Blogs

When ever I need to use the JAXB maven plugin, it is always a task to configure the maven pom.xml file to get this tool to run, but usually an answer can be found pretty quickly so its just annoying. Most often I just use javaws and jaxb plugins to import and export web services, but recently I had to export XML schemas for some POJOs for a client, and this was a bit more of a challenge. It seems, from the google search results at least, that Java developers do not export XML schema definitons for POJO's that often.

I have been working on a project recently which required the migration of a non-trivial application from a, circa 2000, web application built on Struts and JDBC, to a more modern layered architecture using Java Persistence API (JPA), the Spring framework and Wicket for the front-end. Rather than rewrite everything at once the client opted for a phased approach. 

Sometimes software can be like the fashion industry, with ISV (independent software vendors) chasing the next best solution to the same old problems. A few years ago Scalix was all the rage in the mail server space, and lots of vendors jumped on the bandwagon telling their customer how much they could save by switching from Microsoft Exchange to Scalix.

Although bash is a powerful scripting environment it is a bit deficient, compare to other scripting languages, when it comes to date/time calculations. There are no convenient, generally available, date functions such as datediff or overloaded operators for mathematically manipulating dates and time.

A couple of months ago Scalix released "Scalix Active Sync" that allows customers using Scalix mail servers for their enterprise email requirements, to synchronise their mail and contact information with Outlook, or any other mail client that works with Scalix, and their cell phone!

This weekend I dived back into JavaFX again. JavaFX 1.2 has been out for a while now, and I have wanted to try out JavaFX again, ever since I took 1.0 for a spin about a year ago. At that time there was no support for JavaFX on Linux. This, combined with the fact that it JavaFX had no UI controls for data input, meant that I had no practical use for it since I am not really a visual designer but more of an application developer. Luckily now ,JavaFX runs officially on Linux, and whats more 1.2 introduced the first version of the charting API, somethings that worth looking at!

Ok so i am tired of having to hunt around for a ready made snippet of Maven pom.xml stanza's for a complete and compatable set of jars for hiberbate. Most of the time you end up having to roll your own anyway. So below is my current version of the necessary stanzas. The version numbers will need to be changed with changes in hibernate releases but that is quiet easy to sort out by refering to the compatability matrix on the hibernate download page.

 First add the following  repository to your pom.xml 

Postgrey is a great little utility to help eliminate spam from your mails server, and our setup has been running just fine for over three, or more, years now. But the other day I noticed that some of our email accounts were not getting any external mail anymore. These accounts were some of the little used email accounts on the various domains we use.

Hibernate's implementation of JPA has some quirks, such as not being able to handle the eager fetching of two @OneToMany relationships in a single entity without the use of some work-arounds. Although this article is not about these work-arounds I will give a quick overview of the problem and solution to that problem first, before looking at the specifics of the case where I got the error on a entity with two @ManyToOne.

Yes, I own an IPOD. The reason I own one is because, at the time, the IPOD, with a whopping 60 gigs of storage plus an MP3 player, hands down beat any other offer in the market in terms of price/megabyte for mobile storage. Flash disks cost/megabyte was way more than for the IPOD, and other MP3 players only came with 4 gigs of storage. So, as I was using my IPOD as a backup devices and a way to transfer files at clients, the IPOD was a compelling offer.