Search is a component of most web sites. Therefore, it is a problem solved many times before. The solution of choice (at least in the Java sphere) is Lucene. Insert documents in an index, build queries to find the ones you want. Lucene is a library, so there are a bunch of other tools that … Read moreSite search sanity
Warning! This technique is suited to Android API Level 8-10 (Gingerbread). For Honeycomb or newer, use DialogFragment. Problem: my activity knows how to do something (delete a picture), but it needs to ask the user for confirmation first. Solution: pop a confirmation dialog, whose “yes” button responds by deleting the picture. Code:For the very simplest … Read moreAndroid: Confirmation Dialog
Today I had a sticky problem to solve, the kind business app programmers drool over because it’s nontrivial and contained. Halfway through the TDD process, my logic got all jumbled and I couldn’t see the solution. Stepping back, I took ten minutes to write pseudocode in an F# style, then translated that into Java. Bam! … Read moreF# made Java easier today
It is often said that the developer should understand one level deeper than she’s working. If she’s writing Java, she should know how the JVM works. If he’s using a container, he should know conceptually what’s going on inside the container. This statement is true for more than just runtimes and frameworks, but all the … Read moreOne level deeper
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. … Read moreStatic Methods Are Your Friend
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 … Read moreStrong Typing in Java: a religious argument
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 … Read moreVideo review: Java.next
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
The topic of discussion at the office today (yes, it’s Sunday) is Languages, Verbosity, and Java by Dhanji R. Prasanna, which purports to extoll the clarity of Java compared to more expressive languages like Ruby, Python, and Scala. What it really says is: “Languages that are familiar are more readable.” Of course languages that are … Read moreFamiliarity v readability
The new version of IntelliJ IDEA is out, and I’m liking it. Gradle integration: creating a new project from a build.gradle was smooth and easy. Then when dependencies were added to the gradle file, the gradle plugin came in handy. One line added to build.gradle apply plugin: ‘idea’ and then one execution of gradle idea … Read moreIntelliJ IDEA 11