Month: December 2008
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Groovy properties
I’m on a Groovy buzz at the moment. I figured that I’d learn the language properly rather than poking around, doing stuff in Grails. It’s one of Groovy’s huge advantages that you can hack away as a Java programmer and be fairly productive. So playing with properties: class Thingo { def value def […]
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Would you like a toolbar with that platform upgrade?
It’s innocuous enough. “A new update of Java is available. Do you want to upgrade now?” Sure, OK. Why not. Click. Dowload. Install. WTF? What’s the story here? Are Sun that strapped for cash that they need to make a few bucks by installing Yahoo’s “value adds”?
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A fire-side chat about programming
Every once in a while I go through a period of introspection where I pose questions like “why am I solving the same stuff all the time?”, “is there a better way to be doing this?” and “what’s around the corner?”. I think it’s pretty healthy, and I prefer to give it a good two […]
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Why wrong licenses kill good products
Being on the ODBMS train of thought, I checked out a few products that are out there, and something struck me – all of them would be really difficult to bring in to a project. The reason is not technical, but rather one of hassle. All of the products are either proprietary closed-source or GPL […]
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When a Cache is more than a Cache
Recently I have come across a number of instances when I have needed to perform searches across data cached in memory. Standard cache implementations, however do not provide anything more than basic key-value lookups, which is a bit of a pain. One of my colleagues came up with a clever solution to this – keeping […]