The guys at Google took their time, but the much anticipated Google Collections 1.0 have finally been released. I expect this library to change the way we write our Java code (at least it did that to mine), so I put together an overview article to get you started …

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I love unit tests and use them whenever possible. But in the end, there's no substitute for a full scale system test. Only after system testing, you can be sure that everything works as intended. When I was looking for a way to test a REST-style JSON web service, I …

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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 …

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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 …

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Most people eventually get it that building release artifacts using their IDEs is not the way to nirvana. Builds have to stay stable and reproducible between IDE revisions, and being able to execute them in a command line environment or especially continuous integration servers is key to agile development.

Fortunately …

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A while ago I posted an article that showed how to generate a database schema from JPA annotations. Since I didn't get the hibernate3 maven plugin working back then I used the antrun plugin as a workaround. Thanks to the help of a reader the plugin works now, so an …

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On a GridGain cluster, you sometimes want to execute your jobs on only a subset of the nodes available: those nodes meeting a given condition. Let's say some nodes run an expensive piece of thirdparty software that is (fortunately) only needed for a couple of tasks. At another time, the …

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This weekend I finally had the time to take a look at GridGain, a computational grid package written in and for Java. GridGain is a an open source product licensed under LGPL-2.1 (the same as JBoss) with minor portions under the Apache 2.0 license, so use in commercial …

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Handling configuration data in Java isn't as convenient as it could be. The old and popular Properties mechanism has an awkward syntax and you have to take care of type safety yourself. The new Preferences mechanism supports XML but still isn't everything I'd like it to be.

Recently, I discovered …

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Setting up a Java EE application is no trivial task. Dependency management, building, and deployment can get pretty complex and require a thorough understanding of deployment descriptors, jars, ears and other artifacts.

In this article, I'm going to present a truly minimal Maven-based setup for the JBoss Application Server (tested …

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