For some time, it has been one of my dreams to see Java-based web applications be more viable for small websites. This means two things: rapid development capabilities (like Ruby on Rails), and inexpensive, reliable, and economical hosting options.
For goal #1, Grails is clearly fitting the bill. I spent the last year or so developing […]

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Ah, the smell of a fresh codebase.
I’m certain most software developers who have been around for any amount of time have had to work on “The Project”. This project has probably been going for years, has had a fair amount of turnover on the development team, and has had a handful of architects (with their […]

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Having finally got Hibernate Tools working with a project I’m working on, I was pretty excited - the HQL console and auto-complete features are going to save us tons of time, specifically, time spent re-deploying the web application as we debug JPQL queries. Time spent redeploying an application is wasted time and can sometimes eat […]

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(Note: This article is a bunch of high-level thoughts and tips I’ve come up with over the last little while. For more in-depth and comprehensive Hibernate information, I highly recommend Java Persistence with Hibernate)
A little over a year ago, I joined the project in part to add some Hibernate expertise. Since then, we have been […]

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I use Java almost 100% of the time in my day job. I think it is perfectly suited for what we do and love working with it. I also do work on the side and am really struggling to use Java for that stuff.
I actually think that with some really cool developments made over the […]

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Agile has been a popular software development methodology for some time now. I think Agile methodologies typically work quite well for most projects and see this as a generally good thing. That said, how Agile is implemented makes more of a difference than the simple decision to use it.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Agile implemented poorly more […]

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It seems like once a month or so, someone comes out with an article about the ‘real’ problem with JSF, how JSF is dead in the water, or how bad it is. I think uninformed articles like these are the biggest problem with JSF right now - go to a JEE forum and read JSF […]

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Several months ago, the programming team I am on decided to try out pair programming. The title of this paper is not a judgment of how I feel about pair programming at all, but rather an observation on one of the potential pitfalls of it.
Overall, I’m inclined to think that there can be great benefit […]

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