Author Archives: Mathew

AJAX Roundup

Recently I have been playing with various AJAX frameworks, both open source and commercial. For simple ‘update a certain portion of the page only’ type of applications you can roll up your sleeve and deal with the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) directly or use open source API’s like Prototype/DOJO to simply make the call. Continue reading →

Maven

Can build management be made easier? Chances are whatever approach you take will have its own pitfalls and challenges. Many of the Java projects nowadays use Ant as the defacto build scripting tool. Its not too hard really. Can take a couple of days for a the Ant build file to be created (based on project needs). And subsequently it has to managed like any other source code. This approach works well. Most folks now know Ant well enough to get most tasks completed. Why then would anyone want to move to Maven! Continue reading →

JMX + Spring + Commons Attributes

In my previous log4j blog I had used JMX to expose management interfaces to change log4j levels dynamically. If you look at the JBoss JMX console in that blog you will see that the parameter names are named as p1 and p2. Not very helpful. By default Spring uses reflection to expose the public methods of the MBean. Parameter names get thrown away once classes are compiled to byte code. No use of it further. Therefore there is no metadata available to print friendlier names in the JMX console. Continue reading →

Changing Log4j logging levels dynamically

Production issue comes screaming at you at 2am. Red-eyed you open your laptop and check the server logs. You see only minimal logging. After checking other areas such as database, network, machine health, etc., you wish you could turn on more debug logs. Turns out your development team did not provide you a feature to change log levels on the fly. Only way you can do that is to restart the application servers. Ok developers don’t let that happen to you or your ops team. Continue reading →

Agile What !!

One of the things on the hype train is agile development. We have started calling common sense development as agile development. Fair enough. We need to characterize and refer to this type of development model and the word agile fits. I am all in favor of agile development but what most people miss is that the success of an agile project not only depends on the development team embracing agility but also the business users and the client stakeholders doing the same.  Continue reading →

EJB3 Interceptors

Thought I’d give EJB3 interceptors a shot today.  Only class level and method level interceptors are allowed. No rich AspectJ (or jboss-aop) style support. No rich pointcut language. Spring 2.0 is much better in this regards. But like I said before, for most applications what EJB3provides is more than enough. Even Spring prior to 2.0 had only limited AOP support (Method level). Continue reading →