Programming with Inner Classes in Java
Nov 8th
Inner classes are an advanced programming feature in Java. They add another dimension to the concept of Object Oriented programming by allowing objects to not only reside alongside one another, but also within one another too. In this post I’ll explain how inner classes work with the help of an example that illustrates their most common use: Swing GUI programming.
Branching and Merging with Subversion (SVN)
Nov 1st
Working in the head revision of a versioning system isn’t a great idea. It’s much better to work in a branch and to merge the changes once you’re convinced they are stable. This post demonstrates how to do this with Subversion.
How to strip accents from Strings using Java 6
Oct 23rd
I recently needed a function for stripping characters from a String in Java to make searching for words in a text simpler.
Luckily I was using Java 6 which has a new class in the java.text package that provides a really simple solution for doing this: the Normalizer.
The Normalizer class is capable of performing decomposition of [...]
Formatting the Grails RichUI AutoComplete component
Oct 22nd
The RichUI component plug-in for Grails is great! It provides a really simple means of accessing rich Ajax functionality in a Grails application. I used this plug-in recently to implement an AutoComplete text field but needed to apply some formatting to the results. This post explains how I did this.
Using the JForum SSO plug-in from Grails
Oct 19th
How to apply Single Sign On (SSO) to JForum from within a Grails application.
Secure single sign on (SSO) for JForum
Oct 19th
I recently developed a web application that used the excellent open source project JForum for its forum pages. The one thing that was missing from JForum though was a secure SSO module. In this article I’ll explain why the SSO solution bundled with JForum was not secure enough for our purposes and I’ll show you how [...]
InteliJ IDEA is now open source!
Oct 16th
IntelliJ have open sourced IDEA. What does this mean to the Java and Groovy/Grails communities?
How to update your Twitter status using Java
Oct 15th
Twitter provide a RESTful API that allows third party applications to access and use their services. In this post I’ll show you how to submit a status update using the this API from a Java application. To do this we’ll need to construct an HTTP POST request. In Java it’s not simple to do this so [...]
How to Access the Size of a Collection in a JSP Page Using JSTL-EL
Jan 9th
A common and frustrating problem that many programmers encounter when first working with JSPs is how to access the size of a Collection using the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) and the Expression Language (EL). This article discusses this problem and illustrates a best practice solution.
The Problem
The JSTL and EL greatly reduce the amount [...]
Exposing Spring Beans as JMX Managed Beans in Tomcat
Oct 13th
JMX provides a simple solution to application management. In this article, we’ll look at how Spring beans can be easily exported as a JMX MBean making their methods and properties available from a JMX client application, such as JConsole.
This technique has the following advantages:
Your Java bean’s methods can be triggered manually and interactively (great for [...]
