In honor of four months of successful TeamCity usage – I offer this set of TeamCity lessons learned:

11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation

In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Jason Rudolph gives an overview and demonstration of Grails. Topics covered include Java/Grails integration, Grails plugins, creating a complete Grails sample application from scratch, the structure of a

A stunning new report just issued by the Bush administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030 which would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.

Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

There is an incredible article that was published in the Communications of the ACM entitled “How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design?” by Irit Hadar from the University of Haifa, Israel and Uri Leron from the Israeli Institute of Technology. It goes t

TestabilityExplorer.org records the testability scores for many open source and commercial Java libraries. The compiled bytecode for the library is analyzed and metrics are calculated for the testability of individual classes. Those classes fall into one

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library

A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.

This week’s release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don’t need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched,

Michael Burke asked a great question on that thread which can be paraphrased as “forgetting the hype surrounding OSGi, what benefits can I expect to see if I port an application currently packaged as an EAR to OSGi bundles?

Groovy is actually not a brand new language, but rather an extension of Java. The difference between this extension and that of, say C++ over C is that Groovy extends Java by simplifying constructs, ridding the developer of much of the repetitive rituals

Well, more heavy hitting engineers are leaving. When the CTO of the client division moves on (to Adobe again, no less), we yet again have a reason to wonder what is happening at Sun.

Modern guitarists have a new option when it comes to learning their instrument. Chord books and music lessons still sell, but for visual learners, the best option is probably the video tutorial. There are several online options, but we really like iVideos

UML lost the programmers. There is no doubt about it… in my mind. This happened because UML was pushed in a direction that most code writers don’t like: it started to look a lot like bureaucratic paper work

I would like to offer a few thoughts about XML and JSON. My previous post came off much too dismissive of JSON. I actually think that JSON does have real value

Yesterday while working on our internal support system I had a desire to organize the fields on a form a little better. I didn’t want to use a FieldSet and add full wrapping or another layer of indention in my form code so I decided to give the standard

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system

The United States economy is in a funk. Food prices are up, oil is through the roof, real estate has collapsed, and credit is becoming scarce. Here are 12 signs to look for when the recession hits the Internet:

I’ve been evaluating ExtJS 2.1 as the user interface for my client’s next application. During my evaluation I’ve developed a demo (3 actually) that displays the powerful API of ExtJS

Haskell is most likely quite different from any language you’ve ever used before. Compared to the usual set of concepts in a programmer’s mental toolbox, functional programming offers us a profoundly different way to think about software

But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy – and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably de

If we hired like we vote

Am I being “age-ist”? Probably. But the world is a pretty complicated place right now and I’m thinking that it’s not such a great time to elect our oldest President ever. So sue me.

A new tutorial by Upul Godage describes how to use Apache Synapse to mock web services for development and testing. Apache Synapse is a simple, lightweight, high-performance enterprise service bus (ESB). Apache Synapse can be used to filter, transform, ro

Take 11 – Pictures from JavaOne 2008. Continuing from Take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and more pictures from JavaOne 2008.

FingBugs uses more sophisticated analysis techniques than tools like PMD and Checkstyle, working at the bytecode level rather than with the source code, and is more focused on finding the most high priority and potentially dangerous issues.

So all you agile programmers working on Ruby-on-Rails, Python and AJAX, pay attention: If you want more people to think your application loads faster than Google, learn about your host. It’s called the Internet

As organizations continue to grow their IT investments (bought, borrowed, or built) and concepts like Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) become more common, the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become more co

The moral of the story is that if perception is reality, then the best way to manage perception is to make up stuff that you can honestly remember.

The continuing battle between Microsoft and Google will mean fierce competition – adding features, building data centers, cutting deals and spending money on speed and customer convenience

Dell is adding to its virtualization portfolio by embedding Citrix XenServer into its hardware and expanding its services for customers investing in the technology.

Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

JavaFX has a LONG way to go especially when you look at Adobe’s RIA strengths and Microsoft’s very enthusiastic entry into the space. But I think JavaFX will be a breath of fresh air for people and will help in expanding the RIA footprint further

The fact that Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and others are all racing towards the same end should be encouraging, not frustrating. Getting preempted by a week with, basically, the same sort of announcement is meaningless in the grand scheme of things

Google Web Security for Enterprise service, powered by Postini, stops web-borne spyware and viruses before they infiltrate your network and compromise or disable your computers. All web requests are scanned in real-time, rather than solely relying on stat

This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on s

JavaOne 2008 Day One has started, of course, and it’s an interesting show, with a lot of undercurrents about JavaFX (as expected) and multimedia – and mobile applications. There’s a lot more, of course, and this thread is meant for people to add comments

Apache Archiva is an extensible repository management software that helps taking care of your own personal or enterprise-wide build artifact repository. It is the perfect companion for build tools such as Maven, Continuum, and ANT.

In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas extensively describes that good subset of the JavaScript language, occasionally warning to avoid the bad. I consider Douglas’ book a must-buy for anybody who’s serious about developing professional apps for the w

Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now. Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-m

Functional programming languages are enjoying a renaissance. Even if not intending to use a functional language for daily work, learning such a language can improve one’s programming style

The future is definitely looking awesome for dynamic languages on the JVM. And languages like Groovy and JRuby are proving it.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV

In this post, I’ll be talking about a solution I developed at my day job to improve the performance of our web site by allowing the browser to cache JavaScript, CSS, and image files

We’ve come up with a very pragmatic solution with a declarative style for cache configuration and a more programmatic style for handling caching behaviour. As always, the usefulness of such a solution depends on the given problem space and the surroundi

XML data format can be hard to search, but with the fairly recent introduction of the XQuery API, XML searches are now flexible and easy to perform. For Java programmers who work with XML documents using SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and more, the XQuery API for

Some of the Moderators, Answerers, and MVPs have gotten together to create a new resource to supplement the Forums; it’s called SQLExamples. We just started it a few weeks ago so it’s still very much in its infancy

Bottom line… to anyone other than the folks with hands in the code and the folks who have to recruit and manage them, “For all you know, it’s just another Java library.”

Last month Joe Berkovitz announced the initial experimental release of Flexcover, an open-source code coverage tool suite for Flex, AIR and AS3

We’ve just released the Early Draft of the Java Persistence 2.0 specification, so I thought it would be a good time to report on some of the work we’ve been doing in the JSR 317 Expert Group.

We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java

In a well timed move today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project and lifted restrictions on the use of Flash related specifications. The initiative is supported by several industry leaders including ARM, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm,

SpringSource Application Platform is a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications based on Spring, Apache Tomcat and OSGi-based technologies

The SpringSource Application Platform has been designed from the ground up to instead focus directly on supporting the widely used Spring Portfolio of open source projects. Specifically, the application server builds on the Spring Portfolio programming mo

Another question for Sun will revolve around how much open-source software will be required to move the hardware and services needle. MySQL, with more than 70 million downloads, is a good candidate to jump-start movement in hardware and services. Will it

Ext JS is pleased to announce the Ext GWT 1.0 beta2 release. This release includes numerous enhancements and bug fixes since the beta1 release and is a recommended upgrade for those using beta 1.

CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo sat down with Google CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt Tuesday at the Milken Conference in Los Angeles to discuss Google’s growth and U.S. slowdown, the possibility of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo!, online advertising growth rates, Google’s

Load testing is often relegated to late-cycle activities, but it doesn’t need to be that way. In this installment of Automation for the people , automation expert Paul Duvall describes how you can discover and fix problems throughout the development cycle

Every now and then, normally when talking to a libertarian, I think about how we are actually all connected to each other. It is impossible to sandbox yourself from society which leads me to conclude that I need to embrace it and do what I can to work out

Metawidget takes your domain objects and automatically creates User Interface components for them, saving you handcoding your UIs and leaving you to concentrate on stitching together your application.

David Chisnall suggests that the more programming languages you know, the better. The point is not to stuff your head with language rules. Rather, he explains how being able to read multiple languages, even if you never code in them, can help you to selec

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming co

I just read that F-secure found out that already 510.000 600.000++ new websites are hacked and more are being hacked while we speak. Among them the British government, United Nations and many more high target

The attackers appear to be breaking into the sites with the help of a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. In an alert issued last week, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of an unpatched flaw in

It’s not right the amount of personal attacks I have been receiving lately. I have people questioning my ethics, business practices and saying we changed Ext JS to GPL v3 because my (and I quote) “greed for money came before your moral ethics”.

CSS provides three very useful properties to enhance the readability of your site: font, line-height, and letter-spacing

In Adobe Flex 3, you can get a bitmap image of any control by using this code (you’ll need to import “mx.graphics.ImageSnapshot”):

We at GridGain recently were faced with the following problem. It turns out (may be old news to some), that java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService in JDK 1.6 is not backward compatible with JDK 1.5

More so than ever, the time is coming for companies that build it right and do it right to prosper while the ones that exclusively focus on just selling it right and who-cares-what-happens-after-the-deal-closes to stare at a lacklustre or flat revenue cur

The news that Ext-JS has, from one release to the next, changed from a modified LGPL to a GPL based license nearly made me fall off my chair. There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, b

“The Clintons know that she can⊘t win this. But they⊘’re hell-bound to make it impossible for Obama to win.”