Travelling, and not Arriving

Some perspective on Software Architects

“You provide the food, I’ll provide the perspective” it’s my favourite quote from the (excellent, if you want my opinion) Ratatouille. In software, we have a awful lot of “foods” (new technologies, languages, frameworks, architectures, websites), but we have a few people able to put them in the right perspective. That’s what I [...]

TDD of mail services

Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that TDD is the only viable way to develop software; I don’t mean to say that you must use TDD to write even your PHP homepage, but if your team is developing a project for a customer, and you want this project to be mantainable and cause less headaches [...]

Glassfish in the trenches: How to fix MacOsX startup problems

I don’t really know if this is a new problem (caused by the recent update of the JDK 1.5 for MacOsX) or if it’s an old one, but last night, while writing the domain cheatsheet, I discovered that the asadmin command line has some problems with MacOsX 10.4.x.
Reproducing this bug is simple: just try to [...]

Glassfish in the trenches: Domains cheatsheet

Often the new Glassfish adopters aren’t really familiar with the concept of domain, which is really handy when developing Java EE applications.

First of all, what’s a domain? A complete (and complex) definition can be found here. Simply put, a domain is a Java EE engine which can be administered, configured, started and stopped separately from [...]

Debugging Glassfish with Eclipse - Reloaded

A years ago I published on this blog a pretty successful screencast explaining how to debug a Glassfish application with Eclipse; unfortunately, some months later, a cracker decided to break into Wordpress instance, and deleted every content. So, no more screencast available, and I obviously didn’t have a backup.
Anyway, since the post is still there, [...]

Article: Migrating from EJB 2.x to EJB 3.0

There’s a new interesting article on Java.net by Sangeetha S. and Subrahmanya S. V. titled “Migrating from EJB 2.x to EJB 3.0“; long, detailed and quite exhaustive… a good start for those interested in getting in touch with EJB 3.0. Check it out.

Java EE in the trenches - How-to use the TimerService and write a timer session bean

After writing a book about it and a long series of posts, finally I’m having the opportunity (thanks to sourcesense, obviously) to work on a real, full-stack Java EE project (with Glassfish); I know it might seem a bit ironic, but it’s a fact that customers aren’t usually too eager to adopt new technologies.
Anyway, the [...]

Contents, contents, contents

The long tail of new media brings every day new suprisingly interesting contents and opportunities. Check some of my latest discoveries:

JavaOne tehcnical sessions (audio and transcript)

Digitalk TV, an italian TV program about new media and technologies (offer both podcast and videocast)

NerdTv (videocast)

JavaPosse (podcast)

Sometimes never is better than late

Opera is free.
This story reminds me of another great (dead) browser … Netscape. It was a wonderful product, leader in its market (not the case of Opera obviously) when, sadly, Netscape’s management made the “single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make“. It’s not unusual a situation when a company’s management, with a [...]

Joel on Software: The Road to…

Other great articles are appearing on the Web in these days. Joel Spolsky is publishing a series of articles explaining his experience during the development of his product, FogBugz.
The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part I
The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part II
The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part III