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3 Years later my Bitching became Code: Guilder POC Release:
Posted by schaefa on March 07, 2008 at 22:24 PST | Permalink | Discuss (1)  

To the Hell with the JDK Logging: II:
Posted by schaefa on August 28, 2007 at 11:41 PST | Permalink | Discuss (8)  

To the Hell with the JDK Logging:
Posted by schaefa on August 28, 2007 at 06:33 PST | Permalink | Discuss (12)  

JavaOne 2007 is History; so back to Work:
Posted by schaefa on May 12, 2007 at 00:48 PST | Permalink | Discuss (1)  

Open-Sourcing JavaOne:
Posted by schaefa on May 11, 2007 at 15:48 PST | Permalink | Discuss (1)  

Java Developers are Honest in many Ways:
Posted by schaefa on May 11, 2007 at 10:36 PST | Permalink | Discuss (2)  

OpenJDK: Here I come:
Posted by schaefa on May 10, 2007 at 12:27 PST | Permalink | Discuss (5)  

EJB3 and Glassfish:
Posted by schaefa on May 08, 2007 at 17:05 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

JavaOne 6 Years Later:
Posted by schaefa on May 08, 2007 at 04:40 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

OpenJDK: Who is / will be in Charge?: I am delighted that Sun finally decided to make Java open-source and to harvest the ingenuity of developers around the world. In a few days or months the Java source code of the JDK should be available and with a good build system developers should be able to fix or enhance long standing bugs or other nuances.
The only question remaining: Is OpenJDK really open-source?
Posted by schaefa on May 04, 2007 at 21:48 PST | Permalink | Discuss (10)  

JDK Community: Update: Rather than bitching about problems this time I want to take the opportunity to congratulate Sun for the JDK community project and the progress they made. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel where Java could become an open-source project.
Posted by schaefa on April 05, 2006 at 13:22 PST | Permalink | Discuss (7)  

AOP: The Sanity's Madness:

Greg Hamilton blogged about AOP: Madness and Sanity talking about where and where not to use AOP and I nearly threw up, figuratively speaking, of course. Primary AOP is a concept that wants to relive the developer from some of the constraints of traditional OOP. I say traditionally here because J2EE is some sort of a AOP light framework already using some of the AOP concepts even though it is not really AOP by any stretch of imagination.

JDK Community: Dream or Reality:

Yesterday Ray Gan blogged about the JDK Community listing some of the facts about the Peabody project. If you never heard about that project then you are not alone and I only now about it because Joshua Marinacci gave a presentation about it at the LA-JUG last year. But even without knowing about the Peabody project is became a JDK contributor last year in November and started to code a fix for bug #6212146 which I has sent to Sun for a review by the end of November. I got an initial confirmation that the bug fix was received but that was all I heard from Sun for a long time. Then January 2006 Ray blogged about the state of JDK Community and I responded complaining about that I got no feedback from Sun about my patch. A little bit later I finally got an email from Michael McMahon (1/31) that they started to look into the patch. I also spoke with Matt Ingenthron from Sun about it and he tried to find out what is going on and to bring some more transparency into the JDB Community. Needless to say that I did not get any feedback since then

A Short Review of Maven 2: This is a follow up of my original concerns about Maven 2 after I attended a presentation by Carlos Sanchez at the LA - JUG last night. In this blog I discuss the points that make me stay with Maven 1 so far but I hope that most of these points can be resolved in the future.
Posted by schaefa on December 07, 2005 at 14:30 PST | Permalink | Discuss (6)  

Convenience kills the Cat: The decision by the Ant development team to put the junit task archive (ant-junit.jar) into Ant's lib directory without the junit archive is maybe convenient but caused me to waste some time to figure out why the same Ant script works on my box but not on my coworker's box. Both solutions outline on Ant's FAQ have their drawbacks and I think that this is another example where convenience is a good source to waste them on the long haul.
Posted by schaefa on November 09, 2005 at 10:55 PST | Permalink | Discuss (4)  

Sun let's you Scratch the Itch in the JDK 1.6:

After complaining about shortcomings in the Java JDK for some time I took the opportunity to actually try to fix one of the problems is encountered and send a patch to Sun. Looking back I have to give kudos to Sun how relatively easy it is to become a contributor and that they really want to keep the developers in the loop not like in the "good old" days where submitting a bug report meant that I just disappeared in a black hole and if you were lucky it reappeared later.

Drools Performance Limits:

I had the chance to test the Rules Engine Drools and even tough I like it I concluded that Drools did not perform as we had expected. The main reason to drop Drools where that the number of elements participating in the rules where not confined to a small number. My tests showed that Drools is fine when either the number of elements in the test is small or when the many of the possible combinations can be removed because of failing conditions. Again I did not conclude that Drools is not a good tool but rather that I tried to find the limitations of the tool.

Open-Source vs. Big Bucks: II:

I respectfully disagree with Jacob's view to the JBoss licensing issue. When I and even more true for Rickard started to contribute JBoss had a GPL license. Then Marc asked us if we agree to change it to LGPL but did not mention that he was going to register JBoss as a trademark. Therefore we were not aware of the issues that did arise now. The JBoss Inc. already used legal threads to stop competition with the Apache Geronimo project and so I think that is not a isolated incident.

Open-Source vs. Big Bucks: hat a disappointment! After feeling betrayed by the JBoss Inc. with the trademark lawsuits now also Linus Torwald seems to do the same thing with Linux. Yesterday I was attending a presentation about Java 6 (Mustang) and some of the discussions turned around Sun and open-source. Finally, I guess, I have to admit that maybe Sun is more trustworthy company with respect to open-source than some of the bigger open-source projects. I really feel that Sun is paying more attention to the open-source community lately than projects that started as open-source projects and then became a business.
Posted by schaefa on October 11, 2005 at 12:10 PST | Permalink | Discuss (3)  

JBoss: Big Bucks vs. Open-Source: Rickard Oeberg's (co-founder of JBoss) blog points to the JBoss Issue Blog where he and Matthias Bohnen discusses issues related to JBoss. So far Marc Fleury and the rest of the JBoss Inc. could hide their business agenda behind the JBoss open-source project but finally they feel that they can afford to let the business take over because they are now so successful.
Posted by schaefa on October 07, 2005 at 13:11 PST | Permalink | Discuss (1)  

JBoss: Big Buck vs. Open-Source:
Posted by schaefa on October 07, 2005 at 13:08 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

JBoss entering the Evil Empire: JBoss Inc. and Microsoft announced a partnership of some sort.
Posted by schaefa on September 27, 2005 at 18:16 PST | Permalink | Discuss (6)  

Patterns: Not with Me: I do not need patterns in my career as Java developer because I think I mastered Java before the patterns book became available. But I am not hate patterns and think they have their place where they are needed. That said many manager to not share my view of patterns and think I am some sort of weirdo but I think they should rather take the time to view developers as a whole rather than queeze them into a check list of skills they think they need.
Posted by schaefa on September 09, 2005 at 13:59 PST | Permalink | Discuss (21)  

GlassFish: Too Little, Too Late?:

After the magical dust of JavaOne has settled the reality is reappearing and we can start thinking about the results. Especially Sun's announcement (beside buying my current employer) of open-sourcing their application server was a hot topic here even though I did not quite trust all the fuss around it. Now over the long weekend I had time to figure out what happened and the result, quite frankly, is disillusioned and I get the feeling that this was just the last phase of this application's life cycle.

Cool: Even Duke is Podcasting: The jPodder team is proud to be the current Duke's pick hoping that Duke is using it, too. With respect to JavaOne I would love to see that Sun would publish their media files through one or several RSS Feeds with the media files attached as podcasts. So maybe next year the rest of the world can follow JavaOne with ease rather than clicking through a ton of websites.
Posted by schaefa on June 30, 2005 at 11:58 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

Off-Topic: Excitement without JavaOne: Even though I am not attending JavaOne I cannot complain about a lack of excitement. Sun just announced there are going to buy my employer and changes are on the horizon.
Posted by schaefa on June 28, 2005 at 14:46 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

Podcasting: The Hottest Thing on the Planet?:

In case you listened to Steve Job's Keynote presentation at the WWDC you probably noticed that he spoke about potcasting and that it is a hot thing. Now when Apple is jumping on the podcast bandwagon and probably Microsoft is doing it quite soon then it must be a cool thing, don't you think. Now that Apple joins the club of podcast aggregator providers there is still room for the others because Apple's business is limiting iTunes feature set. For example jPodder is a Java application and therefore can run on any Java platform and with its plugin feature any number of players can be supported.

jPodder: your Pod's best Friend:

I am delighted to announce that several months of hard work finally paid off and we could release jPodder 0.9 last Sunday. If you like podcasting or where wondering what it is or where not quite happy with your current Podcast receiver then you should read on.

Posted by schaefa on May 24, 2005 at 10:30 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

Is Microsoft reaching out to Java?: A few Java community leaders were invited to participate in a summit organized by Microsoft and Rick Ross, the founder of JavaLobby, created presentation about it. No matter if you like, dislike or hate Microsoft the presentation is worthwhile to be listened to.
Posted by schaefa on March 24, 2005 at 13:12 PST | Permalink | Discuss (5)  

Certification or Indoctrination? Depends on You!: John Reynold's Blog discusses the question if the Java exams are helping you to learn Java or help the provider to indoctrinate their (marketing) philosophy. For me looking back on having passed the Microsoft Certified Software Engineer, some Microsoft beta exams as well as the Java Programmer and Developer exam I can say:
Posted by schaefa on January 21, 2005 at 14:38 PST | Permalink | Discuss (3)  

How to do Conditional Compilation with Java: I am always surprised when someone tells me that he/she does not know how to implement conditional compilation in Java. Here I want to describe a way to implement it. I did not invent this but took the idea from JBoss but I refined it here to accomplish some additional feature like still have regular Java code.
Posted by schaefa on January 20, 2005 at 16:50 PST | Permalink | Discuss (18)  

Ever Heard of Ant2, XDoclet2 or Maven2: Correntions: I feel obligated to add some corrections to my original email to avoid confusions and distress by the developer of Maven 2 because any open-source developers deserves respect for the time and effort he/she spends on such project help all of us.
Posted by schaefa on December 10, 2004 at 12:41 PST | Permalink | Discuss (2)  

Ever Heard of Ant2, XDoclet2 or Maven2: Why do complete rewrites of popular open-source projects often fail and falter. Most of the time a rewrite comes in form of a complete new project (Ant -> Maven). Maybe open-source developers should stay together improving their projet until it is time for a new project solving the most important problems of the original project.
Posted by schaefa on December 09, 2004 at 15:09 PST | Permalink | Discuss (4)  

Sun vs. JavaGeeks.com: Does Sun own Java or only the Java(tm) Language: Can Sun Microsystem's Lawyer shut down any domain name with the word 'Java' in it like in this case Ted Neward's JavaGeeks.com? Please check this out and voice your opinion beccause it could effect you in the future as well.
Posted by schaefa on December 01, 2004 at 12:52 PST | Permalink | Discuss (10)  

Maven: Jump Start: If you are a lazy developer like me then you appreciate that Maven provides a jump start for a simple project. This means you are out of execuses for not evaluating your doubts about Java with life code.
Posted by schaefa on November 30, 2004 at 15:02 PST | Permalink | Discuss (3)  

Unit Test are at least as important as the Code itself: Part II: This blog is a response to some comments on my blog about Unit Testing. It tries to shed some light into the fact that tests do have an impact on the delivered code and despite the fact that tests are not shipped they influence the shipped code. I hope this somehow justifies my claim that tests can become more important than the code.
Posted by schaefa on November 03, 2004 at 11:35 PST | Permalink | Discuss (3)  

All equals() are not born equal: According to Joshua Bloch's Effective Java book the equals() method does not work with inheritance. Because of my mathematical background I started to thing about Complex numbers and how an implementation of them would fail if we could not solve this problem. Here I am going to discuss a solution and its problems.
Posted by schaefa on October 29, 2004 at 14:37 PST | Permalink | Discuss (24)  

Proposal to fix the Cloneable Problem: After ranting about the still unresolved Cloneable shortcoming I want to propose a solution to fix it once and for all.
Posted by schaefa on October 13, 2004 at 09:02 PST | Permalink | Discuss (9)  

Cloneable: How an old Bug can bite for a very long time: The Tiger (JDK 1.5) is loose but still old bugs are going to haunt him.
Posted by schaefa on October 12, 2004 at 17:15 PST | Permalink | Discuss (10)  

Unit Test are at least as Important as the Coding Itself: This is a reply to Tom's Blog: The Problem with Unit Testing where I agree with some part but not with the notion of that unit tests are only a safety net for the developers. I think unit tests are an essential part of any software.
Posted by schaefa on October 12, 2004 at 14:08 PST | Permalink | Discuss (5)  

JCA 1.5: Choices are not Always a Good Thing: A choice in how J2EE application servers handle a depleted MDB pool for JCA inbound connections leaves the Resource Adapter developer in limbo creating vendor neutral applications. In a specification were pieces have to work together like a lock and key the specification must be especially clear otherwise one party has to pay a high price.
Posted by schaefa on September 09, 2004 at 16:44 PST | Permalink | Discuss (0)  

Maven: 'I love you' afterall: Sometimes it is necessary to jump into the water to see if you can swim. I did not like Maven the first time I saw it (XDoclet) and thought it is an overblown and too compliated tool for the job. But after using it in a real project I started to like it and every day I find another way how it saves me time. This blog will list some of the neat features in Maven and show a way to find help for problems.
Posted by schaefa on June 15, 2004 at 14:51 PST | Permalink | Discuss (6)  

A Generic Application Server: Except you are thinking J2EE is the Holy Grail of application servers one could think about what comes after J2EE. I came up with a proposal of a more generic application server that could work like a J2EE based server in a particular configuration but could become quit another beast in another configuration.
Posted by schaefa on February 25, 2004 at 13:31 PST | Permalink | Discuss (4)  

Brain Teaser #1: the same but not equal: I just came across this strange behavior:
The class 'ABC' does not overwrite equals() method and derives directly from java.lang.Objects.

ABC a = <retrieved from somewhere>;
System.out.println("Is the same: " + ( a == a )); // Yields to true
System.out.println("Is equal: " + a.equals(a)); // Yields to false ???

Debuggers: a modern 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde': As with every tool the debugger is only useful when used appropriately. Based on my experience many developers tend to overuse it and forget that for some problems it does not help at all like with race conditions, class loading etc. A debugger is like a telescope narrowing down my view so that navigating becomes difficult and developers lose their view on the big picture and therefore waste a lot of time locating the problem and then fixing the symptom instead of the cause. But there are other tools available that can be as or even more efficient as a debugger.
Posted by schaefa on December 02, 2003 at 14:16 PST | Permalink | Discuss (5)  

jUnit to the Rescue: Mike Clark's blogs and presentations made me start wring code with test driven development. This is the report of my first attempt to use TDD professionally and I succeeded.
Posted by schaefa on October 10, 2003 at 14:02 PST | Permalink | Discuss (7)  

RE: File Access in EJB: This is my response to Simon Borwn's log 'File access in EJB'.
Posted by schaefa on October 09, 2003 at 12:50 PST | Permalink | Discuss (2)  

SLSB -> SFSB: Meaningless ?: Is a scenario with SLSB -> SFSB meaningless or is the a valid use case? I will show a scenario that hopefully does make sense.
Posted by schaefa on October 02, 2003 at 15:26 PST | Permalink | Discuss (4)  

How to Handle Permanent Exceptions after EJB Deployment: a Proposal: An permanent failure in an J2EE application can cribble the server or at least drain the system resources but it also makes it very difficult for the administrator to find the source of the problem because there is no talk back by the Bean reporting problems to the server.
Posted by schaefa on September 30, 2003 at 16:56 PST | Permalink | Discuss (3)  

Back to Darwin's Survival of the Fittest: Outsourcing and foreign workers bring unfamiliar competition to US software engineers and there comfortable positions. This still does not mean that outsourcing is the magical cost cutting sword and will solve the age old software crises.
Posted by schaefa on September 18, 2003 at 18:45 PST | Permalink | Discuss (1)  

Foreign High-Tech Workers: a Scapegoat for a sagging Economy? I don't think So.: As a former H1-B visa holder I have to respond to Sue's web log here at Java.net about the abolition of high-tech visas and outsourcing
Posted by schaefa on September 12, 2003 at 07:27 PST | Permalink | Discuss (11)