It's not rocket science
Whatever kind application you’re working on, you will probably need to create some sort of message more complex than “Hello World!” at some point. Whether it’s a log message, or some text to plonk into your nice UI, you will probably also need to format it in some way to include some variable values, and maybe some embellishments like using the correct words for plural and singular values.
Java provides a number of ways to do this. In this post, we’ll look at a few of them.
It’s been some time since I started off in the world of software development, but I have found myself looking for a good way to schedule tasks more than once, and I’m sure you have too. You know the sort. Run this report every third Friday of the month, clean out this table at the end of every day, sacrifice a goat every summer and winter solstice, and so on.
Some tasks can happily run in Cron, provided that your operating system has Cron. However, some tasks require a bit more flexibility than this old workhorse can provide. You may need to run the task in the context of your application, for instance, or your requirements might dictate that the scheduling of certain tasks must be controlled by the users. In the case of a Java application, you might not want to start and stop the JVM every time a small task needs to execute.
Enter Quartz, OpenSymphony’s enterprise job scheduler. This API allows you to schedule tasks within your own application, which means that you’re more or less free to control the scheduling your way. In this post, we’ll look at some of the most basic tools which this API brings to the table.
Google Wave is an awesome tool, but right now I don’t have enough contacts on it to make checking it part of my daily routine. This causes me to miss the occasional activity of those friends who do use it, however rarely. Today I found an interesting wave which had been sleeping in there for the last five days, so I decided to look around and see if there are any notifiers available. The one I picked was Waver, which happens to be free, and works on both Mac and Windows.
Are you using Google Wave? What are your thoughts on it so far? Can you recommend any other desktop clients or notifiers for it?
It’s been some time since I started writing this three part series, and it certainly took a while longer to get done than I expected. A busy work schedule does tend to do that, but if it makes anyone feel better, having left the third part hanging did give my conscience a field trip. So let’s do a quick recap and get on with it 🙂
Continue reading “Revisiting the JavaScript Calendar Control – Part 3”
In a project I was working on recently, we were building up a web page by loading up its template, content hierarchy and other information dynamically. This is a common setup, and a very flexible one since it allows sweeping changes to be made very easily. Unfortunately, this flexibility comes with a cost; pulling everything through EJB calls can give you a speed not unlike that of a slightly stunned tortoise trying to sprint up a treacle covered hill.
One way of mitigating this problem is to use a Facade pattern to load as much as possible with as few calls as possible. However, this is not always the best approach, especially if most of the content is not likely to change very often. In these cases, it’s preferable to store the content at the end where it’s being used, avoiding the remote call completely.
This can be implemented quickly and easily with a Map, but that would leave us with a lot of work to do when it comes to managing the cached content. For example, what if we wanted to make sure that the cache does not continue to fill up indefinitely, or that it gets backed to disk when it goes idle for some time to preserve memory?
Since we were already using Hibernate in the data layer, we were already using a cache at that level in the form of EHCache. It made sense to try and see if it was possible to use this in our controller layer, and it turned out to be extremely elegant to use. Continue reading “Object Caching in Java with EHCache”
Following last week’s implementation of the basic shape of the calendar, this week we will add behaviours so that we can pick a date on it.
This post is part of a series of three posts:
A few years ago, I wrote a calendar control for a Code Project article. Although I’ve used it myself several times, and despite the fact that people still appear to be using it, I can’t help but cringe every time I look at it again. Every time, the thought that comes to mind is “It could have been so much cleaner in jQuery…”.
Well, the time has come to bite the bullet and see how it can be pulled off again. Rather than going over the whole thing in one go though, we’re going to take it in steps over a number of posts to implement a feature or a group of features, so we can look each in slightly more detail. This is as much for my benefit as everyone else’s. If anyone spots anything weird, inefficient, or badong in these posts, please let me know. I like to think of this as public code review, so, you know. Bring it on.
The posts will be divided as follows:
And with that, on to the post itself. Continue reading “Revisiting the JavaScript Calendar Control – Part 1”
Wrote a brief note on the speed of digests in PHP vs. the speed of the same digest in MySql.
Read it at http://fwebde.com/php/encryption-php-vs-mysql/
Despite my best attempts at procrastination, it had to happen sooner or later. Stephen Reinhardt’s Light theme, the free version of which has served this blog well and faithfully for the last year and something, has finally been decommissioned. Replacing it is a new theme I clobbered together over the last week.
One of the reasons I moved this blog off the old wordpress.com subdomain – the only reason in fact – was to allow me to mess around with it as much as possible. Writing the theme is one such messing, though a number of things got in the way and meant that it took a while longer to get started than originally intended.
This theme will be considered a permanent work in progress. I’d be interested in any comments, complaints or suggestions concerning its usability (or lack thereof), appearance (or hideousness thereof), or anything else which may be handy or simply cool.
With thanks to Emilyn and SZC, whose advice prevented a number of crimes against aesthetics and partly offset my inability to work with colour schemes more complex than black and white.
Recently, I needed to write an up/down selector – you know the sort, it’s where you select a number by clicking on an up or down arrow. Since they can be useful for other things besides numbers, I gave it the plugin treatment.
Most of the information about the plugin can be found in its documentation page.
Also available is a slightly beefier styled and animated demo of the plugin.
If you’re just interested in the plugin itself, you can find it here.