Tag: java

  • 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”?

  • 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 […]

  • Hibernate/JPA Ternary Relationships

    After much pain and suffering trying to get ternary relationships working correctly using the JPA annotations, I finally hit upon this post. The secret sauce: it makes use of the (rather poorly documented) @CollectionOfElements Hibernate annotation to annotate the set of link objects in the primary class, and makes the link class @Embeddable. No primary […]

  • Irish Java Technologies Conference 2008

    It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up, […]

  • JavaOne Pre-booking

    I finally got around to booking in onto some of the tech sessions for JavaOne in San Francisco next month. Gasp! The amount of stuff going on is incredible. From new languages on the JVM (Fortress, Scala, JRuby) to SOA, mobility and techniques in app development it’s pretty easy to book up 12 hours a […]

  • Desktop Apps made easier, JavaFX and that ESB thing…

    Isn’t it always the way, when you want to blog other stuff comes up? I had intended to write up a final post about the last day of Tech Days, but the weather has been great to get the kite out and the holiday is winding down so… Day 3 was pretty cool, as I […]

  • My Java ME versus Android Question

    Beautiful day in Sydney. I came out of this morning’s Tech Days session on Java ME applications with a whole bunch of questions – they’re much more fun than answers. The latest version of JME now contains heaps of APIs for everything from geolocation to bluetooth and is supported by millions of mobiles, and will […]

  • Sun Tech Days Melbourne

    After half an hour of walking around trying to determine where exactly the convention centre IS in the Olympic complex (signage would be really nice), I finally managed to make it to the Melbourne satellite event of the Australian leg of Sun Tech Days. I love events like this; the interchange of ideas and pointers […]

  • Weak, Soft and Phantom References

    Bob Lee posted yesterday about one of his sessions at Javapolis (viewable at Parley’s), that covered heaps of good stuff about dependency injection and API design. At the end he mentions weak and soft references. What? Who? Not exactly a language feature that I have come across in the day to day, so I did […]

  • Home Cooked vs Open Source. Or, Don’t Build Your Own Workflow.

    First thing’s first. I love open source. I think that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. That thing that we were always told about since computer science, that of the open marketplace for components to be shared and reused HAS happened. Just not in the “buy this billing component” kind of way. It’s even […]