Grok Programming

One of the things I thought might be a good idea for keeping my feet to the fire on keeping up with what is going on in the Java world is to pull some of the currently open Java Specification Requests (JSRs) down and actually read the documentation they are producing. For the most part I’m going to digest the information in the documents and just write about the interesting bits. The crappy bits will be thrown over the fence to the C# folks (yeah, yeah like they need more crap). The goal of these “for Morons” posts is to give you the basics about a specific JSR - enough to hold a reasonable conversation about it so that you don’t sound like a moron - and to point you to where you can read or learn more if you feel like it. I’m sure I’ll toss in a dash of my own excellent opinions about the JSRs here and there too. Lucky you.

So, without any more delay let’s dive into JSR 303: Bean Validation.

Continue reading ‘JSRs for Morons #1 - JSR 303: Bean Validation’ »

Over the last ten years or so I and my family have benefited greatly from open source software.  For the most part Spring and Hibernate have made the biggest direct impact on my career but there have been countless other projects too numerous to name that have helped me along the way.  I have nothing but respect for those folks that work away all those hours to give away something that is useful to other people.  So while I may be a bit blunt and rude here just keep in mind this paragraph.

I have been looking for a place to give back to the Java open source ecosystem for a while now.  In that quest I’ve downloaded and looked over a ton of open source projects.  Most of them suck when it comes to initial buy-in costs on developers who might just want to give some of their time to the project.  There are a lot of us out here that would love nothing better than to help you out on your project if only trying to do so wasn’t so painful.  Let’s take a look at what I’ve seen on where open source projects go wrong and start driving potential contributors away instead of attracting them.  I’m also not going to name the guilty parties (after all these people are honestly working hard on their pet project too) but I will call out one that does a good job.
Continue reading ‘Why your open source project isn’t getting attention’ »

I spend a significant amount of my time just trying to keep up in this wacky software development world. I read a couple of books a month, tons of articles on the web, and more blogs than I should probably admit to. All of these being related to producing software in some fashion. I know, I’m crazy. Anywho, I thought I’d share the podcasts I like to listen to on my 4 hour commute back and forth to work each day.
Continue reading ‘5 Good Software Related Podcasts (Summer 2008)’ »

ThoughtWorks has put out its first podcast covering Domain Specific Languages. The presentation and audio quality is bit rough but the content is interesting and well worth the listen.

Neal Ford, the guy directly responsible for my career (yes, all legal claims need to go his direction), has on his Meme Agora blog, numerous conference keynotes, and various podcasts has pushed forth the idea of Polyglot Programming. The basic idea behind Polyglot Programming is that various aspects of a computer program could be written in multiple implementation languages that target a specific platform. More specifically think of all the computer languages that all run on top of Java’s VM and choosing a few from that set for your application and you’ve got the idea. You would choose what to use based on what language could most easily solve the problems related to a specific aspect of the application. For example, on a JEE web application you might write the view in Ruby on Rails running on JRuby, implement the controller layer in Groovy code in Spring, and use plain ole Java for the model because you have 90% of it already written for a previous application.

Continue reading ‘Polyglot Programming: Is it just too much to ask?’ »