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  • culture icon

    A Modern Parable

    I recently ran across the following article on a blog: Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people...
  • testing icon

    Sonar - Code Quality Analysis Tool

    Sonar is a web based code quality analysis tool for Maven based Java projects. It covers a wide area of code quality check points which include: Architecture & Design, Complexity, Duplications, Coding Rules, Potential Bugs, Unit Test etc. Sonar has a rich set of features like what you would get...
  • development icon

    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...
  • development icon

    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...
  • infrastructure icon

    Creating Services using SMF in OpenSolaris

    OpenSolaris has by far, one of the best service management interfaces that I have used. Below I am going to go over a simple way to turn in shell script into a service managed by the OS. <?xml version='1.0'?>; <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM '/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1'> <service_bundle type='manifest' name='mynewservices'> ...
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    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...
  • development icon

    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...
  • development icon

    Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup

    The basic idea is to output some data to a user in a table and allow them to take an action on each row individually. A fairly straightforward solution is to create a separate page to link to, passing the necessary row information along. If the action is simple enough,...
  • development icon

    Building Perl modules on OpenSolaris

    Anyone that's worked with Perl is probably familiar with CPAN.pm. CPAN.pm is the bundled module that handles downloading and installing modules from the CPAN repository. It usually works flawlessly but I've noticed that on OpenSolaris the process can be a bit more spotty. Let's try installing Mason as an...
  • development icon

    Spring's refreshable beans

    A couple of days ago I found out about a really nice feature in Spring, called 'refreshable bean'. Spring's vision a refreshable bean is a dynamic-language-backed bean that monitors changes to its source code and then reloads itself when changes occur. And it is all this is done without restarting/re-deploying entire...