Calling Methods of Super Classes

18 August 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ java

I was running quickly through the list of my subscriptions when one post by Martin Fowler attracted my attention. Martin is famous in OOP world for his knowledge and experience in design and development of applications. Indeed, he has a lot of great publications (books and articles), he attended many conferences and wrote a lot of wonderful software. What am I talking about? Ah, the article… yes, in his article he tells us how badly smells the calling of methods of super class. I wouldn’t have believed, If only I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes. Excuse me, Mr. Fowler, but I can’t agree with you, completely…

BlogBridge: Version 2.0 Released

17 August 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ blogbridge

People of the World, Listen! Today we have released another long awaited final of BlogBridge for your enjoyment and unlimited pleasure. We were working hard for more than four months to deliver tons of new features and fix known loose ends. This release features so many features, that I wouldn’t even try to list all of them. I simply have not enough memory installed on my laptop to work with files of such lengths. For your statistical pleasure I will outline only major updates.

Java Certification and Skills Assessment

17 August 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ java

This morning I was surfing around JavaLobby.org to see what’s new. I wasn’t there for a month or so (except those times when I published short announcements for my writings). I was fortunate to notice one interesting link — the link to new JavaLobby network site — JavaBlackBelt. It’s a free skills assessment community which can help you to get prepared to serious certification exams or just give you some fun during the coffee breaks. Below are two books I recommend to pay attention to, if you are going to prepare yourself to exams. Sun Certified … Study Guide (Exam 310-035 & 310-027) by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates Sun Certified … for Java X Study Guide (Certification Press) by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates Well, personally, I’m still in two minds about this site. From one side, it is basically a good idea to provide this kind of service — free skills assessment.

Bookmarker: Posts promotion automation

15 August 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ wordpress

Bookmarker is simple plug-in which posts bookmarks to your social bookmarks services accounts automatically when you publish entries in WordPress. It is very convenient and efficient to promote your posts all over the web this way in addition to pinging blog repositories. Before now, you had to walk through these services and post the comments manually, but now everything has changed. Bookmarker does it for you!

Test Driven Design: Part 2

13 August 2005 ⋅ 9 min read ⋅ technology

In the first part of this writing I showed the basics about test driven design. Of course, it was my understanding and experience of doing TDD, but I still think that many of you learned something new for themselves.

In the previous part we finished with development of domain resolver, which tells us list of domains and registered user names in these domains. The design was driven by tests, created before the actual code. The tests allowed us to see the picture from outside and define minimal usable interface for domain resolver component. This time, we will create a dialog box component which will be talking to domain resolver implementation to read data for its drop-down lists without actually knowing the source. The dialog will also do basic validation of entry and displaying of warning messages.

Retrospective CVS branching

12 August 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology

Branching is a very useful concept in sources tracking. It allows to isolate some version of sources and continue with experimental development, bug fixing and anything else, which is better kept away from the main trunk. It’s generally simple to do branching when you have just decided to, but what if you are already two weeks (month or year) away from the version you wish to branch from?

Networking specifics under Java Web Start

9 August 2005 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ java

This writing will help you overcome several annoyances of Java Web Start in respect to networking.

During my development I hit two major problems doing polite networking when running application under Java Web Start: I couldn’t set correct HTTP “User-Agent” string and I couldn’t make application obey connection and reading timeout settings. According to the SUN’s bug reports database these problems are pretty common and that’s why I wished to share my experience with the rest of community, knowing how important to have networking layer working correctly.

Test Driven Design: Part 1 -- The Basics

6 August 2005 ⋅ 9 min read ⋅ technology

Writing tests is usually simple task. When you write tests ahead of code and even ahead of design it becomes really trivial task. Having all tests at hand even before you start coding specific functionality guaranties that you will (a) spend minimum time, (b) implement what’s really necessary, (c) have all documentation and tests ready, (d) sleep well, knowing that you can give the product away in the middle of the night as it’s already tested to be fool proof.

Testing Caches

23 February 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ java

When it comes to testing how you can be sure that the cache releases objects when the VM runs low on memory? This small writing gives some tips about how the running out of memory can be simulated in your test cases safely.

Events Dispatch Thread (EDT) lockup detection

2 February 2005 ⋅ 9 min read ⋅ java

What to do when user interface becomes unresponsive or locks up? How to find out why, when and where? The answer was always near us and as you will see from the article it’s relatively simple. Make a step towards improving the performance of your developments with this revolutionary new watchdog-like performance monitor and detector. No SDK or VM patching. Everything can be done on application level.