Dev on Benny Simmonds

Managing multiple SSH GitHub identities

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:07:00 +1100

Now I’m involved in multiple businesses, I’m finding I need to frequently juggle multiple SSH key pairs (aka identities) with choose your favourite git offering (e.g. GitHub). When I push and pull to origins on the same machine, I need to alternate the identities I use.

The best approach is to use an SSH config file to define host aliases. This lets you seamlessly use different keys without manually switching anything.

Entity Resolution and the Instability Problem

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:02:00 +1100

The Problem

The classic entity resolution gotcha: the thing that looks like a primary key (e.g. Senzing’s entity ID) is actually a volatile cluster ID that can legitimately change as the engine learns. Senzing explicitly says their resolved entity ID is not a globally unique persistent identifier and that it’s just an identifier for a grouping that may be transient. (senzing.zendesk.com)

Shadcn UI Quick Reference

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:45:00 +1100

wat

shadcn/ui is a set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform. Works with your favorite frameworks and AI models. Open Source. Open Code.

components.json

Controls how CLI installs components, paths, and styling preferences.

AI Dev Setup

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 15:29:00 +1000

A place to document how I use AI to assist the development of software.

Context Is King

Managing the context window for your model is the most benefitial thing you can do as the human-in-the-loop.

Redux

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 12:04:16 +0000

Once you start working with React in anger, there is a tipping point to be aware of where:

the complexity of data flows piles up
the same data is being rendered in multiple places
the number of state changes blow out

Being able to tackle these problems in a single place is where Redux fits in.

The Problem

Imagine a fairly deep component hierarchy, starting with your top level App component. Deep down the tree, there are two child components that need to access a common piece of data (e.g. customer data). How should these components access the data they require?

The Go Programming Lang

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 19:02:44 +0000

Effective Go is a howto on writing idiomatic Go.

React v19

Sun, 05 May 2019 22:08:10 +1000

React

React is a JavaScript library for building component based interactive UI’s.

Go Web Apps

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 17:13:10 +0000

A quick tour of doing web with golang, all living off the land with Go’s built-in standard library.

Packages

Working example, where the web server and templating code in source file $GOPATH/src/github.com/bm4cs/gotime/web/server.go. It does lots of things, but exports function StartServer (upper case first character means publically exported).

package web

func StartServer() {
  ...
}

The main func in $GOPATH/src/github.com/bm4cs/gotime/myapp/app.go can import the web package:

import (
	"github.com/bm4cs/gotime/web"
)

func main() {
	web.StartServer()
}

Handling Requests

The http package from the standard library, provides a ton a out of the box functionality. Writing Web Applications on golang.org is a very pragmatic guide.

Packet Analysis Basics

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 21:29:10 +0000

An evolving list of resources around packet analysis tips and tricks.

Terminology

SOC, or Security Operations Center, is a central location composed of leading edge tools, technology and peeps (intel gatherers, analysts) that deals with security issues at an organisational and technical level.
IDS, or Intrusion Detection System, is a device that monitors network traffic for threats to the environment, proactively alert the SOC analyst of potential problems.
IPS, or an Intrusion Prevention System, is more sits inline, and can take active or passive mitigation actions.
SIEM, or Security Information and Event Management, is all about the collection and aggregation of alerts and logs for event tracking, retention and correlation from multiple hosts.

Cheat sheets

Anatomy of a Packet

OSI Model Layers

7: application: HTTP, FTP, DNS
6: presentation: SSL, JPEG
5: session: SQL, SCP, NetBIOS, SOAP
4: transport: TCP, UDP
3: network: IPv4, IPv6, ICMP
2: data-link: PPP, ARP, CDP
1: physical: Ethernet, Bluetooth

Layers 2-4 will be of primary interest.

Beyond Compare

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 22:01:01 +0000

Installation on Linux is well documented.

wget https://www.scootersoftware.com/bcompare-4.2.4.22795.x86_64.rpm
su
rpm --import https://www.scootersoftware.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-scootersoftware
yum install bcompare-4.2.4.22795.x86_64.rpm

On my Fedora 27 box, I found the launcher bash /usr/bin/bcompare exits with a return code of 1, if the linker cannot resolve all dependencies.

BC_LIB=/usr/lib64/beyondcompare
export BC_LIB
EXEC=$BC_LIB/BCompare

#check to see if we have all of the shared libraries.
CHECK=`ldd $EXEC | grep "not found" | wc -l`

if [ "$CHECK" -ne  "0" ]; then
   echo Some Shared Libraries were not found
   ldd $EXEC
   exit 1
fi

Dumping out the shared libs BCompare depends on:

make

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 20:23:01 +0000

A small make orientation guide.

make is a versatile task runner, its core competency is in creating files from other files

Make essentials

make generates files from other files, using recipes, the syntax is as follows. Please note, thanks to POSIX standardisation the recipe MUST be indented with a tab (not spaces):

target_file: prerequisite_file1 prerequisite_file2
	shell command to build target_file (MUST be indented with tabs, not spaces)
	another shell command (these commands are called the "recipe")

Unless you specify otherwise, Make assumes that the target (target_file above) and prerequisites (prerequisite_file1 and prerequisite_file2) are actual files or directories. You can ask Make to build a target from the command line like this:

Architecture

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 22:13:10 +0000

A collection of software concepts I plan to apply to some up coming projects. Some fundamental philosophies:

Automation everywhere.
A clean (agnostic) contract with the underlying operating system, promoting portability between execution environments.
Can scale without major changes to tooling, architecture or development.
Smallest possible delta between development and production, enabling continuous integration.

Deployment

Processes are first class citizens. Execute the application as one or more stateless processes.
Model process types explicitly, e.g. HTTP requests might be handled by a web process, while long running backend tasks by a worker process.
Always rely on the operating systems user-space process manager (e.g. systemd, Upstart) to manage output streams, respond to crashed processes and handle user initiated restarts and shutdowns.
Concurrency;
Physical distribution and clean contract with operating system, e.g. containers (e.g. docker).
Versioning; the ability to deploy and hotswap versions side by side.
Pluggable; ability to snap modules into architecture (punch through all layers), see attached resources under backing services.
Store all runtime configuration as environmental variables. They are a language and OS agnostic standard, and unlike other config options such as Java System Properties, are not accidentially added into the source code repo.

The array of process types and number of processes of each type is known as the process formation.

soapUI mock bug

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 20:57:10 +0000

Today I stumbled onto interesting soapUI quirk, involving a combination of mock services, SOAP 1.2 and multipart message definitions.

In essence, the soapUI mock service will always return an HTTP 500, with the following response:

{% highlight xml %} <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=“http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"> soap:Body soap:Fault soap:Code soap:ValueServer</soap:Value> </soap:Code> soap:Reason <soap:Text xml:lang=“en”>Missing operation for soapAction [http://services.net.bencode/wsdl/2016/06/01/retrievecoolnesslevelrequest] and body element [{http://services.net.bencode/wsdl/2016/06/01}retrieveCoolnessLevelRequest] with SOAP Version [SOAP 1.2]</soap:Text> </soap:Reason> </soap:Fault> </soap:Body> </soap:Envelope> {% endhighlight %}

Sigh.

Thankfully some legend known as fyerf posted a solution on the smartbear community forums.

Classloaders

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 20:33:10 +0000

First some kudos and credits to the below. None of the material in this post is original, and I have documented it for my personal learning. Please refer to the below original (and superior) articles.

ZeroTurnaround’s Jevgeni Kabanov awesome and most practical Do You Really Get Classloaders?
Oracle’s A Sundararajan Understanding Java class loading
All the way from 1996 by Chuck Mcmanis The basics of Java classloaders

Hello java.lang.ClassLoader

A Java class is loaded (i.e. born into the JVM) by a concrete implementation of java.lang.ClassLoader. If a class must be class loaded, what loads the java.lang.ClassLoader class itself (i.e. who loads the loader)? It turns out that there is a bootstrap classloader wired into the JVM. The bootstrap loader loads java.lang.ClassLoader in additional to many other Java platform classes (e.g. java.lang.*) into memory. The essential API:

Struts

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 20:25:10 +0000

Struts, the famous Java MVC web framework of the late 90’s and early 00’s that pioneered well structured server side web logic. Many Java based enterprise applications developed during this era (a metric s#!t ton) still make heavy use of Struts 1.x today.

Apache Struts 1 is a discontinued open-source web application framework for developing Java EE web applications. It complements the Servlet API to encourage developers to adopt a model–view–controller (MVC) architecture. It was originally created by Craig McClanahan and donated to the Apache Foundation in May, 2000.

wsimport

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 21:53:10 +0000

Thrown into a large, legacy EE code base, I needed to create new SOAP web services, and update some existing ones. To make life interesting, there lacked a repeatable process (e.g. via Ant or Maven) for processing WSDL’s and generating the associated JAXWS and JAXB source code artifacts in a consistent manner.

First things first, a repeatable and scriptable procedure. wsimport to the rescue. wsimport has been around so long now, the com.sun.tools.ws.ant.WsImport Ant task is guarenteed to be kicking around in your environment. It’s also a best practice to use the vendor specific wrapper to wsimport, in my case WebSphere.

IntelliJ Bad Font Rendering on Linux

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 16:12:00 +0000

Font rendering in IntelliJ on Linux looks horrid. Any Java based application does for that matter. I can’t take it anymore. I just burnt 30 minutes looking into solutions. Fastest option, run it on the Linux optimised JVM tuxjdk.

tuxjdk is a series of patched to OpenJDK to enhance user experience with Java-based and Swing-based tools (NetBeans, Idea, Android Studio, etc)

Instructions (for me) next time this happens:

Download tuxjdk and unpack it in /usr/lib/jvm, e.g. /usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u25-tuxjdk-b01
Run IntelliJ like this; export IDEA_JDK=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u25-tuxjdk-b01/ & ./idea.sh

Eclipse brain damage

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 10:58:33 +0000

In my current project we use IBM’s version of Eclipse. On a Windows 7 VM. The VM crashes weekly.

Not only has this made me paranoid about loosing my work (I stash my changes in version control like a demon), it seems to corrupt my RAD/Eclipse instance.

Starting RAD produces the useful “An error has occured” error message:

!SESSION 2015-09-02 10:53:50.331 -----------------------------------------------
eclipse.buildId=unknown
java.fullversion=JRE 1.7.0 IBM J9 2.6 Windows 7 amd64-64 Compressed References 20140313_192258 (JIT enabled, AOT enabled)
J9VM - R26_Java726_SR6_20140313_1318_B192258
JIT  - r11.b05_20131003_47443.02
GC   - R26_Java726_SR6_20140313_1318_B192258_CMPRSS
J9CL - 20140313_192258
BootLoader constants: OS=win32, ARCH=x86_64, WS=win32, NL=en_AU
Framework arguments:  -product com.ibm.rational.rad.product.v80.ide
Command-line arguments:  -os win32 -ws win32 -arch x86_64 -product com.ibm.rational.rad.product.v80.ide

!ENTRY org.eclipse.equinox.app 0 0 2015-09-02 10:53:52.658
!MESSAGE Product com.ibm.rational.rad.product.v80.ide could not be found.

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2015-09-02 10:53:54.131
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
java.lang.RuntimeException: No application id has been found.
  at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppContainer.startDefaultApp(EclipseAppContainer.java:242)
  at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.MainApplicationLauncher.run(MainApplicationLauncher.java:29)
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:353)
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:180)
  at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
  at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:88)
  at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:55)
  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:618)
  at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:629)
  at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:584)
  at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1438)
  at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1414)

The error log isn’t much help. Something somewhere is corrupt. Asking Eclipse to clean itself seems to fix things:

JAX-WS SOAP Logger

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 09:56:33 +0000

Hot tip, logging helps understand how a piece of software works, long after it has left the cosy confines of the debugger.

Logging SOAP message bodies can be really handy, when the thing that is interacting with your software is out of your control (i.e. a vendor or trading partner). And if you’re using web services, the likehood of this is high.

Running JAX-WS web services in our servlet container, needed a quick and easy way to acheive this. Welcome to the wonderful world of SOAPHandler’s.

Cherished GCC flags

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 15:32:44 +0000

A (work in progress) compilation of useful GCC configuration, focused on C.

-W warnings.

-Wall is a must.
-Werror to treat warnings as errors.

-l instructs the linker it has some work to do (i.e. link a library please). -lm is shorthand for -libm and in turn -libm.a is a static library is selected.

-L hint to the linker where to locate libraries. -L/opt/gdbm-1.10/src in combination with -lgdbm tells the linker exactly where to find the gdbm libraries. Multiple -L can be specified. Alternatively use the LIBRARY_PATH environment variable like so:

Logback Boilerplate

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 09:16:01 +0000

A useful starting place logback setup.

I needed a way to roll logs not only by date, but also by size, to prevent behemoth log files from being generated. The marvellousSizeAndTimeBasedFNATP triggering policy (which comes out of the box) will gzip roll logs based on date, and then size too. So your logs directory ends up looking something like this:

fooapp.log
fooapp_2015-08-22.0.log.zip
fooapp_2015-08-22.1.log.zip
fooapp_2015-08-22.2.log.zip
fooapp_2015-08-23.0.log.zip
fooapp_2015-08-24.0.log.zip
...

Here’s a sample logback.xml configuration that:

JDBC blob extractor

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 21:59:33 +0000

I was dealing with an application that stores image binary data in DB2. DB2 tooling (e.g. IBM Data Studio) didn’t seem to offer a convenient way of extracting images out of the box. I wasn’t suprised. It turns out dragging them out via JDBC was the path of least resistance.

Ensure that you give your JDBC driver enough hints about the heavy nature of the result set that is coming back. For DB2 ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY and ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY worked well.

JVMVRFY012 Stack Shape Inconsistent

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 18:40:05 +0000

Following the routine restart of a WebSphere app server earlier this week, our application refused to start back up. This was an annoying suprise, as the environments are normally incredibly stable.

The logs highlighted that a darker force was at play:

[15/07/15 13:38:00:581 EST] 000000a9 StandaloneEJB I StandaloneEJBLifeCycle startApplication OpenWebBeans Container is starting...
[15/07/15 13:38:00:589 EST] 000000a9 ObserverMetho I ObserverMethodImpl notify Cannot send event to bean in non-active context :
[-43735604,Name:null,WebBeans Type:EXTENSION,APITypes:[java.lang.Object,org.apache.webbeans.jsf.scopes.Jsf2ScopesExtension,javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension],Qualifiers:[javax.enterprise.inject.Default]] 
[15/07/15 13:38:00:958 EST] 000000a9 ApplicationMg E WSVR0101W: An error occurred starting, ZizzledApp
[15/07/15 13:38:00:959 EST] 000000a9 ApplicationMg A WSVR0217I: Stopping application: ZizzledApp
[15/07/15 13:38:00:972 EST] 000000a9 WSEJBIntercep E CWOWB0102E: A JCDI error has occurred: <null>
[15/07/15 13:38:00:977 EST] 000000a9 WSEJBIntercep E CWOWB0102E: A JCDI error has occurred: <null>
[15/07/15 13:38:01:003 EST] 000000a9 ServletWrappe I com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper doDestroy SRVE0253I: [ZizzledApp] [/ZizzledAppService/v1] [ZizzledAppServiceImpl]: Destroy successful.
[15/07/15 13:38:01:039 EST] 000000a9 SharedEJBRunt I WSVR0041I: Stopping EJB jar: ZizzledAppEJB.jar 
[15/07/15 13:38:01:099 EST] 000000a9 SharedEJBRunt I WSVR0059I: EJB jar stopped: ZizzledAppEJB.jar
[15/07/15 13:38:01:137 EST] 000000a9 ApplicationMg A WSVR0220I: Application stopped: ZizzledApp 
[15/07/15 13:38:01:208 EST] 000000a9 CompositionUn E WSVR0194E: Composition unit WebSphere:cuname=ZizzledApp in BLA WebSphere:blaname=ZizzledApp failed to start. 
[15/07/15 13:38:01:234 EST] 000000a9 FfdcProviderW com.ibm.ws.ffdc.impl.FfdcProvider logIncident FFDC1003I: FFDC Incident emitted on /var/logs/WebSphere8/ffdc/bencode02_9315bb77_15.07.15_13.38.01.2112090578995796253353.txt com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.CompositionUnitMgrImpl 679 
[15/07/15 13:38:01:269 EST] 000000a9 DMAdapter I com.ibm.ws.ffdc.impl.DMAdapter getAnalysisEngine FFDC1009I: Analysis Engine using data base: /usr/WebSphere8/AppServer/properties/logbr/ffdc/adv/ffdcdb.xml 
[15/07/15 13:38:01:338 EST] 000000a9 FfdcProviderW com.ibm.ws.ffdc.impl.FfdcProvider logIncident FFDC1003I: FFDC Incident emitted on /var/logs/WebSphere8/ffdc/bencode02_9315bb77_15.07.15_13.38.01.235306456357083187192.txt com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.invoke 679

Wanting more details than an error occurred starting, tried my luck with the FFDC logs listed toward the end of the log:

Spring Context Specific Configuration Files

Sun, 31 May 2015 21:22:05 +0000

Spring can be configured in lots of different ways and using context specific XML configuration is one of the preferred approaches. Context specific configuration in other words is simply a chunk of XML specific to a single concern (e.g. servlet config, jpa config, and whatever else you need). A classic example of this is the servlet-config.xml that the Dispatcher Servlet binds against:

{% highlight xml %} fitTrackerServlet org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet contextConfigLocation /WEB-INF/config/servlet-config.xml {% endhighlight %} Other Context specific configuration files can be registered by hacking your web.xml. Here’s an example for defining a place to stick JPA related cruft:

Spring MVC

Sun, 31 May 2015 21:16:05 +0000

Some of my learning notes about using the excellent Spring MVC framework to build a simple MVC based web application. Spring MVC is an action oriented framework. For a good overview on the differences between UI Component and Action oriented frameworks checkout this link.

In action oriented MVC land, the controller dispatches to a specific action, based on information in the request. Each action does a specific thing to transform the request and take action on it, possibly updating the model tier. This approach does not try to hide the request/response model of the underlying HTTP, and it also says absolutely nothing about the specifics of the HTML/CSS/JS comprising the UI.

Spring Data JPA Fun

Fri, 29 May 2015 17:03:05 +0000

Maven dependencies:

<dependency>
  <groupId>mysql</groupId>
  <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
  <version>5.1.21</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
  <artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
  <version>4.1.9.Final</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>javax.transaction</groupId>
  <artifactId>jta</artifactId>
  <version>1.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
  <version>3.2.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-orm</artifactId>
  <version>3.2.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

Entity Manager Factory

Used to bootstrap JPA and also Hibernate inside our application. The LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean which is packaged in the spring-orm.jar, references the defined persistence unit.

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="punit" />
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
        <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
            <property name="showSql" value="true" />
        </bean>
    </property>
    <property name="jpaPropertyMap">
        <map>
            <entry key="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect" />
            <entry key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="none" />
            <entry key="hibernate.format_sql" value="true" />
        </map>
    </property>
</bean>

Transaction Manager

The JpaTransactionManager (packaged within spring-tx.jar) which sucks in a reference to the entityManagerFactory, is responsible for taking care of transactions within the JPA layer.

EJB Timing with Interceptors

Wed, 13 May 2015 15:36:19 +0000

Java EE is packed tight with useful functionality. The humble Interceptor provides cross cutting functionality external to the targetted code, without modifying the code itself. In other words AOP. The API is rather simple an involves using @AroundInvoke.

The following highlights just how simple it is to log all EJB service call execution times, without the need to modify a single bean.

META-INF/ejb-jar.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ejb-jar xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/ejb-jar_3_1.xsd" version="3.1">
  <display-name>SerivceModuleEJB</display-name>
  <assembly-descriptor>
    <interceptor-binding>
      <ejb-name>*</ejb-name>
      <interceptor-class>
        net.bencode.common.ServicePerformanceInterceptor
      </interceptor-class>
    </interceptor-binding>
  </assembly-descriptor>
</ejb-jar>

ServicePerformanceInterceptor.java

Microservices

Sun, 26 Apr 2015 22:09:01 +0000

Amped by @yaamehn’s opinionated Microservices A Reference Architecture recent talk at the Microservices Australia Meetup, has got me thinking about the many interesting possibilities Microservices stirs up. Many useful techniques are touched on, regardless of whether actually adopting Microservices.

On the surface Microservices doesn’t appear to be anything groundbreakingly new. It does however push tried-and-trued concepts (e.g. abstraction, decoupling, modularisation, continuous delivery) to extreme levels. Fused with innovations in the operations space such as containerising like Docker, can lead to some very powerful outcomes; such efficient continuous delivery (on a micro scale), decoupling of domains allowing for a best of bread technlogies, and so on.

soapUI freeze on Mac OS X

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 22:31:43 +0000

Well first time for everything. Messing around with some JAX-WS web services, wanted to spin up my favourite SOAP frontend, soapUI. On my Mac. Annoyingly it would just immediately hang. Completely frozen. soapUI by default will try and render a web page on startup. This doesn’t seem to work out so well when running on OSX.

A handy little article I found on Anton Perez’s blog, made my day.

Start ‘Activity Monitor’ and Force Kill your dead soapUI process.
In Finder, /Applications/SmartBear/soapUI-5.0.0.app > Show Package Contents.
Edit /Applications/SmartBear/soapUI-5.0.0.app/Contents/java/app/bin/soapui.sh.
Uncomment this line# JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsoapui.browser.disabled=true".
Edit /Applications/SmartBear/soapUI-5.0.0.app/Contents/vmoptions.txt.
Add -Dsoapui.browser.disabled=true.
Start soapUI.

Checkout these commented lines in soapui.sh…our fix ready to go:

Apache Ant

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 22:15:00 +0000

Lately I’ve gleened some “real world” Apache Ant tips and tricks from some really impressive Java EE developers I’ve had the opportunity of working with over the last year.

Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool whose mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test and run Java applications.

Asynchronous Workloads with WebSphere Application Server

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 20:16:10 +0000

So I’ve been using WebSphere for a while now, and continue to discover new functionality in this powerhouse of an application server. This post focuses on performing background work in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 7.0, which is an EE 5 compliant container.

Firstly a quick outline of the problem. Across a series of web service calls, there exist a number of intensive processes that need to take place. I wanted a way to perform work this asynchronously somewhere else within the application server, without being bound to the request/response cycle that HTTP web services impose…in essence making the actual service calls appear super snappy.

REST APIs with RESTEasy and Tomcat

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 21:48:10 +0000

Java EE application servers at times can feel big and heavy…as in behemoth. I’m “lucky” enough to work with an old version of WebSphere AS on a daily basis at the moment. To keep things fast, I’ve resorted to using lighter weight containers for the job at hand. Tomcat is king when it comes to meeting the servlet specification, and no more.

Its hell fast. As a result is very lean on what it offers out of the box. I needed to whip up a quick and dirty REST API using Tomcat and ideally using something based on JAX-RS. RESTEasy is a JBoss project that provides and surfaces various frameworks (e.g. Jackson for JSON serialisation) for building RESTful services, and is a fully certifed and portable implementation of the JAX-RS specification. Perfect.

Essential software development toolkit

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 21:46:37 +0000

Sometimes life in the world of software can seem like complete chaos, and other times a well planned cathedral. Perhaps this is due to subjective nature of software itself. Like any other engineering related discipline (e.g. building construction), beauty is in the eyes of the creator. Also a happy customer is a happy customer…even if they want a pink color scheme and pictures of kittens on their screens. Unlike the construction industry, a customer does not happily accept a product built on unreliable foundations, that is unmaintainable mess. Problems such as software quality and longevity, and even the impediance mismatch between customers and engineers, are by no means new problems, and have been solved in a plethora of ways a long time ago.

Neat and tidy Swing with JGoodies FormLayout

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 20:30:05 +0000

When its comes to laying out slightly complex forms in AWT or Swing, using the baked-in layout managers (BoxLayout, FlowLayout, GridLayout) can feel frustrating.

Thankfully I stumbled across the JGoodies FormLayout layout manager whilst working on some Swing applications using IntelliJ IDEA 13. IDEA has an integrated visual GUI builder, that makes it really quick and easy to mock up FormLayout controlled layouts, but for the most precise level of control I found handcrafting to be very clean and simple.

Machine learning basics

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Well, after wanting to do this for years, I finally bit the bullet and enroled in the infamous Machine Learning class run by Andrew Ng through Coursera and Stanford. Professor Andrew Ng is Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford, with 20 professors and about 150 students/post docs. The first revision of this course ran in 2008, where Andrew started SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere), which was Stanford’s first attempt at free, online distributed education.

ReSharper killer shortcuts

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 21:05:20 +0000

ReSharper (R#) is a tool that I use, love and recommend for anyone who uses Visual Studio. The immediate benefits that it brings and the sheer productivity boost that you gain from using it makes Visual Studio a pleasure to use. I have been using R# for about 2 years now, and keep discovering new gems every now and then, from other R# fans. It compliments Visual Studio so well, sometimes you don’t notice that you are actually using R#.

Spring Dependency Injection

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:58:05 +0000

Spring provides dependency injection capabilities using Setter injection, or Constructor injection. Object models can then be declaratively represented in XML. Here’s a Setter injection based example using the property element:

<bean name="shaker" class="net.bencode.model.Shaker">
  <property name="proteinPowder" ref="proteinPowder" />
</bean>

<bean name="proteinPowder" class="net.bencode.model.ProteinPowder">
  <property name="grams" ref="120" />
</bean>

Or if XML isn’t your thing, annotations are also an option, using a combination of @Component and @Autowired.

@Component
public class Shaker {
  @Autowired
  private ProteinPowder proteinPowder;
  ...
}

@Component
public class ProteinPowder {
  private int grams;
  ...
}

Constructor injection is similarly defined using the constructor-arg element. The following example works if the Shaker class has a constructor that takes in a ProteinPowder instance:

Native Desktop Window Skeleton with ATL

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:50:06 +0000

Building native Windows application with C++ can be done using a variety of techniques, from handrolled win32 to MFC. Some uglier than others. Using some ATL macros, here is the most minimalist implementation I could find, that will get you a native Windows desktop shell up and running.

Here’s a skeleton native Windows desktop application that uses ATL (Abstract Template Library) as a thin wrapper on top of the underlying Windows scaffolding (e.g. the winproc, the message pump and so on). Compared to hand rolling this plumbing yourself, ATL (although its largly macro based) keeps the code lean and mean. I plan to use this as a shell DirectX render target for testing. For buildable VS2012 solution see github.

C++11 with Clang on Windows and MinGW

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 10:44:33 +0000

Installation steps for getting a functional Clang++ build running on Windows 8 and MinGW.

Step 1

Install MinGW. Using mingw-get-inst-20120426.exe go with the pre-packaged repository catalogues, which bundles in GCC 4.6.1 as opposed to 4.7.x, which at the time of writing Clang does not support seemlessly. You will need the C Compiler, C++ Compiler, MSYS Basic System and MinGW Developer Toolkit MinGW packages.

Step 2

Python 2.x. Install the Python Interpreter and Libraries into c:\MinGW\bin.

StreamInsight in Azure

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 05:21:59 +0000

Well, the dust is starting to settle after an amazing geek-out week at the gold coast with the Mexia team. Pre-TechEd Australia 2012, we kicked off with the Mexia’s “Code Camp 2.0”, an opportunity for the team to come together and deep dive (hack code, whiteboard, design and discuss, present) on emerging Microsoft technologies. It was epic to say the least.

One technology that particularly excites me is StreamInsight.

Perhaps because my brain has become so conditioned to the existing data storage techniques (relational, normalisation, warehousing, ETL, etc…) that we regularly apply in the industry, when I first learned of StreamInsight or Complex Event Processing (CEP), it seemed such a natural and elegant fit for so many common data problems we aim to solve today.

How to pass 70-513 Windows Communication Foundation 4 Development

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

My experience preparing for and gaining the TS Windows Communication Foundation Development 4 certification.

The (~7 year old) WCF stack to my suprise, is much larger than I ever gave it credit for. 70-513 successfully pointed me toward a number of “off the beaten track” topics, so much so, that I actually quite enjoyed preparing for this exam. Lots of emphasis in the exam on topics such as routing, diagnostics, transactions, sessions and discovery.

F# Cheatsheet

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

The VS11 beta includes a really slick cheatsheet style F# language reference. A gem for groking F# syntax.

The samples are grouped into modules. A module is just a collection of value, function and type definitions.

To execute the code in F# Interactive, highlight a line of code and then either type Alt-Enter, or right-click and choose “Send to Interactive”. To start F# Interactive, see the “View” menu.

For more about F#, see: http://fsharp.net

WCF Error Handling using IErrorHandler and log4net

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

When its comes to managing and supporting WCF services, like any software, having insight into erroronous situtions is essential. There are several ways to go about this that are specific to WCF, such as enabling a trace listener for example. A more customisable option involves fleshing out an IErrorHandler. As put by MSDN, provides the necessary hooks to run custom error processing logic.

Allows an implementer to control the fault message returned to the caller and optionally perform custom error processing such as logging.

Autofac Your WCF

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Autofac (a .NET IoC container) makes .NET code better. Simple. Controlling the way software interacts with it’s components (dependencies) is one powerful way to the increase its “bendability”. Bendability meaning how well a chunk of software is able to cope with change (this is inevitable). WCF’s unique object model (bindings, endpoints, behaviors, contracts, etc) can make doing IoC more of a challenge, however Autofac’s native WCF integration comes to the rescue.

SharePoint 2010 Application Development

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

The SharePoint 2010 platform is dauntingly huge. Fortunately development certification 70-573 (Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development) sticks to the bread and butter fundamentals that is applicable to all forms of custom SharePoint development. For the purposes of 70-573 you can pick up things like FAST, Excel Services, Form Services, Performance Point and toss them out the window. Concepts like lists, libraries, web parts, and delegate controls is what SharePoint development is really about.

.NET 4.0 GAC Post-build Event Command

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

For various design reasons .NET 4.0 has it’s own GAC, located here.

%systemroot%\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly

An updated version 4.0 of gacutil is available as a part of the Windows SDK. Here is a handy VS.NET “Post-build event command”, that will .NET 4.0 GAC your freshly baked assemblies.

"%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe" /i "$(TargetPath)"

JavaServer Pages

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:15:48 +1100

As a follow up to previous post [The Servlet API]({% post_url 2007-02-20-servlet-api %}), this post aims to sweeps over some fundamentals of JSP, a technology which thanks to its simple yet extensible design, still to this day, underpins many modern web application frameworks.

JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology that helps software developers create dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types. Released in 1999 by Sun Microsystems.

The Servlet API

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:12:10 +0000

As you start out building Java web applications, you soon find that it sit upon several well designed building blocks. Once the penny drops, and an intuition about these building blocks is gained, creating web apps on Java becomes a delight.

Two key, top level concepts are the mighty Servlet API and JavaServer Pages (JSP). These are deployed to a Web container, also commonly referred to a Servlet (or Web) container.

Dev on Benny Simmonds

Managing multiple SSH GitHub identities

Entity Resolution and the Instability Problem

The Problem

Shadcn UI Quick Reference

wat

components.json

AI Dev Setup

Context Is King

Redux

Contents

The Problem

The Go Programming Lang

React v19

React

Go Web Apps

Packages

Handling Requests

Packet Analysis Basics

Terminology

Cheat sheets

Anatomy of a Packet

OSI Model Layers

Beyond Compare

make

Make essentials

Architecture

Deployment

soapUI mock bug

Classloaders

Hello java.lang.ClassLoader

Struts

wsimport

IntelliJ Bad Font Rendering on Linux

Eclipse brain damage

JAX-WS SOAP Logger

Cherished GCC flags

Logback Boilerplate

JDBC blob extractor

JVMVRFY012 Stack Shape Inconsistent

Spring Context Specific Configuration Files

Spring MVC

Spring Data JPA Fun

Entity Manager Factory

Transaction Manager

EJB Timing with Interceptors

Microservices

soapUI freeze on Mac OS X

Apache Ant

Asynchronous Workloads with WebSphere Application Server

REST APIs with RESTEasy and Tomcat

Essential software development toolkit

Neat and tidy Swing with JGoodies FormLayout

Machine learning basics

ReSharper killer shortcuts

Spring Dependency Injection

Native Desktop Window Skeleton with ATL

C++11 with Clang on Windows and MinGW

Step 1

Step 2

StreamInsight in Azure

How to pass 70-513 Windows Communication Foundation 4 Development

F# Cheatsheet

WCF Error Handling using IErrorHandler and log4net

Autofac Your WCF

SharePoint 2010 Application Development

.NET 4.0 GAC Post-build Event Command

JavaServer Pages

The Servlet API