Thoughts and Fragments

Dynamic mixins in Clojure: an experiment.

2010-09-28T20:28:00.015+02:00

My web-friend Debasish Ghosh recently come up with an excellent post about modeling the same domain with Scala and Clojure, focusing in particular on how to implement dynamic behavior through Scala mixins and Clojure combinators.Now, while the post is excellent as always, and Clojure combinators are pretty cool, I think a domain model is better represented with Clojure records and protocols, so

Terrastore and the Cap Theorem

2009-12-19T12:21:00.005+01:00

This is an edited version of the original "Terrastore and the Cap Theorem" article, updated to reflect latest Terrastore developments.Terrastore is a new born document store based on the wonderful Terracotta technology, focused on providing a feature-rich, scalable, yet consistent, data store.Data stores today are often classified depending on how they deal with availability, partition-tolerance

Eventual Consistency by Example

2009-11-04T08:52:00.015+01:00

Recently, there has been a lot of chitchat about the eventual consistency model as illustrated in the famous Amazon Dynamo paper, and today employed by several non-relational databases such as Voldemort or Cassandra.Everything starts with this blog post by the Facebook Infrastructure Lead, claiming: "Dynamo: A flawed architecture", where he makes a few points against the eventual consistency

Terracotta, Domain Driven Design and Anti-Patterns

2009-04-08T11:20:00.005+02:00

Yesterday I was going to participate at a technical meeting, when the following statement suddenly appeared on my Twitter timeline:One interesting reflection is that the "super static" property of Terracotta roots helps us with Domain Driven Design.Finally we have (what I feel a nice) way of using Repositories in our Entities without Aspects or Register style coding.My immediate reaction was to

Actor concurrency model in a nutshell

2009-02-03T15:42:00.004+01:00

While the necessity of writing software applications capable of exploiting the multi-processor architecture of today computers is more and more common, concurrent programming is often perceived as an hard task.No wonder, so, if many languages come to our rescue by supporting concurrent programming through first-class syntax support, or through higher level user libraries.Two well-known languages

Against the viral Commons-Logging

2009-01-31T19:15:00.006+01:00

Years ago I wrote a blog post about how to make your application Commons-Logging (JCL) free by using SLF4J.However, there is still a problem if you're writing a Maven2 based application: even if you're using SLF4J, you will probably end up with a viral JCL jar in your classpath! That's because JCL is still used by a lot of projects, and Maven places it in your classpath as a transitive

Real Terracotta @ Rome JavaDay 2009

2009-01-24T18:25:00.003+01:00

I'm just back from the Rome JavaDay 2009, and here is the presentation I gave: Real Terracotta - Real-world scalability patterns with Terracotta.Real TerracottaView more presentations or upload your own. (tags: terracotta scalability)I hope you enjoyed it!I'd be very glad to hear your feedback, so feel free to comment on with any question/thought you may have!

Follow me on Twitter

2009-01-22T14:10:00.002+01:00

Just subscribed to Twitter: http://twitter.com/sbtouristFeel free to follow me, hoping to tweet interesting stuff at an higher rate than my blogging one ;)

JAX-RS: A proposal for resource URI identification and resolution

2009-01-09T17:59:00.004+01:00

In my latest two posts I talked about the problem of clearly defining and resolving the URI of a REST resource in JAX-RS, and then described a possible solution.I discussed this topic in the Resteasy dev mailing list (here is the thread), and Solomon Duskis suggested to identify resources with a unique logical name rather than with a class name, in order to support multiple REST resources in the

JAX-RS and HATEOAS : A Proposal

2009-01-05T12:02:00.006+01:00

This is a follow-up to my latest post: JAX-RS and HATEOAS, AKA "JAX-RS should provide a way to identify and resolve resource URLs".I'd like to outline a possible solution, but first, let me recap the problem with a simple example.The Problem.JAX-RS let you define web resources out of simple POJOs by properly placing simple, meaningful, annotations.Let's say we have a Library resource, containing

JAX-RS and HATEOAS

2009-01-04T18:15:00.004+01:00

This post should have been named something like: "JAX-RS should provide a way to identify and resolve resource URLs".However, it was too long, so I opted for some buzzy acronyms: let me explain them.JAX-RS is the official Java API for building Restful Web Services: also known as JSR-311, it went final a few months ago, and is, IMHO, a very good specification, providing an easy and effective way

Best of 2008

2009-01-03T15:21:00.005+01:00

Here is my personal list, just for fun ...Best of MusicThe Decemberists - Always the BridesmaidShearwater - RookOkkervil River - The Stand InsBest of Movies/TVZohan (Movie)The Dark Knight (Movie)Dexter (TV)Best of Tech/Non-Tech ReadingClean Code, Martin (Tech)The Road, McCarthy (Non-Tech)InfoQ.com (Tech)Now, let the 2009 begin ...

Presenting at the Rome JavaDay 2009

2008-12-13T16:33:00.012+01:00

I'm more than happy to announce that I will present at the third edition of the Rome JavaDay on the 24th of January 2009!I will host a session entitled Real Terracotta, where I will talk about Terracotta, the most famous open source clustering solution, and how to effectively use it in some real world uses cases.In particular, these are the use cases I have in mind right now:Data affinity

Weekly Digest Ep. 1

2008-12-01T10:57:00.004+01:00

I read a number of blogs, and when I see that some of my favorite bloggers don't post anything for a long time, I generally feel disappointed.So, yesterday I was wondering: how the hell did my readers (if any) feel, given that I generally write one or two posts every two or three months? That should be terrible!!!!Jokes aside, I decided to write at least a weekly digest about what happened to me

Gridify your Spring application with Grid Gain @ Spring Italian Meeting 2008

2008-06-16T11:34:00.001+02:00

Last Saturday I've been at the Spring Italian Meeting in Cagliari, for an enjoyable meet-up with colleagues, friends, and Spring-passionate users.First of all, thanks to Massimiliano Dessi', the man behind this event ;)Then, if you lose my presentation about Grid Computing, Grid Gain, and the Spring Framework, here it is: | View | Upload your ownI really enjoyed presenting it, and I think

On the road from Scarlet 1.0 to 1.1

2008-06-03T16:50:00.001+02:00

Two months ago, Scarlet 1.0 GA was released: it was a very important milestone in the Scarlet life, completely covering all Jira clustering aspects.However, there still was one major problem: Jira limited scalability caused by the existent Lucene indexing infrastructure, which was affected mainly by two problems:Synchronous execution of CPU-intensive operations, causing "standard" operations like

Scarlet 1.0 RC2 is out!

2008-03-15T19:12:00.000+01:00

Short news just to let you know that the Scarlet second release candidate is officially out!This is your last chance for submitting bugs, suggestions and feedback about Scarlet, prior to its final release, scheduled for the end of this month.So don't hesitate to contribute to the unique Open Source clustering solution for your preferred enterprise issue tracking software!Enjoy it!

Scarlet first release candidate is out!

2008-02-11T10:27:00.000+01:00

Exciting news about Scarlet are coming!The new Scarlet 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is officially out, with new features, several enhancements and fixes, and a brand new web site!Can't wait for it?Take a look at: http://scarlet.sf.net!Talking about the technical side of this new release, the most important changes concern the upgrade to Atlassian Jira 3.12, improved APIs for plugin development and a

See you at Javapolis!

2007-12-11T06:40:00.000+01:00

I'm going to leave Rome and catch my flight for Antwerp.Actual destination : Javapolis!I will hold a BOF, so don't miss it.See you there!

Owner Based Locking explained

2007-12-08T16:07:00.000+01:00

If you attended my presentation at the Rome JavaDay about my real world experience in clustering Atlassian Jira, or if you took a look at my slides, you may already know that one of the challenges was the rewriting of the Jira caching system.The hardest part of this challenge was to define the cache locking strategy.That was because of two requirements, due to the Jira code and the way it has

News about Scarlet

2007-12-05T14:48:00.000+01:00

One month has passed since my last post, due to the fact that I've been very busy working at the hottest (well, maybe I'm a bit biased here...) Jira extension around : Scarlet.Here are some news about it:Me and my colleague and friend Ugo talked about our experience in clustering Jira with Terracotta at the Rome JavaDay: people really appreciated it, and if you weren't there (or if you liked us

Scarlet is out!

2007-11-06T14:46:00.000+01:00

As I said some weeks ago, in the past two months I've been deeply involved in clustering one of the most important Open Source enterprise applications around.Now, it is time to unveil the amazing work done here in Sourcesense, because the first public beta release of Scarlet is officially out!Scarlet is a free, open source, clustering extension to Atlassian Jira, providing scalability and high

Introducing the Scala Language

2007-11-03T15:34:00.000+01:00

It is both a pure Object Oriented and fully featured Functional language.It is both a scripting language and a compiled one.It is a stable, solid, well designed language.It has been very well received by a lot of people and has thousands of downloads per month.It runs on the Java Virtual Machine and fully interoperates with the Java environment.It has been called the "next next Java".It is the

The Fail Fast Rule

2007-10-26T18:07:00.000+02:00

Every time you're writing a piece of code and you have to deal with unknown corner cases ...Every time you're implementing some kind of logic and you don't know what to do when things go bad ...Every time you think: this can never happen, I don't have to check for it ...Every time you don't know what to do or what would happen ...Please ...Fail fast.This is the Fail Fast Rule, as I call it, a

JavaMail and GMail : it's all about configuration

2007-10-23T10:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to send emails with JavaMail APIs via my GMail account.It wasn't easy: the standard JavaMail configuration didn't work, while Google gave me a lot of wrong and/or outdated information.Moreover, JavaMail FAQs provide a sample about sending emails via GMail, but it has some problems too.So I think these bits of information will be helpful to someone trying

Avoid your getters and setters, Part 2

2007-10-19T15:07:00.000+02:00

More than one year ago we've talked about how to avoid getters and setters by using the most fundamental object oriented programming principle: programming to an interface.Well, it was just the beginning ...I know we're a bit late, but let's go now with the second part of my How to avoid getters and setters series ... I hope you'll enjoy it!Avoid your getters and setters : The Expert, the

Alive

2007-10-13T15:58:00.000+02:00

Hi all.I'm not going to talk about the great Pearl Jam song.I'm going to talk about me, because (very) long time has passed since my last post, and yes ... I'm still alive.I don't want to bother you too much, just let me jumble a few bullet points about the most important things happened to me during these months:I finished working at that big project for RAI, the Italian State Television,

Join Us: Be Commons-Logging Free!

2007-01-21T16:48:00.000+01:00

Johannes invited his readers to revise their code in order to remove all dependencies on Jakarta Commons-Logging (JCL).Why?It is simple: JCL gives you a lot of class loading problems, often driving you mad.If you've never had class loading problems while deploying your Simple Servlet / Complex JEE application which makes use of JCL, if you've never struggled for making JCL use that damn Log4j

Five things you don't know about me

2007-01-16T09:16:00.000+01:00

Some weeks ago I've been tagged by Daniele , but I'm very busy to do anything other than working at a big project for RAI .So, now, let me start the new year with five things you don't know about me:I used to practice martial arts: more specifically, Shorinji Kempo.I used to play guitar in a Rock band called Voodoo Economics.I used to write short novels, and I also won a prize.I have very

Spring Modules 0.7 and XT Framework Highlights

2006-12-10T13:55:00.000+01:00

Hi guys,I'm pleased to announce here the new Spring Modules 0.7 release.We have made several changes (you can find the general changelog here), so I suggest you to update to the new release.Talking about the XT Framework, here is a short list of the most important changes:XT Modeling Framework : New annotations for better controlling the DynamicBeanIntroductor behaviour. XT Ajax Framework :

Spring 2.0 and the P-Namespace

2006-12-08T15:50:00.000+01:00

Some days ago Rod Johnson blogged about an undocumented feature of Spring 2.0: the so-called P-Namespace, which permits you to shorten the XML configuration.This feature has been very well welcomed by the developers community, because it clearly makes the Spring XML configuration easier to manage and read, without running into the burden of writing a custom namespace handler.I strongly suggest

Maven2 : Evil or Not?

2006-11-24T15:21:00.000+01:00

Guys, I have very little time to blog these days, too much work, but let me do a complaint.Since my colleague Gianugo talked me about it, I've always been a strong supporter of Maven2.It is true that it is a kind of black magic.It is true that it has a (very) poor dependencies conflict resolver.But hey, it let you manage your build process with very little configuration effort, has a good

Java Interfaces or Abstract Classes?

2006-10-31T10:42:00.000+01:00

These days there's a very interesting discussion on the Domain-Driven Design mailing list about the use of "pure" Java interfaces (the one expressed by the interface keyword) or classic abstract classes for modeling and implementing domain objects.I strongly suggest you to read the whole thread.But for now, let me summarise a bit.I'm a strong supporter of the use of interfaces in domain model.As

Integrating Prevayler into Spring: ease your persistence with Prevayler-Template.

2006-10-18T14:42:00.000+02:00

System prevalence is a term coined by Klaus Wuestefeld, denoting a transparent persistence solution.Let me give some more details for understanding what that means. A prevalent system is a system made of business objects which obey the following rules:They must be serializable.The must be deterministic, that is, given some input to a business method, it must always return the same output.A

Spring 2.0 and Maven 2

2006-10-05T10:17:00.000+02:00

And finally, the happy ending: Spring 2.0 is in the Maven 2 repository! This is a great gift for the whole (rich) Maven 2 community.My best congratulations to Ben Hale and the whole Spring team!

Great news about Spring

2006-10-04T10:21:00.000+02:00

Hi all,there are great news in the air about the Spring Framework.I think all of you know that the final 2.0 version has been released yesterday, but you may not know that Spring 2.0 will be published into the official Maven2 repository in the next days: take a look here.That's great!In the meantime, Spring Modules 0.6 has been also published yesterday into Maven2 repository: that's great, too!

I'm back

2006-09-06T11:06:00.000+02:00

Hello guys,I'm finally back.I've been very busy at work.Then, I've been on vacations for three weeks.Now?Well ... what a question ... I'm busy, busy, busy!I have, as usual, a lot of work, and I'm applying myself in fixing the last issues prior to the upcoming Spring Modules release.However, I'll try to blog as much as possible, obviously trying to write something interesting ... at least by my

Constructing View objects with the Builder pattern

2006-07-21T19:32:00.000+02:00

Domain-Driven Design gives us important concepts like Entities, Value objects, Factories, Repositories, Aggregates, Services, but doesn't talk about View objects and how to construct them.View objects, as I see them, are a kind of DTOs without the burden of DTOs.While DTOs represent and duplicate domain objects data, View objects simply represent data requested by a view and extracted from one or

Spring Modules 0.5 and the XT Framework

2006-07-14T16:47:00.000+02:00

Today, Spring Modules 0.5 has been released.It contains a lot of improvements, as you can read from the announcement, among which you can find my main contribution to the project: the brand new Spring Modules XT Framework.Born toward the end of the last year as SpringXT, you can find its old (never publicly announced) home page here, I'm proud and happy to say it is now a top level module of

Avoid your getters and setters, Part 1

2006-07-11T10:42:00.000+02:00

In the Java world, getters and setters are one of those things everyone says to hate but everyone actually uses.I think this is mainly because:They are procedural, heritage of C-style (or even older) programming.They are a practice embedded by JavaBeans conventions.Many ORM and Web frameworks heavily use getters and setters.In a series of blog posts called Avoid your getters and setters, I'll try

Java should provide interface level equality

2006-07-08T19:20:00.000+02:00

While working to a business domain model in a pure Object Oriented approach, one thing I miss in Java is the concept, hence the implementation, of type equality, where for type I mean interface.Let me explain with a simple example.Say you have a Customer entity, that in your domain model is an interface, that is, a type:public interface Customer { public String getCustomerCode(); public

A great day

2006-07-04T10:56:00.000+02:00

About one month has passed since the last time I've made a post.I'm very busy at the moment, but today is a great day.I'd like to say I'm very proud of being, from now on, a Spring Modules committer!Thank you very much to Costin Leau, the Spring Modules Lead, and the whole team: I'll try to do my best!What will be my involvement in Spring Modules?Stay tuned, I'll let you know in another post.

Solving Method Contract Problems

2006-06-11T20:28:00.000+02:00

In these last days an interesting discussion about the final Java keyword took place in many sites and blogs: take a look here and here.I don't want to add my opinion about that because everything has been already discussed.What caught my attention was the following statement in this very interesting blog post by Elliotte Rusty Harold:It is a general principle of object oriented programming that

Spring Modules 0.4 released

2006-06-10T19:00:00.000+02:00

The Spring Modules project has released today the 0.4 version: you can find the announcement here.It is still under deep development and maybe not ready for certain production environments, but the modules I played with (or I read of) seem to be stable, and it contains a lot of interesting stuff.In particular, I'm very interested in the Valang Validator, because writing Spring Validators in Java

Caught by an iPod Nano

2006-05-29T19:05:00.000+02:00

Ok, it finally happened some days ago: I bought a black Apple iPod Nano.I don't generally fall in love with all those fashionable things (mmmhhhh ... maybe sometimes ...), but this time Apple caught me with its iPod Nano, and I have to say it's worth one's while. You may know I'm a proud Linux user, so here are some tools you may want to use for making your iPod talking with your good Penguin:

Google Web Toolkit: The Next Big Hype

2006-05-24T17:55:00.000+02:00

Let me say something about Google (I don't put links here because everyone knows).I love Google Search Engine.I love Google Mail.I love Google Chat.I think all those people at Google are great in creating advanced (and cool) applications.This is what I think, and this is what a lot of people also think.Now, too bad, thanks to this kind of leadership, everything Google produces gets acclaimed by

Spring Hacks : Reflection Based Property Editors.

2006-05-17T17:17:00.000+02:00

Property Editors are a J2SE feature used for editing JavaBeans properties from user interfaces, typically representing these properties as text values.They are used in SpringMVC for similar purposes: representing and binding complex objects in web interfaces as they were simple, plain, properties. A short example will clarify.Say you have an Order owning a collection of Orders, each with its

Enhancing Composite Specifications with Message Notifications

2006-05-11T19:16:00.000+02:00

In this blog entry we'll enhance our previous Composite Specifications implementation, in order to sending message notifications at evaluation time.We'll take back some ideas from A notification strategy for business errors and related comments by Johannes Brodwall.We'll use the same concept of Notification object, but intended as a carrier of generic messages (not only errors).So, let's start

Implementing Composite Specifications

2006-05-08T16:16:00.000+02:00

In my previous post, An idea for Composite Specifications, we took a look at how a composite specification could be structured and designed.Now, we'll see how to concretely implement it, using (as always here in my blog, where not specified) the Java language.Let us rewrite the composite specification interfaces:public interface Specification { public boolean evaluate(O o);}public

An idea for Composite Specifications

2006-05-02T16:05:00.000+02:00

Several days ago I've written some blog posts about how to work with and implement Specifications.In particular, I've written one article about how to implement Specifications with Apache Commons Collections.For a short recalling, we implemented Specifications using Commons Predicate as base interface, which let us combine those specifications using Commons PredicateUtils class.This approach has

Code that is worth reading

2006-04-23T18:12:00.000+02:00

I must suggest you to read the following blog entry by Gregor Hohpe: March is Not a Number.It well emphasises the importance of a well written, expressive, code, showing also another example of how fluent interfaces can help you write such a code. Obviously, it is also related to Domain Driven Design!Have a nice reading!

Is there some hope in Italy?

2006-04-11T11:15:00.000+02:00

My blog friend Roni Burd recently blogged about his difficulties in founding money funds for going in United States and attending a Master in Software Engineering in the Carnegie Mellon college.Roni comes from Argentina: its recent economic collapse left people savings very devaluated, and lowered people salaries to a mean, as Roni said, of about $ 18.000 per year for a good salary.Italy

New look, again

2006-04-08T11:42:00.000+02:00

As you can notice, I've changed my blog look again.I hope this new layout and colours will enhance your reading, in particular making it more relaxing ... I must admit old colours were not so eye-relaxing, in particular for long posts ... but now they are a lot more readable and I also love this new look and feel!The only thing I have to define is how to write long code snippets in a reasonable

Very busy ...

2006-04-07T19:35:00.000+02:00

Hello all,too bad, in these past weeks I've been very busy and I wasn't able to post anything.I spent most of my time in refactoring a legacy corporate banking application, in order to make its core components using the Spring Framework for configuration and dependencies management.However, I also spent a lot of time working on a brand new open source project aimed at extending the beautiful

A notification strategy for business errors

2006-03-15T17:57:00.000+01:00

In one of my past posts we talked about implementing specifications with Apache Commons Collections.Recall: we used specifications for validating a requestGraduationThesis method of a Student object.One common need, as emerged here, is to communicate the result of this validation in case something goes wrong.That is, we need to transfer errors resulted from business methods to the layers above,

Blog improvements

2006-03-01T15:41:00.000+01:00

During these days I've spent some time in improving my blog.Despite of how much difficult is to customize Blogger blogs, I've got very good results!Here are the improvements:A new three columns layout (found here), with two sidebars.A "Categories" section in the left sidebar, for browsing my posts per categories, supported by the great del.icio.us service: it took me some hours to make this work,

Protecting domain objects with protection proxies

2006-02-26T17:47:00.000+01:00

I write this blog entry in response to this mail in the Domain-Driven Design discussion group, regarding how to protect access to certain properties of domain objects.Here is a snippet of the problem as described by the author of the mail, Pascal:I'm in a situation where we are redesigning a large core business system using domain driven techniques (which we've come to love, BTW). The resulting

SourceForge meets Subversion

2006-02-26T09:52:00.000+01:00

From my SourceForge.net subscription update :The SourceForge.net team is pleased to announce the General Availability of Subversion service to SourceForge.net-hosted projects, effective 2006-02-21. This service offering is in addition to our existing CVS service; as with all of our services, projects may select (and enable in the project admin pages) the portion of our offering that best meets

Toward a Semantic Blog

2006-02-23T19:07:00.000+01:00

As you can see in the sidebar, I've just added some blog links in the Links section and, that's more important, I've created a FOAF file of mine.What is, in short, a FOAF file?FOAF (Friend-Of-A-Friend) is an RDF vocabulary describing information about people, their interest and relationships.You could say that this is already done by a simple web page ... the answer is that FOAF, being an RDF

Implementing Specifications with Apache Commons Collections

2006-02-21T13:38:00.000+01:00

Some days ago I read a blog entry by Roni Burd, commenting on my A case for specifications post, where he mentioned the possible use of Apache Commons Collections facilities for implementing and combining Specifications.I think this a very good idea.Let us play a bit.First of all, we need to download Apache Commons Collections and put its jar in our classpath.Then, we need a little domain for our

Another case for Specifications

2006-02-14T19:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I've started to hold my third week of courses, introducing people to Enterprise Application Design and Development using the wonderful Hibernate and Spring.Using, as a reference, the well known Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture book, I've came across this sentences:One of the hardest parts of working with domain logic seems to be that people often find it difficult to

SourceSense : Logo Challenge

2006-02-13T18:33:00.000+01:00

My (should I say "ex", Gianugo?) colleague Gianugo Rabellino is starting a new, very promising, open source based company : SourceSense.If you feel comfortable with graphics, you can submit a fancy logo for SourceSense here and try to win a new MacBook Pro laptop (if you are reading, Mario, you should REALLY REALLY try)!So, good luck for your logo! ... and a shiny future for your company, Gianugo!

Rome JUG : First Meeting

2006-02-01T10:52:00.000+01:00

Since December 2005, Rome has its first, official, Java User Group. On 25th January 2006 there was its first meeting, with two interesting talks regarding: Neural networks and the Joone framework, by Paolo Morrone. Alternative persistence frameworks, by Ugo Landini (yes, the OO guru!). If you crunch Italian language, you can download presentations and audio podcasts of the two talks here.

A case for Specifications

2006-01-30T10:52:00.000+01:00

It has been a long time since I wanted to post about this, and now, finally, here I am.In this post I want to talk a bit about Specification, a Domain-Driven Design pattern I think very interesting and useful in a lot of situations.What is, so, a Specification?Domain models are not only about entities, relations and collaborations. Domain models must also host a lot of implicit concepts and rules

Google, finally!

2006-01-20T12:17:00.000+01:00

Google finally hit the target, again.Now, if you search for "sergio bossa blog" you'll get my personal blog (yes, this site) as its first result.I'm very well-satisfied ... don't you see?

A funny quote ...

2006-01-19T18:58:00.000+01:00

I can't help but laughing about this:The March of Progress1980: C printf("%10.2f", x);1988: C++cout << setw(10) << setprecision(2) << showpoint << x; 1996: Java java.text.NumberFormat formatter = java.text.NumberFormat.getNumberInstance();formatter.setMinimumFractionDigits(2); formatter.setMaximumFractionDigits(2);String s = formatter.format(x); for (int i = s.length(); i < 10; i++)

Teaching Object Oriented-ness

2006-01-17T16:06:00.000+01:00

OK, new year, old life, and very poor free time for posting or enjoying a lot of new technologies waiting for me and requesting my attention!!!!I should find more time .... no, correct myself .... I MUST find more time!!!!Repeat, please : more time, more time, more time ..... !!!!However, I don't want to talk about this, but rather about what happened to me some days ago: in fact, last week I

A New Year

2006-01-02T10:17:00.000+01:00

Another year passed fast.Another year starts to pass.For our memories.Shantih shantih shantih.(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, verse 433)

The beauty of the State (Pattern)

2005-12-16T14:48:00.000+01:00

Ok, let's talk about design, please.First, recall what said in my previous post:Say the boost() method, depending on the GearType, must do the following:Decreasing Car fuelQuantity and oilQuantity.Calling changeGear() on TransmissionGearHow would you do this?For a moment, I'll talk about the straightforward way: if you have a boost() method on the Car object, which must behave differently

Object Challenge

2005-11-25T18:50:00.001+01:00

Challenges are always something people love to face ..... if you want an example, think to Sudoku success!!!So, I want to submit you a challenge based on some object oriented crunches.Give me your attention for some minutes, if you care, or if you don't have something better to do.Say you have a Car object in your business domain. It has state and behaviour, so no, it is not an anemic business

Unit testing with the Spring Framework, Part 2

2005-11-22T14:14:00.000+01:00

In one of my old posts, Unit testing DAO classes in the Spring Framework, I talked about how to test Hibernate based DAO classes implemented with the HibernateDAOSupport Spring template.However, inspired by a Matt Raible blog post, I've recently started to use the AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests Spring class.It's a long time since I want to post about this very interesting

Strange side effects of White Phosphorus (WP)

2005-11-15T18:15:00.000+01:00

From an interview to Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, spokesperson for the U.S. military in Iraq, Jeff Englehart, former army Specialist in Iraq, and Maurizio Torrealta, News Editor for the Italian television RAI and co-producer of the film "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre":LT. COL. STEVE BOYLAN: We have used it in the past. It is a perfectly legal weapon to use.AMY GOODMAN: Maurizio Torrealta,

How good is White Phosphorus (WP)

2005-11-15T18:07:00.000+01:00

From an interview to Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, spokesperson for the U.S. military in Iraq:AMY GOODMAN: So are you confirming that you used white phosphorus in Fallujah, but saying that it's simply not illegal?LT. COL. STEVE BOYLAN: White phosphorus has been used. I do not recall it was used as an offensive weapon. White phosphorus is used for marking targets for both air and ground forces.

How to survive White Phosphorus (WP) ...

2005-11-15T12:32:00.000+01:00

... if you are ACCIDENTALLY hit by WP particles during a military action. From GlobalSecurity.org (see here):If burning particles of WP strike and stick to the clothing, take off the contaminated clothing quickly before the WP burns through to the skin. Remove quickly all clothing affected by phosphorus to prevent phosphorus burning through to skin. If this is impossible, plunge skin or clothing

White Phosphorus (WP)

2005-11-15T12:24:00.000+01:00

From GlobalSecurity.org (see here):WP is a colorless to yellow translucent wax-like substance with a pungent, garlic-like smell. The form used by the military is highly energetic (active) and ignites once it is exposed to oxygen. White phosphorus is a pyrophoric material, that is, it is spontaneously flammable.White phosphorus results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn

Your Face Tomorrow

2005-11-11T10:16:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I wonder if my life would be a lot better and easier if I didn't know anything.Anything about people, I mean.Anything about my friends, my family, even about me, even about unknown people.This is a strange thing to tell and I don't know if anything of you can understand, but what I think is that people, but I'd rather better say humans, rarely know by itself what they really are and

The importance of being extremely built

2005-11-08T11:59:00.000+01:00

Ok, as said in my last post, daily builds are good, but what is better?Like pointed out by my colleague Ugo Cei, like recommended by XP practises, and like well explained here by Martin Fowler, it is better and better to install a Continuous Integration System, in order to go through the "checkout / build / test" process in a fully automated way and many times per day, avoiding the so called "

The importance of being daily built.

2005-11-04T10:55:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was reading "The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code" : I had already read that article, but yesterday I've given it more than a thought.Among other things, my mind was caught by the third item : "Do you make daily builds?".My answer was "no", and my question was: why is this so important?Yes, I said, they are a good thing and let your team check every day if their new commits do not

JavaZone 2005 ... online!

2005-10-26T14:45:00.000+02:00

Hello all,It has been a long time since the last post, but I'm very busy here at work, so please forgive me!This is one of these news which really enjoy me ... Javalobby has published on-line videos and MP3 podcasts of the JavaZone 2005 conferences ... take a look here: http://www.javalobby.org/av/javazone/.Watching and listening to conferences held by great minds is always awesome, and you can

Talking about Cocoon

2005-10-04T10:00:00.000+02:00

A recent post on Cocoon dev mailing list, by the Cocoon founder Stefano Mazzocchi, said that "Cocoon is obsolete" ... take a look at the full post for details.My colleague Ugo Cei, a Cocoon committer, comments on in one of his blogs entry:For a long time, I’ve been convinced that Cocoon must do less, much less than what it currently does if it wants to thrive and survive. Now it tries to be

Photos from a beautiful Calabria

2005-09-30T11:31:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine has published a very nice photo set on Focus, an italian magazine.The subject is a beautiful Calabria which I want to share with you .... here are some links:http://www.focus.it/community/contr_new.asp?ID=10005http://www.focus.it/community/contr_new.asp?ID=10009http://www.focus.it/community/contr_new.asp?ID=10011And my preferred one:Take a look and if you want give them a vote!

An AJAX office suite

2005-09-29T09:35:00.000+02:00

Yes, I say, everyone wants AJAX.Yes, I say, AJAX usefulness in rich web application development is true: just in these days, for compatibility reasons, I turned off AJAX support from the web project I'm working on, which previously was AJAX-enabled, and I REALLY NOTICE the difference. And yes, AJAX is very appealing for many developers (like me).But my mind could never imagine this:I'm a bit

Unit testing DAO classes in the Spring Framework

2005-09-20T16:53:00.000+02:00

One of the major claims of the Spring framework is its non-intrusiveness, which, among other things, permits to unit test all classes managed by the Spring container.So, it is natural that I felt very surprised when yesterday my unit test failed two times while testing a DAO class, based on Hibernate and implemented with the HibernateDaoSupport class provided by Spring.The first time, my unit

Takk...

2005-09-19T11:02:00.000+02:00

Simply beautiful.No other words than these, because no human word can describe what art and creation are.

.... and come back.

2005-09-09T11:13:00.000+02:00

There's always a come back, wherever you go you'll always end up coming back to same place, maybe this is our destiny, maybe this is our damnation, maybe our salvation.It's like the sea ... what if the sea didn't come back towards earth?So, this is my "come back".I'm in Rome since Monday, but I've been very busy until today ...First, my Linux box with Fedora Core 3 started going crazy .... maybe

Going away ....

2005-08-19T23:40:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I'll leave Rome, being away for two weeks.I'll come back home, my, home, in Messina, Sicily, enjoying my family, my girlfriend, my friends, plus a lot of sun, sea and ... relax.The right energy for continuing the already started work, and starting new exciting projects ...I have a lot of ideas .... but they will wait for September.Now, farewell.And good night.

Time Out of Joint

2005-08-15T23:32:00.000+02:00

"The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite,That ever I was born to set it right!"Hamlet, William Shakespeare When I first read this, suddenly Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf" novel came to my mind.This beautiful (and meaningful) novel talks about the crisis of a 48 year old man, Harry Haller, his conflicts with a world that he views as populated by people living meaningless lives, his frail belief

Native support for binding "complex" properties in Cocoon Forms

2005-08-04T11:48:00.000+02:00

This is a good news for all those Cocoon guys.Cocoon Forms has now a "native" support for "complex" properties and JXPath factories.Simply implement your JXPath factory, as shown in my previous post, and configure it in you binding, without adding any other class.Take a look at this XML snippet showing a binding example:

A strategy for binding "complex" properties in Cocoon Forms

2005-07-30T23:46:00.000+02:00

First, a short introduction about the problem context.Cocoon Forms provides a binding framework for both loading object properties into form widgets and saving form values into object properties.This is done through the association of every form widget you want to bind, with a JXPath expression leading to a particular object property.This is an XML snippet showing a binding example: