An Article on Ferret

Together with Benjamin Krause I wrote an article on the Ferret and acts_as_ferret for the German IT magazine iX which was published today. The article is part of a Ruby on Rails special which also includes articles on the current state of Rails and deployment with Capistrano, both written by Ralf Wirdemann and Thomas Baustert. Go grab it while it’s hot (and available).

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.

RailsConf Europe 2007 Day Two

First up: RailsConf Europe 2008 will be in Berlin again. Woot!