Yearly Archives: 2009

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? Permanent [...]
Posted in mobile development, programming languages | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Posted in mobile development | Tagged | 5 Comments

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 [...]
Posted in mobile development | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Posted in facebook | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Posted in java | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

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 [...]
Posted in Web2.0, javascript, php | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Initialise External Javascript in Page Fragments

By Ben | Published: October 1, 2009
In the last couple of hours I was contemplating around maintainable, performant and non-obstrusive Javascript on a project I am working on. Following situation: - Much Inline Javascript - Many JS and CSS files referenced - No Frontend Deployment/Build Process in place - Some Javascript values are set at page generation time by Server Side code - Webserver is not configured [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, javascript | Tagged | 1 Comment

JPA Best Practices and efficient research

By Ben | Published: September 18, 2009
Recently, in the course of a evaluation for a project to switch their persistence provider I was doing some JPA research and came across this exhaustive presentation from Carol McDonald: JPA Best Practices. I am working with JPA now quite some time, but always found that the documentation is not very detailed for such an [...]
Posted in JEE, Search | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Firefox 3.5 hanging? slow? buggy?

By Ben | Published: September 7, 2009
Like many other users I recently had slow-down problems using the new firefox 3.5.x. Seems like the Skype Plugin was causing the issues. Disabling it worked for me. There is an interesting thread on the issue. Skype apparently is having problems making reasonable quality plugins for quite some time. Mozilla was aware of it but [...]
Posted in Distractions | Leave a comment