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 …

When using an ordinary jar library, IDEs like Eclipse's JDE don't have enough information to display inline javadocs for referenced classes. You have to manually direct Eclipse to the library's source code to take advantage of inline documentation. Maven's source plugin provides a convenient solution to this problem. When building …

Java's persistence API (JPA) makes object-relational mapping very convenient. Using Hibernate, tables and sequences are generated automatically which speeds up development significantly. However, in production systems automatic schema creation isn't desired. In many cases you would want to tune the schema a bit, like adding an index for speeding up …

This week at work I had the opportunity to build an RPM for some third-party software package.

My previous experiences with RPM date back to SuSE 5 almost ten years ago and I haven't touched it ever since. Packaging for Debian or even NetBSD is mostly a painless process, so …

Java projects, especially when it comes to web or EJB applications, tend to get pretty complex. Setting up such a project is a non-trivial task because of the many conventions you have to follow to make your application deployable. The maven project management tool provides a mechanism to setup a …

Unit testing is hip these days and every programming language has its own JUnit clone that mimics the original more or less closely. For C++, there's the excellent CppUnit package that I've been using extensively lately. Unfortunately, C++ is less dynamic than languages like Java, so you can't simply tell …