Puzzles: Informative alternatives for Java developers

By Ben | Published: April 29, 2010

Reading in my currrent favorate time-beater book when commuting I stumbled across the following:

\u0070\u0075\u0062\u006c\u0069\u0063\u0020\u0020\u0020\u0020
\u0063\u006c\u0061\u0073\u0073\u0020\u0055\u0067\u006c\u0079
\u007b\u0070\u0075\u0062\u006c\u0069\u0063\u0020\u0020\u0020
\u0020\u0020\u0020\u0020\u0073\u0074\u0061\u0074\u0069\u0063
\u0076\u006f\u0069\u0064\u0020\u006d\u0061\u0069\u006e\u0028
\u0053\u0074\u0072\u0069\u006e\u0067\u005b\u005d\u0020\u0020
\u0020\u0020\u0020\u0020\u0061\u0072\u0067\u0073\u0029\u007b
\u0053\u0079\u0073\u0074\u0065\u006d\u002e\u006f\u0075\u0074
\u002e\u0070\u0072\u0069\u006e\u0074\u006c\u006e\u0028\u0020
\u0022\u0048\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0077\u0022\u002b
\u0022\u006f\u0072\u006c\u0064\u0022\u0029\u003b\u007d\u007d

Guess what is this?*

Java Puzzles is one of these great book you can read when travelling short distances. It keeps you fit in the language basics and is fun to read. I also like the fact that being an  IT book for once and doesn’t require a computer to work it through. This is from a newer edition of Java Puzzlers Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafters book on traps, pitfalls and corner cases in the Java programming language.

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UX and App Design at Google – Takeaways

By Ben | Published: February 3, 2010

Yesterday I was at an interesting UX knowledgeshare event where Simon Raess spoke about user experience and application design at Google. Google being an engineering company at heart they arguably only put in the recent years more weight on Ux and Design. Also nowadays Google employs only 200 designers. Being an engineer myself, I expected to get some new insights from another perspective.

The talk was built around the first principle of Googles corporate philosophy “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. Being the first principle it is the most important one, and prioritised in favor of other conflicting aspects when making a product. Among other things, this means that the first thougth when starting with a product is not how to make money but what do users want.

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A Programmer’s New Year’s Resolution for 2010: Learning Scala

By Ben | Published: January 9, 2010

In a world of constant change and ever increasing speed of innovation as a programmer, you might sit back and think about how to prepare for those changes and increase your career options. You might also look forward to a mental distraction from the daily Java/Ruby/PHP routine, or your inner geek is just looking for the next big thing.

So without further ado and fanboy-ing here’s why I want to do it.

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The old-school Objective C is approaching top 10

By Ben | Published: December 9, 2009

From time to time I check the index of the most popular programming languages by tiobe, check out how popular the old-school Objective-C is becoming!

Given that this language is very old school, it makes me wonder what would have happended to the Appshop and Apple if they opened the Shop for Java, PHP or Python?

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MegaTrend #9: Cross-platform Mobile Development

By Ben | Published: November 30, 2009

In a recent article by InfoWorld Cross Platform mobile development was mentioned as one of the top 10 emerging enterprise technologies.

Until about 1 years ago the options for cross-platform mobile development were

  • doing platform specific native builds for Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry, UIQ, etc. or
  • Java development with specific twists per handset / handset group or
  • WAP/XHTML Mobile Web Site
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Obfuscation Bugs in J2ME Apps

By Ben | Published: November 21, 2009

Does this sound familiar to you?

It really did drive me crazy. Bug only appeared in a certain phone model with a certain version of the app. Not in emulator, not in other phones, not with other version of the app and just 2 weeks ago – without major change in the app – all was running good in this certain phone. Of course I did not remember one crucial thing that happended in these 2 weeks: I upgraded my IDE NB from 6.1 to 6.7.1.

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FB Series: Difference between IFrame and Connect Apps

By Ben | Published: November 16, 2009

Writing about specifics on iFrame apps in Facebook development was on my list for quite some time. So now despite a lack of time, let’s just get out with the essential message:

When writing iFrame Apps, think of it like a Connect App. It is essentially the same.

I made the long way round trying to find out what are the specifics of a iFrame app in the Facebook Wiki, Forums, and Google. The Facebook Docs is very unclear about the concrete iFrame functionalities from my point of view. Start reading the Facebook docs substituting Connect with IFrame and you find it way easiert to get along, I found.

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Lessons learned trusting Code Generators

By Ben | Published: October 30, 2009

To give you a short answer beforehand: Do not do it! But let me tell you my experience:

I started using Jersey back in 2007 when it was at version 0.4. Netbeans however already had a plugin to get you started on the fast track by generating REST Webservices out of Entity Classes, which you can also generate out of an existing db schema. At that time I was only starting learning JPA and was happy that the Netbeans Code Generators took care of most of my Entity Access Code. In retrospective I should have made the effort of learning everything JPA beforehand and not gradually as I worked along. Usually I actually would have done that, but the Code Generators tricked me into not doing it: It just seemed too simple to bother.

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Website deployments: Plain old Ant

By Ben | Published: October 21, 2009

In the last entry I was mentioning several solutions for managing web site deployments and packaging for php webapps. Since with PHP there is usually no build process already at development time this has often to be established especially for test & production – and yes there needs to be a build process if you do serious php web development.

Despite Sprocket or similar tools I decided to go for the plain old ANT approach. Why? It was the most practical tool, you have full control of what you are doing and the other tools did not quite what I wanted.

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