Exceptions are a necessary evil of most software development endeavours. As much as we would like to design applications, which are equivalent to mathematical functions 'give me one input and always I will trustfully return you the same output', the real world IOExceptions, OutOfMemoryExceptions, DivideByZeroExceptions and their various
Formatting JavaDoc using plain HTML can be a troublesome and time-intensive experience. Today I installed the JDocEditor plugin for eclipse, which allows editing JavaDoc in eclipse using a small rich text editor. Here, a quick evaluation, a few screenshots and a little getting started guide. Evaluation Good: * Free * Helps to
The question of the right programming language is one that has always spurned much controversy. Likewise, the idea that one day we could develop software by simply 'drawing' expressive models has as many advocators as opponents. The idea of domain specific languages could be one which helps us
The other day I came across another interesting static source code analysis plugin for eclipse: JDepend. JDepend calculates a number of quality metrics for Java packages (therewith it has a slightly different unit of analysis to other tools, which focus on methods, classes or projects). I found that Andrey Loskutov
In order to configure a simple Apache Web Server, I found myself many a time connecting to a UNIX system using putty, fiddling around with various configuration files using pico or vim. I don't want to count the times I deleted some configuration I later missed dearly or
In order to mount an image file on VirtualBox, I needed to convert an IMG image file into an ISO format (VirtualBox does not support mounting IMG files). There seem to be a myriad of applications available for this purpose; many of them commercial or at least shareware. With OSFMount
Google offers free web hosting as part of their 'Google Sites' service. Anyone with a Google (gmail) account can sign up for a website with an address such as https://sites.google.com/site/\[yoursitename\]. Google sites has some nice features, first and foremost that editing the website
After having published a number of posts on Maven and integration between Maven and eclipse in particular, I have been thinking for a while to summarize some best practices in a post. I have found that these best practices are actually too long and too interdependent to fit nicely in
Problem Today I came across a strange error when generating eclipse metadata using maven. Running "mvn eclipse:eclipse" results in : [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-eclipse-plugin:2.8:eclipse (default-cli) on project mxGWTUtils: Execution default-cli of goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-eclipse-plugin:2.8:
Although an SVN server is possibly a fixed anchor in dynamic and distributed development efforts, even these servers might have to be relocated from time to time. Surprisingly, this can be done quite swiftly, even in complex set ups, for instance an eclipse workspace comprised of dozens of projects stored
There has been not little critizim of the slow progress made in the core of Java. Java 6 has been released on the 11th of December 2006 (!). Java 7 saw the light of the day almost five years later this July. Competing languages, most notably C# in Microsofts .NET environment
It has been a while since the new release of the eclipse IDE, Indigo, has been released. One of the most interesting new features seems to be a better integration with Maven. After some very unsuccessful attempts using eclipse IAM and the m2eclipse plugin, I became a bit sceptical of