Java EE With Netbeans Review

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Technology

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I recently completed a review for Packt Publishing of some course videos on Netbeans 7 with JavaEE, which concentrated particularly at JSF and related technologies such as JPQL. The videos are a natural follow on from the author’s book Java EE 6 Development With NetBeans 7.

I have to say that David Heffelfinger’s videos did a good job of walking through the basics of the technologies and would suggest that they’re worth checking out if you want to quickly get your head around this area of Java.

For more on this kind of thing checkout David’s blog – http://www.ensode.net/roller/dheffelfinger/

Only catch – I don’t know when the videos will get published officially at the moment.

Update:videos likely to be published mid June

JDeveloper & Copying Formatted Text

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

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JDeveloper, Plugin, Pretty formatting, XSD

I’ve started to use Oracle’s JDeveloper more and more, not just because I’m working with the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) Foundation Pack but also as an XSD Editor for designing interface definitions.

I’ve spent sometime trying to find a solution that can compete with XML Spy but without the huge price tag. I’ve tried OxygenXML, Eclipse, Visual Studio among others and concluded that its very good for a free tool. Perhaps still not as good as XMLSpy – but thats the difference between an IDE and a dedicated XSD/XML tool.

JDeveloper design view- with a lot of similarities to XMLSpy in presentation

You might think, that to use JDeveloper I have to commit to using the Oracle technology stack (and the big price tag that comes with), but this isn’t the case.

Not to mention Oracle have very much caught up with the Open Source World of Maven, there is a growing library of plugins both Official and Open Source covering a plethora of things from JUnit integration to Python & Groovy language syntaxes.

One of the nice things with XMLSpy and VisualStudio is the ability to copy into other documents the pretty formatted text (colour coded syntax etc) – making schemas or code fragments easier to look at in a document. However out of the box JDeveloper doesn’t do this out of the box. But it would seem that this capability wasn’t just wanted by me, so an extension has been written Chris Hughes that solves this problem called jdev-copyashtml.


<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><xs:schemaxmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><xs:elementname="shiporder"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="orderperson"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="shipto"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="name"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="address"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="city"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="country"type="xs:string"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element><xs:elementname="item"maxOccurs="unbounded"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="title"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="note"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0"/><xs:elementname="quantity"type="xs:positiveInteger"/><xs:elementname="price"type="xs:decimal"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:sequence><xs:attributename="orderid"type="xs:string"use="required"/></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:schema>

Once downloaded go to Help –> Check for Updates and step through so you can then choose your download – as shown.

Once installed you’ll need to restart JDeveloper. To then configure to plugin to work as you want go to Tools –> Preferences… Where you should be able to find Copy As HTML/RTF in the left menu tree to get the options to configure the plugin behaviour.

If you’re going from Windows application to another then you want the Rich Text Format setting. After that rather than Ctrl+C its Ctrl+H to copy and carry the pretty formatting/colours etc.

TOGAF Skills Matrix

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Technology, TOGAF

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Open Group, Skills, Skills Framework, Spreadsheet, TOGAF

My employer is increasingly aligning its architecture team (of which I am a member) to TOGAF. As is the tradition, new year means start reviewing things like personal development plans. So I thought I’d compare my skills base against that of the TOGAF skills framework (http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap52.html). Now being a bit geeky, I wanted to do the comparison using a spreadsheet rather than print the document and scribble on it – means I can keep a tab on how things progress/change as go. However I haven’t been able to locate a spreadsheet representation of the HTML/PDF documentation surprisingly, so I knocked one together. Amusingly I found a couple of colour coding/level errors in the tables of version 8 of TOGAF as provided by the Open Group.

Feel free to use the spreadsheet as you see fit (TOGAF 9.1 Architecture Skills Framework Spreadsheet), obviously within the constraints of the Open Group’s terms.

OSGi In Depth – A Review

29 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Technology

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book, OSGi, review

OSGi In Depth

When I first came across OSGI In Depth (was originally called Enterprise OSGi In Action during its Manning draft stages) I had to ask myself whether the same publishing house could justify another book on OSGi when they had already published OSGi In Action a year or so before.

Having now read both I have to say that there is a case for both, yes there is a degree of overlap – but that is necessary to set background. The In Depth book is very much geared up for architects and looks at the technology from a architecture and design consideration with some very honest insights and good practices. The In Action is better suited to developers that need to know about all the different interfaces. The two books are very complimentary, where to start obviously depends upon where you’re approaching OSGi from.

In Depth can at times feel feel a little be discouraging read, but upon reflection what you’re reading is actually very honest worts and all set of insights. Lets be honest how many J2EE books go into the challenges, and headaches of getting entity EJBs to be highly performant, not to mention the deployment challenges that could be faced with versioning of the underlying database if your selling production solutions that should be easy to upgrade.

When you get past this, there are some seriously valuable insights into possible dead ends that you could go down or catch you out later on if you don’t do that up front thinking about how you want to package, deploy and upgrade during the earlier phases of a development programme.

The book illustrates the way to address a number of these, and provides a number of design patterns. The book does miss a trick of providing these patterns as an appendix where they can be easily referred to for reference only.

Over all this is a valuable read, particularly you’re looking at OSGi from an architectural perspective (as I am). Rather than try and review each chapter I have developed a mind map to help show content of each part of the book (of course this means I have a memory jog if I need to come back to specific issues). The mind map of this can be found at http://www.mp3monster.org/new/techie/MindMaps/OSGi-In-Depth.shtml

Beyond Software Architecture

28 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by mp3monster in Books, mindmap, Technology

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I’ve been reading Beyond Software Architecture – although there is nothing particularly new here, it was useful in helping me distill all the different things that as an Architect I try to take into account. Given the process of distilling thoughts I ended up choosing to mind map my thoughts. The masp can be found here.

Information Privacy

07 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by mp3monster in General, LinkedIn, Technology

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Information, Privacy

I attended Ovum’s briefing Information Privacy & Protection in London today. One of the presentations included the use of a rather effective video below, to help illustrate the data security considerations and numbers of channels data could now leak through.

In addition to that, there was a very good presentation from Alexander Hanff from Privacy International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/). Without any slides or other media to assist, Aexander’s presentation was very good, getting his points across about current privacy considerations going beyond just the Data Protection Act, but also what is likely to happen with the update, EA efforts, the impact of privacy concerns such as those around smart advertising by solutions such as Phorm (which may well end up filling for Chapter 11). Although Privacy International is very much a campaigning organisation in the vain of EFF, the presentation I thought was well balanced and not a ‘big corporate bashing’ view.

I think the only issue I had that Alexander mentioned is during a question and answer session, is that when recruiting you should not take into consideration any public posting potential job candidates have made on a social networking site, he is correct to say a case (in Germany I think) may have made a president. If the post is public, I would argue it is fair game (and comparable if questionable statement was printed in the traditional media). If Alexander’s view is to stand, then the value of LinkedIn for example is dead in the water as you can’t use such a site to assist in recruitment. Yet LinkedIn is a way of advertising yourself as potentially approachable for work.

It is a shame that there doesn’t appear to be a podcast of a similar style presentation – as it would serve well as a wake up call, to those complaicent about privacy.

Reverse Tethering – why such a hassle

16 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by mp3monster in App Ideas, Technology

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networks iphone app adhoc

There are nay reasons for wanting to reverse tether my iPhone to my laptop such as:

whilst travelling I dont want to have to pay for my personal phone’s ridiculous roaming data rates to pickup a few emails when there is free internet access from the hotel through a wired network.
working in a medium size company (or even on a supplier/customer site) accessing a wireless network to then manage my laptop during a presentation just is not a practical option, meaning those nice apps for managing presentations from the phone etc can’t be used.

The answer to these problems is what is known as reverse tethering (where tethering is getting your laptop etc to use you phone’s internet access). to reverse tether you have to go into your laptop’s network settings and create an ad-hoc network. Depending on your laptop this can hamper it then using a wireless network at the same time.

Now everytime I move location, I really dont want to have to go in and start unnecessarily messing around with netowkr settings. even Microsoft have recognised this with a simplified means to connecting & disconnecting from wireless networks. So why is it that no one has created a little app that you can run creates an adhoc network for you, and then creates shortcuts for the desktop which can be used to quickly toggle the adhoc network on and off? That way when off running a presentation you can quickly toggle the adhoc network on – use the iPhone to manage the presentation (freeing you from carrying more devices and the laptop when presenting) and then at the end – toggle the network back off (after all you dont want to be announcing your machine as a network access point unnecessarily).

Maven Continuous Integration Best Practices

05 Saturday Jun 2010

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Continuous Integration is a development best practice that you need to be using in your process; it is an essential part of an efficient Software Development Lifecycle (SLDC). If you aren’t using it already, then you should start, now. The main benefit of Continuous Integration is the ability to flag errors as they are introduced into a system instead of waiting multiple days for test failures and critical errors to be identified during the QA cycle. This post isn’t about the virtues of using CI, it’s about how to setup an optimal environment in a Maven shop. Here are seven tips for running Maven builds in a CI system such as Hudson.

via Sonatype Blog » Maven Continuous Integration Best Practices.

Stephen Fry on technology and its impact on culture

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

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internet, Stephen Fry, Technology

This ia brilliant video of Stephen Fry discussing technology and how it has affected culture. A recommended 12 minutes.

ISPs to be rail roaded with anti-piracy legislation in the UK

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mp3monster in Music, Technology

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Despite a lot of opposition is looks like the current government are going to force the 3 strikes and your connection is cut off approach as an attempt to cut down piracy (more details at the NME). With ISPs reporting that the process is very difficult and costly to implement I can several scenarios playing out of a lot of incorrect cut offs, service pricesses increasing and/or service quality dropping as ISPs try to claw back the investment (and reduced revenue as they can’t earn from a cut off service).

Aside from what happens with ISPs I think the process is likely to stiffle media development, consider how the Arctic Monkey’s got going – a lot of buzz generated by allowing people to download live performances, and who easy that will be to mixup with illegal material. Those who are intent on sharing will find means to defeat the ISP checks – more sophisticated file hiding etc. The fact that technology will always run faster than legislation has been missed. What the industry needs to wake up to is to make it more attractive to people to pay for music. This doesn’t mean bigger and heavier prouncements about piracy, look at the anti taping campaigns of the 70s and 80s to see what that did, or didn’t do.

Fortunately a few artists have started to try and develop their approach such as the Nine Inch Nails. The record industry shoul look to develop the ‘long tail’ by supporting more smaller artists as the proportion of copyright theft drops as you move down the tail. So rather than pooring millions into a big ad campaign for one artist, whos ‘product’ is then panned by a fickle audience (to be a little more blunt – a poor quality product trying to cash in on a fad or fashion), costing lots and resulting in labels simply blaming piracy for dumb thinking.

We’ll see what happens in July 2011. I hope to be proven wrong, but I suspect it will all endup being a repeat of RIAA mess, and we’ll see court battles about being denied people’s inealiable right to surf the web etc.