Dev

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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 (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 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: ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...