Blogs

Well today was the first day of BarCamp Johannesburg 2008 and it lived up to its reputation of being an exciting and invigorating un-conference.  The talks included:

Well this weekend I hope to attend my first barcamp meeting in Johannesburg.  Not sure what to expect but should imagine it will be a great opportunity to meet new people, chat with fellow geeks and basically get an infusion of energy from everyone who will be attending, maybe it will take my mind off the imploding world economy for a while :)

When Netbeans 6.1, or was it 6.0?, introduced JRuby support a lot of work was done to enable the support of  any dynamic languages within the IDE.

Toplink is real sucky. This works in Hibernate but throws an error in Toplink.

"Select s from SalesOrder s where s.status.code not like 'Unconfirmed' and ( s.id in (714,653,-1))"

The error thrown is really stupid. 

" expecting RIGHT_ROUND_BRACKET, found 'in'

Toplink has some way to go to catch up to hibernate.

Well we have been forced to move our site to servers located in Germany. The bandwidth costs were becoming prohibitive in South Africa and we had to bring them under control. It is a bit more sluggish now for people in South Africa but will probably be faster for our international users. I would prefer to keep the server in South Africa as that is where most of our customers arewe just couldn't afford the costs anymore, especially since they bandwidth usage is growing every month!

BTW Does anyone have any recommendations on Managed Hosting solutions in the UK?

Jumping Bean is pleased to announce the release of Openbill under the GPL V2 license. Openbill is an advanced invoicing and contract management system. The system was originally written to handle data contracts at our associate company Cyber Connect. We are releasing the code as part of our Software Freedom Day celebrations.The system architecture makes use of:

JNDI setup and configuration is one of those parts of java where the differences between container implementations are just enough to be a barrier to porting your application to a different server. This combined with the incompatibilities with JPA between implementations can lead to vendor or stack lock-in, hopefully this get better with the next release of JPA.

One of the issues with JPA is using JNDI datasources for your persistenceContext.

Glassfish JNDI setup and persistence.xml

Glassfish does not require any special handlng for its JNDI entry.

On one of our projects we decided to switch JPA providers from Hibernate to Toplink. The main reason for this was that Hibernate depends on so many core open source libraries that other open source projects also use, that there are all kinds of version problems when the application is deployed in a JEE container, such as Tomcat or Glassfish, that uses different versions internally. Basically jar hell with all kinds of issues with classloaders loading the wrong version of the jar.

BackupPC is a great piece of software that makes the setup and management of backups of servers and workstations a breeze. If configured correctly it will allow for a complete disaster recovery solution. Since it primarily backs ups to disk it is also a cheap, or cost-effective solution. One of the steps often left out of the many setup guides for backuppc on the internet is configuring mail for sending event notifications.

One of the most important things when dealing with any system is having a model in your mind of how the system works. As with most abstractions it is not necessary that the model reflects how the system is implemented as long as it allows one to make accurate predictions on how certain actions will result in predictable events. The model may even be wrong but seem to work. I have a very bad model for how my Microwaves and Video player work and hence am restricted to using only a couple of buttons.