There’s an age-old debate about whether static methods are the devil. They make unit testing so hard! Utility methods are easier to use when they’re static. Take for instance a simple method to pull the value of a cookie off an HttpServletRequest. Since this is Java, we can’t put the method on the HttpServletRequest class. …
We love to make abstractions. Human beings understand things in terms of abstractions, especially in terms of metaphors and similes. When we encounter something new, we find ways that it is like something similar. Eric Evans makes some great points about this in Software Is (Not) Like That, an article on DDD from way back …
Strongly-typed, type-inferred languages like F#, Scala, and Haskell make Java feel like its static typing system is half-assed. This is not Java’s fault entirely; it’s the way we use it. Say we have a domain class like public class User { public User(String firstName, String lastName, String email, long balanceInDollars) {}… } I’m in agreement …
If you’re a Java programmer who’s itching to switch to a newer, more exciting language, then remember we can still improve the paradigms we’re using in the language we get paid to use. Erik Onnen’s video on InfoQ, Java.next, talks about why Java is still the language best-suited to the JVM, and how we can …
“Programmers don’t need an office. They don’t need infrastructure. They don’t need staff. They don’t need anyone to tell them what to do. They hardly even need money. They can just make things. A programmer is a human self-contained factory that can manufacture stuff that’s worth money. That is some insanely powerful stuff!” — Tess …
This F# Snippet illustrates a way to divide a sequence into a sequence of shorter sequences of a fixed length. The snippet uses list comprehensions. I don’t like it, because it involves flipping through the original sequence over and over and over. With recursion, we can do all the construction in one pass through the …
LinkedIn integration instructions provide the following syntax: http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js we say, WTF? what kind of script tag has a src attribute and content as well? It turns out that the JS in the src attribute is pulling those lines out of the DOM and parsing them. It is not really JS inside there, but a language …
How do you test whether a JavaScript object is empty?The short answer (if you’re using JQuery) is: $.isEmptyObject(obj) The longer answer is, you loop through its properties. This is the method JQuery is using. for(var prop in obj) { // it is not empty if this hits} The even longer answer is, you loop through …
Separation of concerns is a challenge in a web application. The quick, straightforward way to control a page winds up being messy, with business logic and application logic and view logic all mushed together. Here at my Stealth-Mode Startup, we’re using the Sitebricks web framework on top of Guice. One pain point in our webapps’ …
Read moreCross-platform problem solving: how an Android Pro Tip helps our web app design
Reference post. Don’t expect this to be interesting. We had a particular subdirectory of a repository (repoA) that really belonged in repoB. The goal is to transfer all files and history from repoA to repoB, permanently. Thanks to Nikolai in this blog post, the move isn’t too bad. I’m not going to repeat his instructions. …
Read moreStupid git tricks: transferring part of one git repo to another