Over the weekend I was debugging a peculiar issue with ActiveMQ (turned out to indeed be a bug that had been reported a few months ago: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AMQ-3359 ) and I became...

Although the Active MQ website already gives a pithy, to-the-point explanation of ActiveMQ, I would like to add some more context to their definition. From the ActiveMQ project’s website: “ActiveMQ...

I recently stumbled upon an essay that I've read many times in the past.  I didn't have it bookmarked on this newer laptop, so after doing so I also decided to share with you. It was published orig...

Enterprise architects seem to become more and more involved in “trying out new things” or pushing down technology or implementation advice -- nay dictation -- without having a dog in the fight, or ...

I stumbled upon a discussion, probably an age-old discussion, about whether java passes function arguments by reference or by value. i know I've studied this in the past and I know the answer is no...

Recently, I needed an way to report the version of the application I'm working on to the users of the application. I wanted to avoid manually updating a settings file or some similar configuration ...

For a lot of people, TDD (read -- both Test Driven Development and Test Driven Design) is a software practice that one couldn't and shouldn't live without. Carefully double-checking your code by bu...

I was listening to a podcast today of Scott Hanselman interviewing Michael Feathers, the author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I'm currently reading the book, and I highly recommend it. F...

Recently, a reader spotted a comment that I made on a different blog concerning generalizing data-access operations for inappropriate reasons. What follows was his email and my response: Christian...

Response to "How to Mock Static Methods" Definition of code smell (from Wikipedia): "any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem." In Java, static met...

Object Oriented Analysis and Design is certainly not new to the enterprise software workforce, but how is it actually carried forth in industry? Are software engineering groups reaping the benefits...

I recently read a blog on the Intel Software Network describing the reduced execution flow readability in object-oriented systems that implement a domain model as being a "flaw" in object-oriented ...

Our goal when writing code is to write 'high-quality' code, not just hack together what appears to work and moving on to the next set of functionality. When writing 'high-quality' software, we must...

I am planning a series of posts  that walk a reader through building a simplistic application using Ext-GWT as the choice of technology for the user interface, Hibernate as the ORM, HSQLDB as the b...

I am working on the next Ext-GWT blog, but in the interim, I would like to share an awesome podcast that I found at Scott Hanselman's blog. He interviews Robert C. Martin (author of a few excellent...

The Ext-GWT (GXT) library uses a "loader-store" functionality to handle manipulating UI models (or domain objects) and binding them to GXT widgets. The Ext team has posted a simplistic overview doc...

Although the gwt-maven-plugin from codehaus is going through the merge with the gwt-maven plugin from Google Code, I wanted to share with you how building the Ext-GWT mail application with the gwt-...

Apache Maven is a popular project-management tool that allows you to model your projects in XML and then streamline the development lifecycle by taking advantage of dependency management and conven...

For this entry, being the first, I would like to help the Ext-GWT community (especially those newly introduced to the framework) grasp a firm understanding of the reference "Mail" application, spec...