Exciting news for Java developers: The first 1.0 release candidate of Google Collections has been released. For almost a year I've been waiting for this, and now it seems the waiting will soon be over.

Basically, Google Collections is a better, more consistent version of commons-collections with generics and …

Configuring servers is tedious work if you operate a cluster of more than a few machines (if you're a regular reader, you've heard about it). I've created a simple deployment framework that helps with building deployment packages based on central configuration templates. It is ant-based, so people from the Java …

I've been reading up on distributed systems again. For quite a while, my monthly copy of CACM has been my only connection to computer science topics. This time, I followed a few references and came across interesting concepts (most of them familiar from back in university).

Amazon doesn't just sell …

In my projects, I've always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I'm no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn't even my job. In this article, I'm going to list a few …

I'm back to playing with the Django web development framework again. Since I'm close to putting something online (it's only a matter of years, actually), I'm also looking into hosting options. Due to the framework choice, Google App Engine appeared on my radar and I had a quick look at …

Most wiki-based documentation I have worked with has sooner or later turned into a tangled mess of outdated information. Some pages are maintained actively while others aren't updated anymore and you never know how reliable the information still is. For a while I've been thinking about a simple technical solution …

There are many ways to store session data in web applications. They all differ in scalability, failover capabilities, and complexity. I'll give you a quick rundown on the major themes.

2008 is done and over with. Before moving on I'll follow David's example and post my most popular articles in terms of page views.

Here they are:

1. The State of Java Build Systems
2. Generating DDL Scripts with Maven
3. Generating DDL Scripts from JPA Annotations
4. Parsing Command Line Options in Shell …

I read a lot of RSS feeds to keep myself up to date. Perhaps too many, almost two hundred articles appear in my Google Reader each day. One of the most busy ones is the DZone front page feed. Not all of it is interesting, so some filtering would be …

Externals definitions are a little known but very useful feature of subversion. Using an externals definition, you can create links to different parts of the repository (or even other repositories). Subversion clients then automatically check out the linked content into your working copy.

How this works is best explained with …