During a recent class I taught on ICEfaces, one of my students asked me why the calendar was often one day off from what got posted back to the model managed-bean setter. ... more »

This is my first blog post ever, so please excuse the formatting. Here it goes… Using the ICEfaces selectInputText component, combined with Glazed Lists, I was able to put together a simple auto completion implementation.... more »

The original intention of web services was to provide a mechanism to integrate different systems together. The systems could be running on different operating systems that are hosting applications written in different programming languages. The basic technology underlying web services is XML, which is can be transported between systems using a variety of protocols, most commonly HTTP or HTTPS. XML makes for a power conversational language, not only because it is human readable, but because everything is represented as a String, with specific rules defined for how that String value should be interpreted. This is important because “250” will be interpreted as 250 regardless of whether your application is written in Java or C/C++ or if it is running on Windows or Unix. There is no ambiguity with things like “big endian” or “little endian” interpretations of bytes.... more »

The code I wrote nine months ago sucks. And I'm happy about it. Of course back then I thought what I was writing was the bee's knees, and that the code that I had written nine months before that was what sucked. And at that time, I thought that it was the code written nine months prior to that was what sucked. And on and on and on back to the beginning of my programming career, when 110 baud teletypes were all the rage. So why am I so happy about it? Simple: if I can look back at code I had written previously and know that the code I am writing today shows significant improvement, it means that I am still learning and growing as a coder. The day that I look at my older code and think that it is perfect will be a sad day indeed, as it will mean either: (a) I have learned all that there is to learn (highly unlikely), or (b) that my brain has calcified and can accept no more information. Either of these would be a sad state of affairs. ... more »

I have read the Article on Java 7 & the features it provides. I learned that it supports Dynamic Language . Any comments or discussions on this topic would eventually be more helpful for me as well as for others. Thanks in Advance. ... more »

I discovered lombok which uses annotations to generate getters and setters. http://projectlombok.org/index.html Is this recommended? Another question is: Is it better to make all the fields which should be accessed by other objects public and access fields instead of getters/setters - encapsulation is therefore secured? So I do not need to write that boilerplate code an do not need something like lombok.... more »

Using prepared statements with parameters helps to defend against SQL injection in most common cases, when you would otherwise interpolate untrusted content into a string and then execute the string as an SQL statement. ... more »

I have no knowledge about j2ee security but I am giving it a second look now. I have been studying this for a while now but cant get my head to understand all the concepts. I have been involved in web projects that runs on the company's local Intranet only. As I have checked, there's no security constraints appended to it. ... more »

Previously, I discussed techniques for freeing up memory on video and images in Flex, but I neglected to include a discussion of event handlers. With the release of ActionScript 3, Adobe added the notion of strong references and weak references. Strong references are those references that, if present, will prevent the object from being garbage collected. The presence of only weak references, on the other hand, will allow an object to be garbage collected. When most developers consider garbage collection, they often consider only strong references, those references they explicitly know about. The age-old wisdom, that if you remove all active (strong) references to an object, it will become eligible for garbage collection, overlooks the fact that the object may have strong references from other objects, created via event handler registration.... more »

Arjen Poutsma has just announced that Spring 3.0.4 is now available. This release addresses over 80 minor issues and updates Spring's support for some recent third-party releases including Hibernate Core 3.6, Hibernate Validator 4.1, EclipseLink 2.1, and EHCache 2.2. ... more »