Using Rails-like Environments with Spring

One thing that’s nice about Rails is the separation of test, development and production environment right from the beginning. I’m currently working on a Java project with Spring and found myself using MySQL for most of the development and testing and Oracle in production. Using Hibernate that’s not a big problem (most of the time that is, unless you’re bitten in the ass by another weird Oracle JDBC driver bug), but I don’t want to change all the properties for every deployment.

Do Java’s Date Classes Make Any Sense?

I just spent the last hour banging my head on my desk trying to get any kind of date type (whether java.util.Date or a simple timestamp) from the current time and a timezone identifier (something along the lines of Etc/GMT+12). You’d think this is an easy task. Obviously the GregorianCalendar takes a timezone as a constructor argument, so it really should be.

The Perils of Using final

I’m currently working with a proprietary framework. Which is not bad per se. Compared to others I’ve worked with it’s a nice framework to work with. It uses Spring heavily which is a plus and makes working with it quite flexible.

Best Practices on Rails

This morning, on day two, Marcel Molina and Michael Koziarski did a little Best Practices session, a welcome change to the keynotes and sessions. It was very code-oriented. I did even take something out of it I didn’t know before. Though I wish it would’ve gone into a little bit more detail (which I actually wish for a lot of the other sessions as well, but more on this in a later post), it was something that you could relate to on a practical level.