Delicious

Cake mixes consist of a mix of things you already have in your cupboard plus a load of unnecessary, potentially harmful preservatives. They cost more than making cake from scratch, the resulting cake tastes worse, they take away people’s confidence in their ability to make their own cakes, and they don’t even save you any time. Hibernate has the same misperceived benefits and the same draw-backs. Gordon Ramsay wouldn’t be caught dead using any cake mix. As professional programmers, we should be more skeptical of generic frameworks like Hibernate.

Morphia is a Java library which acts sort of like an ORM for MongoDB – it allows us to seamlessly map Java objects to the MongoDB datastore. It uses annotations to indicate which collection a class is stored in, and even supports polymorphic collections

This paper discusses best practices for running Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere virtual machines. The guidelines will help you to get the best from your Java applications and application servers when you run them on VMware vSphere.

I’ve been blogging lately about Apache Abdera and ATOM. ATOM can be used for a lot of things and is very flexible. Today I want to introduce you to a new ATOMPub server called: Atom Hopper.

Atom Hopper is an open source ATOMPub server for accessing, processing and aggregating ATOM entries. Atom Hopper was designed to make it easy to build both generalized and specialized persistence mechanisms for ATOM XML data, based on the ATOM Syndication Format and the ATOM Publishing Protocol.

The Ext GWT team has been hard at work on Ext GWT 3.0 and we’re happy to announce the availability of Ext GWT 3.0 PR5. This will be the last developer preview release as we move toward our 3.0 beta releases.

Java Simon is a simple monitoring API that allows you to follow and better understand your application. Monitors (familiarly called Simons) are placed directly into your code and you can choose whether you want to count something or measure time/duration.

There is enormous scope for coarse and fine grained control of JVM behaviour. The option -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal allows comprehensive reporting of the options and their values. The available options vary by build and JVM type (server or client). Recording and auditing this output is an important step in any Java benchmarking or continuous monitoring exercise

I have (finally) successfully cloned Wikipedia and indexed it with Solr. In the spirit of documenting my work and helping others, here are the key steps along the way.

Thread Pools are very important to execute synchronous & asynchronous processes. This article shows how to develop and monitor Thread Pool Services by using Spring. Creating Thread Pool has been explained via two alternative methods

You use Byteman to change how a Java program operates without having to edit the source code and recompile it. Actually, you can even use Byteman to modify a running application without needing to stop and restart it. Byteman will happily redefine the behaviour of both application classes and JVM runtime classes like String,Thread etc.

Finally, he finished with an interesting thought – that one of the main scalability issues with any web framework is people i.e. the competencies and preferences of the developers on the team.

CloudBees, Google App Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Cloud Foundry reveal the pleasures and perils of coding on a public cloud platform

Making its certification debut at JavaOne, Apache TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is the Java Enterprise Edition of Apache Tomcat (Tomcat + Java EE = TomEE) that unites several quality Java enterprise projects including Apache OpenEJB, Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache OpenJPA, Apache MyFaces and more.

Oracle boasts the Public Cloud will provide “all the productivity of Java, without the IT,†and “the Oracle database you love, now in the cloud.â€

As promised in the first part of the "Effective Mockito" blog series, I will concentrate on Mockito specifics in the followup posts. So, the main topic for Part 2 is Mockito's @Mock Annotation.

During debugging IntelliJ IDEA shows only the first 100 elements of arrays and collections. It’s enough in most cases. However, it’s sometimes convenient to use a custom range. Exactly for this the ‘Adjust Range’ action has been available for arrays for quite a long time.

Here is a quick screencast that shows how to instantly deploy Java web applications on the cloud with Heroku.

It seems like Java is not only the most popular language, but also the most used language for OpenSource development [according to: http://www.ohloh.net].

It’s been an exciting year leading up to Spring Social 1.0, and there is a lot to be excited about with this big release. Now that we have a strong, stable foundation, I’m looking forward to seeing where Spring Social goes from here.