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.

Soft property change listeners

1 February 2005 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ java

In some cases you will wish to have the cache of objects, but what if these objects are registered listeners of some other objects? This hard link between the cached items and persistent ones will not let the first to be garbage collected. The article shows how this misbehavior can be easily avoided using soft-referenced wrapper for your listeners.

Enumeration sub-types

31 December 2004 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ java

Font for text and font for date are both fonts. Colors for corresponding elements are both colors. Colors and fonts are properties of some theme. You need some constants to read out properties (i.e. fonts or colors) from the theme. The safest and clearest way to have them broken into hierarchy of sub-types. The article is not only about fonts and colors, it’s about general approach to enumeration sub-types and testing of their applications.

Caching asynchronous calculations

23 December 2004 ⋅ 9 min read ⋅ java

Have you ever seen how file managers preparing the thumbnails in background while you are browsing some folder on your drive? If you will switch to the other folder and then get back to first you will see the thumbnails almost instantly. They were calculated asynchronously and cached. Here’s what the text is about.