Just a quick comment while I’m working.
I’m recently moving over to the new Netbeans 6.0 and looking at what plugins are available for it. Turns out there is a Spring Netbeans Module. Fantastic.
http://spring-netbeans.sourceforge.net/
This is slightly off-topic for typical blog articles, but I am convinced that this is the future of the software industry.
Strategy consultants Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams have released a timely book that attempts to reveal the structure of explosive growth sites and organisations like Wikipedia, eBay and Myspace. The book - Wikinomics - is a book about the explosion of mass collaboration, and just how you can borrow and leverage these business models from within your own business.
Five years ago, the notion that there would be a totally free encyclopedia rivalling Britannica, or that real world TV shows would be screening segments captured by lone individuals on mobile phones, was a blue sky dream. What is far less publicised is that smart businesses around the world are bridging the gap and tapping into huge communities and providing rapid innovations for their customers and increasing shareholder returns.
The book opens with an introduction to the topic of mass collaboration and provides a brief summary of the four principles which are drawn on throughout the book:
Some of the technological advances over the past decade that have contributed to the possibility of mass online collaboration are covered. From here, we springboard into the deeper content in the remainder of the book. This is not a detailed book on how to implement mass collaboration within specific businesses; the authors have chosen to make the content accessible and practical (which is what makes the book so useful). I won’t delve too far into the deeper content in the book; if I haven’t already got you interested, believe me there is a good deal of very valuable information.
Through the later chapters in the book the authors draw on a huge range of examples. For instance, we learn about how IBM have put paid developers into developing and giving away Linux (a freely downloadable open source operating system), and saved themselves $900 million per annum in the process. We learn about how Goldcorp Inc decided to reveal their secret mining data portfolio to all comers, and in the process transformed themselves from a “$100 million company into a $9 billion juggernaut”.
If you’re like me, those sort of results are definitely something to look at more deeply. How do they do this? Wikinomics does in fact cover the strategies involved in each of these investments (along with a huge variety of others), and how this non-conventional thinking can be applied to your own organisation. The authors take care to also show a number of pitfalls and examples. Not only does the analysis of a number of real world examples throughout each chapter help to demonstrate how you can apply this thinking, each chapter closes with a number of more specific tips on just how to take the first steps to applying the strategies presented within a business context.
This is a must-read for anyone in business or who intends to run a business. Wikinomics has certainly opened my eyes to the future; I no longer look at business problems as “how can I”, but “how can I get others to” …
I’m not going to recommend you read all the books you can get your hands on, though you could if you wanted to. These are the tips they don’t teach you in books or in school. From deleting code and refusing to comment, through to deliberately throwing exceptions, these tidbits of experience will make you a faster and smarter developer. And that’s what you want, right? Read on ..
In most server-side applications there will be a requirement to persist your data to some storage layer. Spring provides a neat abstraction in the form of the JdbcTemplate to achieve this, and in combination with a Spring-injected DataSource you can easily switch your data source between testing and production databases. Unfortunately the recommended and well-publicised test strategies for *integration* testing of your applications involving Apache Derby, HSQL (HSQLDB), and MySQL don’t enable rapid-fire *unit* testing of your data access code, since they require a real database to be at some known location on your disk or on a server (or in the case of HSQL don’t completely support all of the JDBC-3.0 spec).
Today, I’ll take you through combining some free components that enable you to run unit tests on your JDBC data access layer in a completely in-memory fashion, which allows you to more easily run regular complete and predictable tests of your data access layer and get consistent results. In fact, this solution isn’t limited to just Spring applications; any JDBC code can be tested like this!
Hey all,
Well, time is up unfortunately. I received a cease and desist from Telstra recently, and frankly I don’t have the energy or money to take them to court. As of today, I’m pulling the plug on the site.
Many thanks for your continued support over the years, and a special thanks to those who have offered their help in various ways over the times.
There are a number of sites around on the net providing functionality near to what this site provided; if you know of one, comment and help people keep up with new sites.
I was working with Lingo (a RPC over JMS mechanism for Spring) last week and we uncovered an issue in which Lingo threads were not closing properly. The problem was uncovered since our JUnit tests were running fine, but any application which used a main() method had to call System.exit() to finish, which is ugly. Additionally, our Tomcat server application would not close, there were a number of threads left around even after the Spring context and ActiveMQ broker had been taken down.
With a little effort I isolated the code to a mistake in the Lingo MultiplexingRequestor. The MultiplexingRequestor uses threadpool internally, and the close() method is not overridden, which causes the threadpool (and attached threads) to linger indefinitely.
The bug and solution code has been filed as LINGO-44. To use this, simply copy the MultiplexingRequestor to your local project and ensure the updated code comes *ahead* of lingo-1.3.jar in your classpath.
Welcome to my blog 
I’ll be covering primarily tool and technology discoveries as I uncover them in my work.