Blog Insights
Simple Subversion Branching and Merging
Branching and merging in Subversion is a great way to work on large new features without disrupting mainline development on trunk. However, it has a reputation for being so difficult that many developers never take advantage of it. In this post I'll show just how easy it really is thanks...Environment Specific Properties in Spring
On many occasions I want to be able to inject environment specific property values into my Spring managed beans. These may be things like web service endpoints, database URLs, etc. Values I know for each environment at build time, but I want to use the same WAR/EAR file in each...Java EE 6 and Scala
Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything...Replacing and Patching Java Application and Core classes
Why would you ever need that? Say you get a jar file. After using the jar for a while you realize that there is a bug in a class in the jar file. Unfortunately you also find out that the jar is no longer supported and there is no way you...IP Addresses in PHP/MySQL
I've been working on a web-based tool that stores, among other network-related things, IP addresses. When I first started I stored each IP address as four TINYINTS (0-255 for each octet): mysql> desc ipaddresses; +----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type ...Taking Advantage of Spring MVC's Default Behavior
Over the last several months I have worked on several content heavy websites for one of our partners. When I say “content heavy”, I mean that 80%-90% of the pages in the application are static, or at least mostly static, a customer name, membership number, etc may need to be...Magento Customization
Magento is an e-commerce framework that is used as an online shopping cart. I am going to talk a little bit about Magento extensions and why they are useful when wanting to customize your shopping cart. Magento extensions allow you to change functionality of the shopping cart while modifying little...Automating the Web with WWW::Mechanize
And yes, the double colon does mean Perl. However, I know that Python also has the same class modeled after the Perl module. So even if py- is your favorite prefix, this should still be useful. WWW::Mechanize gives you basic access to a "web browser" from your Perl scripts. It has...Hibernate Embeddable Objects
Hibernate Embeddable Objects are a really neat way to organize your data model. Especially, if you have the same few columns in a number of different tables, that all pertain to the same thing. The example commonly used is Addresses. You may have a number of tables that each have...Is trying to learn a new language every year worth it?
While spending time recently looking for something new to learn that looked interesting, and it still being so close to new years, I was reminded of a bit of advice from the book "The Pragmatic Programmer," learn a new language every year. But is learning a new language every year...