When I was in grade school I had to do a biographical book review every year. Probably 5 years, from 2nd grade to 7th grade we would be required to do book reviews and inevitably we'd have to do a biography. We'll, I hated biographies, so every year I would...

With the recent release of Subversion 1.4 I'm going through the process of updating repositories. I often like to use multiple repositories because Subversion versions the entire repository with each checkin (Atomic commits rule!). When I do that, I group all of the repositories in the same directory. It makes...

Seek and ye shall find. I posted yesterday about the trials and tribulations of code formatting. While I've solved the basic problems of displaying code, we spoiled programmers have gotten really used to syntax highlighting. Syntax highlighting offers a lot of visual differentiation of text which makes it a lot...

I finally got tired of dealing with reformatting that Wordpress does in its attempt to be "user friendly". In general it does the right thing, but when you deal with code snipits inside <code> tags a lot it can quickly become a problem. I wanted to accomplish two things Have...

Ok, so I might not exactly be on the cutting edge with this post, but I just started playing with jMock, a framework for creating Mock objects. Mock objects are used to isolate various layers of an application by providing a fake implementation that will mimic the behavior of the...

The Hibernate ORM tool give you the ability to write SQL-esque queries using HQL to do custom joining, filtering, etc. to pull Objects from your database. The documentation gives you a lot of examples of the things you can do, but I haven't seen any caveats or warnings. Database Performance...

How far is going to far when you are doing build automation? My answer to that question, is that it's basically not possible to go to far. Any task that you need to do more than three times deserves automation. Three times is my heuristic. The longer and more complex...

I had a chance to install and play with JetBrain's new Team City beta today. Team City at its most basic is a Continuous Integration server. Continuous Integration (CI) systems are used to help manage a team's software development process. Every time a developer checks in code, the CI server...

If Ruby on Rails is all about optimizing the development of web applications, then what would happen if you optimized Rails? Well, it would get streamlined. Streamlined is a generator for Rails that can be used to easily create sites that are much better looking and much easier to use...

Brennan posted a blog entry about the Firefox 2.0 beta release a couple of days ago that talks about a lot of the new features in the next Firefox release. This version seems to be an evolutionary release and not a revolutionary one. A lot of work has gone on...

I was asked today "How do I find out the revision number of my Subversion directory?" and I didn't know the answer. The good news is there is an easy answer: svnversion . From the svnversion help command: The version number will be a single number if the working copy...

In a previous post I lamented about Tapestry and Hibernate fighting each other. This was very soon after I had started using Tapestry for the first time, and I wanted to talk a little bit more about it now that I've been using it for a while. So now I...

The Milwaukee Ruby User's Group had it's first official meeting last night. A few people showed up and we talked about some of our favorite ruby features. I talked about Metaprogramming a bit. There was also a good discussion about the Ruby Object Model. (Classes are Objects and Object is...

Ok, so I don't know what the name is really going to be, but it looks like there is going to be a Ruby User's group in Milwaukee. There was a kick-off meeting tonight that was well attended for a "getting things started" meeting. Check out the temporary website at...

For much of the web's history JavaScript has been the domain of the web designer who was often not a skilled programmer. So JavaScript was often a messy endeavor and did not follow a lot of the tenets of good software development. What has been missed this whole time is...

I've been away from doing much Java development recently. I've been getting paid to do .NET development and have been doing Ruby in my free time. So, I've been looking forward to get back to some Java programming (which was the first language I ever got paid to develop). I've...

So I finally broke down and got a new Mac laptop the MacBook Pro to replace my 3ish year-old PowerBook. The initial impression I have is very positive. It's got a very Buttery (tm) experience. It feels way more responsive (as would be expected with dual core CPUs, each of...

Yeah, so I'm sure everyone who cares already knows that Ruby on Rails 1.1 has been released. Congratulations to the core team for what appears to be a quality release. They are building on their strengths for sure and offering some compelling new features. The official announcement is available, and...

One of the big features I keep hearing .NET developers talk about is something called Language Integrated Query (LINQ). LINQ is an Object Query Language (OQL) technology that is slated to be integrated into .NET 3.0. In the general sense an OQL allows you to "query" an object graph much...

My WebDAV with ASP.NET post has proved to be very popular and gets me emails, so I figured I'd share some more tidbits that I've picked up along the way. What do you learn when you write your own server to implement a standard protocol? Well you learn that protocols...

Three Ruby related posts in a row! Yes, I'm currently enamored with this colorful little language. If you know people that know (or you yourself know) languages like Smalltalk and Lisp, you'll often hear them curse when they use other languages. Something like "Damn, I could do this so much...

Check out the Ruby Quiz run by James Edward Gray II. It's a weekly 'quiz' that runs on the ruby-talk mailing list each week. I think this is a great idea for any language, but especially emerging languages full of interesting features like Ruby. This week's quiz was a meta-programming...

Web Services are about sharing. SOAP Web Services are about interoperability. If you don't need to share information or services and if you don't need to interoperate with other systems or other programming languages, then why incur the overhead of doing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? If you don't need to...

As I discussed in a previous post "ASP.NET Web Application without ASPX Extension", I've been working on a custom WebDAV server for a client. The initial proof-of-concept was just to see if we could get some .NET code that would respond to all paths for a given web application. From...

So, I stumbled across some totally excellent Cheat Sheets today available for free! They cover a bunch of web programming topics including: Javascript, CSS, HTML, MySQL, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/ They include great function references and things like that. The best thing about them is that they are...