John Vlissides

OO and Design Patterns has lost a true legend. He will be greatly missed.

Perhaps a week or two ago, I was telling some one that there is a chance they will update the book.

Finally, the Java naming issue is over with

The Java naming jokes are now finally over with.

There are very simple names to follow:

Java SE 6 (Standard Edition)
Java ME 5 (Micro Edition)
Java EE 5 (Enterprise Edition)

Java ClassPath wildcards

Here is one feature that is a time saver and scheduled for the Mustang release.

ClassPath wildcards

No more writing shell scripts (Remember lcp.bat) for various platforms for looping. Endless typing of the umpteen jar files in a dir.

Large project - Result of a process or inherent?

Here is was one nicely put statement about large project in the above link.

"I often hear developers described as 'someone who knows how to build a large system quickly.' There is no trick in building large systems quickly; the quicker you build them, the larger they get!"

-- David Parnas

VSS and list of shared files for a given project

Recently we have observed random corruption of a large VSS database recently at my work. As a stop gap measure, we have recreated a fresh VSS database to copy at least the latest source to proceed further. However we do have a number of shared files among projects and VSS doesn't have a built in report to list those files that are shared.

So here is a quickly hacked Ruby script for producing a "list of shared files in VSS project". It is also smart enough to ignore deleted shares when considering whether a file is shared or not. It might be useful for others so I am publishing it here.

List shared files VSS Report

How to find out where a class is loaded from?

ClassLoader cl = aClass.getClassLoader();
while (cl != null) {
System.out.println(cl);
cl = cl.getParent();
}

try {
System.out.println(aClass.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation());
} catch (Exception e) {}

More about WebDav

Having said good things about the WebDav earlier, I also have to point out that at times we do miss out retry and parellel connection facilities available in advanced web clients like CuteFTP or FileZilla.

Here is a very cool Java library (OnJava article) that plugs into the Java's protocol handler mechanism and provides the retry and parallel connection facilities to HTTP connections. With this one should be able to build a cool WebDAV Client that is as good as any modern FTP client.

WebDav and File Transfer

As FTP is blocked at the firewall level in more corporations, we switched to WebDav (used the Apache 2's Dav module) for File Transfers between our offices. With WebDav, We also got an additional advantage of using the Windows OS's built in WebDav client (Web folders) rather than having to install an FTP Client or in most cases just use the Web Browser. Once the folder is setup, it is simply one more folder in the Windows Explorer. Since we use Apache on the server, we can rely on the industry standard Web Server and have to worry less about security issues.

Chairs we are looking at for Bangalore Office

Here are the pictures of the chair we are looking at for Bangalore office


Chairs 

Discussion on LDAP , OpenLDAP, etc

An interesting discussion about directory services, LDAP and OpenLDAP at slashdot.org