Plaintive Mewling

I’m using Darcs on a new project and one annoyance was that when I did, say, a text search, Eclipse would happily descend into the “_darcs” directory and pull up the Darcs internal files in the editor. When I Googled this I found people asking about it but nobody with the answer, which turns out to not be too hard. You can also use this to hide metadata from Monotone or any other system that produces directories you don’t want Eclipse to mess with. (more…)

I’ve been working on a little pilot project using RIFE, spurred on by some of the glowing reports I’ve read of how productive it is, and I’m finding it a bit frustrating. Mostly it comes down to the documentation, or lack thereof.
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Like many people, I use a coverage analysis tool to measure how much of my code is covered by my unit tests. (For my hobby projects, Coverlipse is my tool of choice; it’s free and reasonably capable.) And I always hate to see my coverage numbers drop just because I’m not bothering to test trivial getter/setter methods. So I wrote a helper class to test the getters and setters for me. Download it here and read on to learn how to use it.
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Has anyone out there ever gotten a decent response from filing a Hibernate bug? I sure haven’t. Here’s my latest one, on the subject of support for JOINED entities with discriminator columns in Hibernate’s EJB3 implementation. I ran into a situation that was handled fine in other EJB3 implementations but not Hibernate. In his inimitable fashion, Gavin King claims it’s not really a problem “because Hibernate is better than these other inferior implementations.” But I think he’s wrong.
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The agenda for day 4 included a more in-depth look at Spring’s AOP facilities, its support for adding JMX management capability to Java classes, and its wrappers for remote object access. There was also a little unexpected extra.
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The view continued to shift in the direction of the user on day 3; the topics for today were the Spring MVC web framework (with a diversion into Spring Web Flow since the instructor is heavily involved in that) and the Spring Security system, aka Acegi.
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Day 2 started off with a discussion of best practices for enterprise app design, with a focus on how Spring can help encourage good programming techniques. Oddly, one of the signs that you’re using Spring correctly is that your code doesn’t depend on Spring! (more…)

Today was the first day of the Core Spring training class. So far so good. The instructor is Keith Donald, primary author of the Spring Web Flow module. He certainly seems to know the framework inside and out. Colin Sampaleanu, one of the developers who works on the core code of the framework, stopped by a couple times, but it was really Keith’s show.

The first day covered the big-picture stuff: what Spring is, how it works, what services it provides, etc. The focus was mostly on Spring’s inversion-of-control concept; Keith covered every IOC service the framework provides, with sample code to demonstrate each one. (more…)