Author Archives: Ben

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

Long development cycles of compiled languages – the real killer

By Ben | Published: September 4, 2009
Ever asked yourself what are the reasons for the rise of scripting  languages like PHP, Ruby, Groovy for web development in the last couple of years? Let’s take the concrete case of Java. Common critiques of the language and the API’s, and the J2EE/JEE frameworks were/are in a loose historical order: performance – too slow: this [...]
Posted in Web2.0, java, programming languages | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Scaling Enterprise Applications and all that jazz: Terracotta, GigaSpaces, and Azul

By Ben | Published: August 22, 2009
I like scaling and the architectures that attempt to solve those issues. Below I tried to bullet point 3 prominent players in this area, all solving scaling problems with different architectures at different levels. Terracotta 3.1 Clustering JVM using Network attached Memory Only the field-level changes are sent over the network Uses TCP to communicate within cluster Open Source and recently [...]
Posted in Scalability, Terracotta | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Discovered Quercus

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
Scalability, security, pooling, long lived connections , container services in general are all aspects where Java has a lot to offer. PHP on the other side is good for fast development cycles with a low maintenance infrastructure, request response orientend with not so much support for long lived connections, caching etc. Read the full post [...]
Posted in Scalability, java, php | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Copyright reloaded

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
I found this article recently. Quite funny the copyright symbol designer sues e.g. RIAA for using his artwork whereas RIAA itself sees itself something like the holy grail of copyright. Permanent link to this post (31 words)
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FB Series: AJAX & Facebook debugging

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
The php facebook client has a nice setting to track the different http calls between your app and facebook. You can enable this with: $GLOBALS['facebook_config']['debug'] = true; This will actually insert some script code to the header of every page served, in order to render the tracking code, if there is something to render: Read the full post [...]
Posted in debugging, facebook | Tagged , | 2 Comments