to do common binary math (like bitwise ANDs). I decided instead to store these 32-bit values as unsigned integers (of length 32). To make my life easier yet, MySQL and PHP both have native functions to convert IP addresses between my old and new formats to make this migration extremely easy.
» Read more: IP Addresses in PHP/MySQL

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Posted in Database, Development

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