If you have used such plugins in your project as FindBugs, Checkstyle etc then you quite likely have heard of PMD too. (I have used these tools initially with Apache Maven and nowadays use them via Gradle in my builds, but there’s lots of support for others tools, Ant included.) The trouble with PMD as […]
Nicolas Fränkel published a blog entry recently talking about “Type-safe annotations” in Java — which trigger my thoughts on the same matter, and voila, there’s this post as a result of it. This is in fact my 2 cents on the matter — and as such I’d recommend you read Nicolas’ point of view too […]
I have started using recently Gradle, which I have to confess I actually find to be a bliss compared to Maven. Maybe because I prefer a Groovy-based syntax for build configuration, rather than Maven’s XML-based configuration file. Or maybe because I feel somehow the Gradle peeps have made the tool a bit easier to use […]
If you have been working in software engineering for a while chances are you have often come across (even if you didn’t know it!) design patterns. If you haven’t, as I said, chances are you just don’t realise you have used them — so I strongly suggest the “Gang of Four” book as a starting […]
I’ve been playing for a while with Evernote and their API, which I find rather simple and effective (well done, guys!) — and as such on a few pet projects I have started considering moving the storage to Evernote itself. The beauty of using Evernote is that the storage is already structured for you in […]
This is something I wanted to write about a while back – while there are articles on the net about using JMX in a Java application to keep an eye on how it ticks, or manage its running cycle, I think there is still a large number of users out there who are somewhat reluctant […]
I’ve been digging for a while now into how to fix this annoying issue that I’m having with WP-Syntax plugin when writing code which contains less than (<) or greater than (>) — which, let’s face it, if you have an if / while / for in the code is bound to happen! The trouble […]
This is something that I have discovered recently looking through some (old) code — and it occurred to me that XPath is so powerful and easy to use that quite often programmers might forget the price paid for something this powerful. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying XPath is worthless (on the contrary!), if […]
I haven’t had much time lately to use my beloved mobile WordPress application – due to a mixture of owning a Kindle nowadays and being swamped with work. Ironically it was some of the recent work that forced me in the end to write this article so today I gave up my Kindle on the […]
Just like many others I do keep an eye on the technical articles and blogs that are out there on the net. I’d like to think that most of the ones I’m reading are quite authoritative on some areas of programming and present some useful insights into the world of IT. Even so, I am […]
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