September 2012
1 post
1 tag
Top-down or bottom-up architecture? →
Slides of my talk at the Agile Software Architecture Symposium 2012 in Elst.
April 2012
2 posts
5 tags
Exploring Kotlin, writing a simple spell checker
In my last blog I talked about exploring Kotlin, a JVM language in development by JetBrains. In this blog I’ll walk through a larger piece of Kotlin code.
Spell checker The program we’re talking about is a simple spell checker. It reads a dictionary of words from a file (/usr/share/dict/words) into a set. Then it reads a sentence from stdin and checks if every word is in the...
5 tags
Exploring Kotlin
I’ve been exploring Kotlin recently. Kotlin is a new statically typed JVM language and was announced about half a year ago. This month JetBrains released its first milestone candidate which I decided to have a closer look at.
First of Kotlin is still in its early stages. A lot of things work pretty well (I’m especially impressed by the IDE support) but there are still numerous issues....
March 2012
2 posts
5 tags
NoSQL techday →
Recap of the techday that I organized last week at Avisi.
3 tags
Disabling caching in Apache Shindig →
I’m currently working on a project that involves using Apache Shindig. As you may know Shindig relies heavily on caching. While generally a good thing caching is a pain during development. See my post at the Avisi blog on how to disable this in Shindig.
January 2012
2 posts
8 tags
Putting Talend Open Studio projects under version...
When you are working on OS X - I’m not sure if other OS’es have the same issue - your Talend Open Studio workspace is located under
/Applications/TOS-<version>/TalendOpenStudio-macosx-carbon.app/Contents/MacOS/workspace
That’s right the workspace is placed inside TalendOpenStudio.app, which isn’t a very convenient place. Although Talend Open Studio is based on...
2 tags
Healthy RSS addiction
I’ve been a long term fan of RSS feeds. It’s ideal when following tech news. In the past I used to read my feeds on a computer - using a mail client - but nowadays I prefer my iPad.
The following screenshot from Google Reader shows my addiction over the past year.
Hmmm a little over 7 tech articles/blogs a day, that sounds about right. Although… this doesn’t include my...
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Has Facebook silently killed Open Streams in favor...
I was looking at the JSON Activity Stream specification today. Facebook is listed as one of the parties to support this format. Indeed I’ve found a blog post written in April 2009 that confirms Facebook has implemented JSON activity streams. Facebook calls it Open Streams.
In the meantime all references to the Open Streams developer documentation have been removed. Looking at the current...
November 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Integration testing RESTful services in Java →
Currently I’m using the build-in HTTP server in Java 6 for (integration) testing RESTful services. Although this has the advantage of adding zero dependencies, the API of REST-assured looks cleaner. Something to keep in mind when you need to test (many) services.
2 tags
The Architecture of Open Source Applications →
This book is available for free online under the Creative Commons license.
2 tags
5 tags
Pretty-printing JSON and XML on Mac OSX
Like my colleagues at Avisi I’m an avid OSX user. One of the reasons I like OSX is it gives you the power of Unix right under your fingertips while still providing a nice user interface.
Now suppose you’re working on RESTful services and you need to verify or debug some JSON output. Digging through an unformatted JSON string can be a real pain. To make a JSON string human...
5 tags
Interesting extension of OpenSocial beyond web... →
Xobni offers an OpenSocial container inside Outlook. One example of a useful gadget (at least one that I can relate to) is the JIRA gadget.
2 tags
October 2011
4 posts
6 tags
IntelliJ IDEA and Maven: M2_HOME trouble
There’s an annoying issue when using Maven from IntelliJ IDEA on OSX. You might encounter the following error when building a Maven project.
No valid Maven installation found. Either set the home directory in the configuration dialog or set the M2_HOME environment variable on your system.
The issue is well known and there are various solutions to the problem. The trouble with some is...
2 tags
Amazon Web Services Architecture Center →
Take a look at the references architectures in case your wondering how the different AWS services fit together.
“Extract until you can’t extract any further.”
– Robert C. Martin, better known as Uncle Bob, talking about (refactoring) functions.
First post
Welcome to my new blog or more accurately “tumblelog”. Here I’ll occasionally share my experiences as a software engineer. Themes include Java, agile, open source, architecture and pretty much anything in between.
