New Project: JSysTest

I love unit tests and use them whenever possible. But in the end, there’s no substitute for a full scale system test. Only after system testing, you can be sure that everything works as intended. When I was looking for a way to test a REST-style JSON web service, I decided to create a small [...]

Google Collections Reaching 1.0

Exciting news for Java developers: The first 1.0 release candidate of Google Collections has been released. For almost a year I’ve been waiting for this, and now it seems the waiting will soon be over.

Simplifying Server Deployment

Configuring servers is tedious work if you operate a cluster of more than a few machines (if you’re a regular reader, you’ve heard about it). I’ve created a simple deployment framework that helps with building deployment packages based on central configuration templates. It is ant-based, so people from the Java world should have no problem [...]

The State of Java Build Systems

Most people eventually get it that building release artifacts using their IDEs is not the way to nirvana. Builds have to stay stable and reproducible between IDE revisions, and being able to execute them in a command line environment or especially continuous integration servers is key to agile development.
Fortunately, there are open source build tools [...]

Generating DDL Scripts from JPA Annotations with Maven

A while ago I posted an article that showed how to generate a database schema from JPA annotations. Since I didn’t get the hibernate3 maven plugin working back then I used the antrun plugin as a workaround. Thanks to the help of a reader the plugin works now, so an update is in order.

Using GridGain’s Topology SPI

On a GridGain cluster, you sometimes want to execute your jobs on only a subset of the nodes available: those nodes meeting a given condition. Let’s say some nodes run an expensive piece of thirdparty software that is (fortunately) only needed for a couple of tasks. At another time, the jobs should be executed on [...]

A Quick Look at GridGain

This weekend I finally had the time to take a look at GridGain, a computational grid package written in and for Java. GridGain is a an open source product licensed under LGPL-2.1 (the same as JBoss) with minor portions under the Apache 2.0 license, so use in commercial products is possible. Since we’re doing medium-sized [...]

Easing Configuration with Spring Beans

Handling configuration data in Java isn’t as convenient as it could be. The old and popular Properties mechanism has an awkward syntax and you have to take care of type safety yourself. The new Preferences mechanism supports XML but still isn’t everything I’d like it to be.
Recently, I discovered an alternative while playing with GridGain: [...]