Live from Kurihama

I knew it had to exist somewhere: A Java implemenation of Maywa Denki’s Bitman

DaveB let me know about this book: “Naked Objects is an open-source Java-based framework designed specifically to encourage the creation of business systems from behaviourally-complete business objects.”

I sure that just the title is going to make a lot of people check it out. Maybe it could start a whole new trend in Naked Programming books and even Extreme Naked Programming. The mind boggles…

Intellij Idea is so smart that it can even AutoComplete variable names after an @param JavaDoc tag. That is so smart!

I had a debugging problem with Intellij IDEA that I couldn’t figure out and eventually I found a note about it in their Knowledge base: Debug problem using target JDK 1.3.1_07 or 1.3.1_08.

I spent ages trying to figure this out. I could use the software fine in production mode but when I went to debug it wouldn’t work at all. I checked and rechecked all my settings, blamed Windows XP, exhausted every avenue. When I found it was a JDK bug I nearly fell of my seat. The solution: drop back to an older version but the older versions are (easily) available for download. sigh…

What’s more when I installed JDK 1.4 I swear it just went ahead and installed it in the root of c: without asking for my preference.

What a waste of time… nasty JDK 1.3.1_07/08.. we hates it.

My Ant build was failing yesterday with the code: RESULT=137 sortly after something was Killed. After a certain amount of frantic Googling with no results I decided to look at the processes which are running on the server. There were about 20 Javas there and one defunct one so I decided to kill them all off. That seemed to do the tricked. I think Ant was killing the compile tasj that was taking too long as it was getting blocked some how by the extraneous Java processes. Had me worried there for a second. It’s interesting though that I immediately assumed a third party had changed something when the daily build broke. My new mantra is: when Linux goes bad on you, check the ps and check lsof before you attempt anything wackier.

I was looking yesterday about how Basic User authentication works on a servlet. It always intriguing to find out how things work under a hood and before I looked I didn’t know how this worked. To the beginner it’s not really obvious who is popping up the password box when you hit a password protected folder. It’s hardly changed since early Netscape.

I’m still looking for how you can customize the page that gets shown when you input the wrong name or password.

I have just come across and old Post-It note with an idea scrawled on it that I am going to note down, in this my backup brain.

I had the idea that all classes should implement SelfDocumenting and have a method getDocument so after a build. A tool could examine all the built classes and recreate the documentation from them. Add this in the code might make the class overlong, maybe classes should also have a companion Documentation class as well as a test class. Though, you do then get into the issue of whether some methods need to be public or package private for the sake of the documentation.

I’m looking for a free Java charting engine to display some results as webservice client to give realtime sales and stock data for our online store. The first one I came across looks pretty good:JFreeChart.

Someone must have done this before. I want to print some Java source code in order to study it but I want to pretty print the Javadoc that is in the source in a way that I can read them together. I don’t want to print the source and the JavaDoc separately. I want them together on one page printed prettily.

I know that Java VMs support optimization but I wonder when they do it. I know that some classes run faster after their first invocation but does the VM do optimization when it is idling? Excuse my loose use of the terminology, I’m just thinking out loud here…