In the Beginning, if you wanted to create an executable application in C, you’d run a program that translated C code to assembly language, run an assembler on the translated code, then run a linker to bundle it all up into an executable file. And it was Good. But it was also annoying after a while, so someone […]
Category: Better Software Design
Do’s and Don’ts for designing software for reliability, maintainability and performance
Gnome Evolution is an Abomination and gnome-keyring should die in a fire!
Really. Between Evolution’s penchant for creating non-deletable – and defective – account associations and gnome-keyring’s useless pop-up dialogs, the whole thing almost makes Microsoft Windows seem attractive. Then again, gnome is, by and large, a slavish attempt to imitate many of Windows’ more obnoxious features. Like the Windows Registry. Honestly. People have been complaining about this stuff for […]
JPA and overlapping complex keys
If at all possible, you should avoid setting up databases with complex keys (or compound keys, as they are sometimes known). It makes life a whole lot more complex, and in a world where everyone already says you’re taking too long because “All You Have To Do Is…”, complex isn’t a good thing. Sometimes, however, there’s just no […]
org.hibernate.PropertyAccessException: could not get a field value by reflection getter of com.mypackage.MyEntity.entityId
There are reports that messages of this sort were due to bugs in one or more Hibernate releases. But this is also a legitimate error. I wasted a lot of time before it hit me. The original code was: @SuppressWarnings(“unchecked”) public List<State> getStatesForCountry(String countryID) { final String SQLCOMMAND = “SELECT c ” + “FROM ” + State.class.getSimpleName() + […]
Writing files into a WAR – Another BAD IDEA
I’ve always recommended against this. For one thing, a WAR is a ZIP file and Java has no builtin support for updating ZIP files. A lot of people abuse the fact that many JEE servers unpack (explode) WARs into a directory such as Tomcat’s webapps directory. They then proceed to use the ServletContext getRealPath() method to translate a […]
Why Do-it-Yourself Java Security is a BAD THING
One of my greatest peeves in working with Java in the Enterprise is the fact that everyone+dog seems to think they can do a better job on application security than the Java architects. OK, so there’s some really awful stuff that’s part of the Java standards, but nevertheless, rolling your own security is still a BAD THING. Here’s […]
Why Software Projects Should Not Depend on an IDE
disclaimer: I’m about to show my age. My first “IDE” was an IBM 029 keypunch machine. I keyed programs in FORTRAN, COBOL, Assembler and PL/1. When I messed up, I threw away the defective cards and punched new ones. After waiting in line for a free keypunch machine. Over the years, things got better. I graduated to online […]