Podcast Gear

For the past few months we've been recording the Illegal Argument java podcast and I thought I'd write down some quick thoughts on the tools/setup we're using. The first ever recording (not publicly available) was recorded directly to internal mike
Comments (1) . Sunday, 16 August 2009

Writing Stupid Specifications with Concordion

For a while I've been an avid lover of the concordion testing framework, but one thing I always struggled with was the separation of state/data between the specification and the fixture. As a simple work around I added a simple "eval" command, which
Comments (0) . Saturday, 30 May 2009

Illegal Argument #5

Episode #5 of our new java podcast Illegal Argument is has been posted focusing on language diversity and Microsoft's new Axum programming language, static vs dynamic templates and much more.
Comments (0) . Sunday, 17 May 2009

Connecting the Clouds - The Internet in New Zealand in PDF

The other day I was pointed to the <a href="http://www.nethistory.co.nz/index.php/Main_Page>>wiki version of Keith Newmans book "The Internet in New Zealand" and but found it hard to read, so I decided to convert the content into PDF for a m
Comments (3) . Tuesday, 5 May 2009

Code Coverage of Clojure Code

Since pulling in Dmitry's test-compile mojo, and adding a test script runner mojo to the clojure-maven-plugin I thought I'd try something fun like running the maven emma plugin against a very simple test project. I was pleasantly surprised to see so
Comments (0) . Friday, 24 April 2009

Clojure running successfully under OSGi

Functional languages, and specifically the clojure language are being talked about at the SMX offices recently and I thought it was about time I gave it a closer examination and I've always found the easiest way for me to learn about new technology/f
Comments (4) . Sunday, 1 February 2009

Typesafe Entity References for Hibernate/JPA

It would seem Gavin King's having similar thoughts to something I was working on last week, only with a much larger and grander scale: The first problem isn't really solvable without major new language features (usually described as "DSL support").
Comments (0) . Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Should Sun embrace Maven?

With all the talk from Sun about bringing a focus to modularity in the JDK via Project Jigsaw, I wonder how things would shape up if a modular build tool such as Apache Maven was also adopted. I've never looked at the JDK sources/build process and I
Comments (2) . Sunday, 14 December 2008

If we can't have closures, can we at least have comprehensions?

Dear Sun, If we can't have closures in Java 7, can we at least have comprehensions added to the collections API? It seems I'm forever writing, or pulling in Commons Collections (which lacks generics) or Functional Java to add simple functional list
Comments (4) . Thursday, 6 November 2008

Database Migrations with Maven

In order to learn more about using Apache Maven beyond a more 'simple' build, I decided to build a maven plugin, or mojo as they're called to wrap my simple database migration library. Now it's as easy as a few lines of XML and SQL to have your data
Comments (0) . Tuesday, 21 October 2008