Random musings in IT

This post is the last in my current retrospective series, that sampled the projects I was working on years ago. You can see the previous posts here and here. While the previous posts were about projects that span through years, this will be about a project that took no longer than a couple of…

Lately I was assigned a task which involved something that a unit test seemed to be able to solve, but later it turned out to be way more complex than that. Almost a third of our codebase consists of POJOs generated from Xsd descriptors scattered around in our projects. The generation is performed…

Recently I was musing about this topic and was trying to find reasons for this phenomenon. When I was running my company I interviewed several developers for open positions, and interestingly there was an unspeakable imbalance in the gender ratio. Namely I can only recall two ladies I interviewed,…

Reading the post about useful regular expressions,  remembered what my favourite solution is to one of  the questions of the test we give to junior Java developers. The task is to write a method that takes a string as a parameter and returns the acronym of the string in uppercase made up of the…

Something gave me the weird idea to try the new features of JAX-WS on a current project. The main idea was, to get rid of the code generators that must be ran whenever some minor change is done in the web service. So instead of designing the WSDL along with the matching schema definition for the…

This is the English version of a tale I've recently found in my archive mailbox from 2001. Looking at ongoing projects, I think it still has a point. Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots…

We are starting up prototyping on a new project I've mentioned in this article. Our aim is to provide a proof-of-concept implementation of a simple off-line application running on the PDA's we have. The PDA's of today are quite well equipped, they come with ample processor power and enough RAM for…

In on of our major projects we store some of our business logic data as database metadata, but provide GUI interface for updates. Since clicking through the project's GUI is much easier, than creating and verifying scripts for each tiny modification, our developers got lazy and we had to find a way…

I spent half a day today trying to see why a the web start application created and deployed using a simple build script didn't work after I've created a new certificate as our previous was about to expire. First I suspected it was because I signed the application using SUN JDK 1.6, and it might…

One of our current Customers have a very interesting requirement for an upcoming project. The nature of the project requires mobile clients and frequent (or even instant) database updates, but there is no guarantee to have constant connectivity. We more or less have full control on the choice of…