Soul Power

Episode 121 of Software Engineering Radio deals with the topic of OR Mappers. Michael Plöd introduces the concept of object-relational mapping technologies, discusses advantages and disadvantages. The content of the episode is very basic to a large extend, which makes it ideal to get an introducing idea of the topic.
The reason I discuss this here [...]

As i twittered a few days ago, I stumbled over a subtle issue in the core Java library. Not as extreme as here but one to raise ones eyebrows, too.
I just wanted to write a small method to access an enum value by its String representation or use a default, if the conversion fails:
public static [...]

I’m taking a break currently, skipping one of the talks here. Devoxx is actually the most exciting conference I ever attended and I want to take the chance to recap some of the impressions I got here. After 4 days of non-daylight, lots of coffee and coke, I really have to say that I liked [...]

Browsing the latest JavaMagazin leader written by Stefan Tilkov,  I stumbled about a phrase in his abstract, that triggered some thought I wanna share with you. Stefan claims REST to be a more lightweight approach to web services than SOAP.
First I have to admit, that I clearly favour REST style webservices over SOAP one, too. [...]

There some upcoming talks on Hades I will give on a variety of locations and events. As I don’t want to deprive the dates from you, here we go:

Dec, 9th 2008 – Devoxx Conference, Antwerpen
Dec, 17th 2008 – Java User Group, Karlsruhe
Jan, 15th, 2008 – DevDusk, Frankfurt

Perhaps some of you will attend one of these [...]

Java EE development has been packed with lots of metadata since day one. Things have changed a lot over times and we have been provided with more elegant solutions. I don’t want to go deeply into the ongoing debate on Annotations versus XML but rather go one step back and discuss metadata on a more [...]

Fellow developer David Linsin wrote a blogpost about validation of domain objects recently. I actually wanted to leave him a reply but it got kinda long so I decided to post it here. So this is what came to my mind:
Prototyping some web portal kind of software I’ve encountered a similar situation. Take a User [...]

There are a lot of opinions buzzing around about how testing and test driven development helps you writing better software. Reading Secrets of the rockstar programmers just now, I’ve stumbled over an intresting interview with Hani Suleiman, co-author of Next Generation Java Testing. As this is a book purely on testing, you could expect him [...]