The Ancient Art of Programming

The Sorry State of SAAJ

Wherein I describe the Java EE library SAAJ, and the fact that most app servers don't support it.

On bytes, chars, Strings, XML and Unicode

Strings

What does this print?

byte[] buf = new byte[]{'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd'}; String s = new String(buf); System.out.println(s);

Obviously, the answer is the infamous “Hello World”. Unless you live in China or Japan. More about that later.

Let’s make it a bit more exiting:

byte[] buf = new byte[]{'H', (byte) 0xEB, 'l', 'l', [...]

I can see my house from here!

Some time ago, I have heard a developer say something like:

You know, when developing an application, I really don’t care whether I am exposing services as EJB, SOAP, CORBA, REST, JMS, or any other infrastructure. It should just be a matter of configuration.

To which I replied:

Yeah, these things tend to look [...]

Conforming to Zawinski’s Law

Over at the SpringSource Team Blog, I’ve just written a post about the new features in Spring Web Services 1.5. One of the new features is the email transport, thereby conforming to Zawinski’s Law of Software Envelopment:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are [...]

REST FAQ

Apparently, the REST FAQ is hosted at:

http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RestFaq

Quite a RESTful URI!

Platonic REST

I knew studying philosophy was good for something...

Storing Custom Fields in the Database

Discussing four different ways of storing custom fields in a RDBMS.

Conversions: All in a Day’s Work

Back in the day, when I was a C++ Developer on the Microsoft platform, it always struck me as weird that half of my code base consisted of String conversions1. The reason for all this conversion fun was that there were at least half a dozen string types in Microsoft C++: [...]

SQL Injection

AcronymDefinition

C|N>KCoffee Through Nose to Keyboard

For an extra laugh, note the alt tag on the image.

(Via xkcd.com.)

Conferences, conferences, conferences

My upcoming conference schedule