I am really amazed and astonished by a few updates I've been seeing on linkedin recently.

I've been working these ten last years with incredibly gifted people. You know, the kind of guys you discuss with wondering whether you yourself will ever be as good, clever and keen as them. I really think being that good is nothing to be ashamed of so let's assume I can name these guys. The very first one I remember is Thomas Beck (Geneva, Switzerland) . I've been working two years under his supervision (he was the software architect on our project) and I have learn more about the job discussing with him than I ever did reading whatever software architecture or design related book (agile, DDD, whatever). Happily I have learn a lot more since I left him yet I'm quite sure he did even more so I believe I'm still far from reaching his level of mastering of the software architecture business.
Other people I would also mention here are Sebastien Ursini, Sebastien Marc and Thomas Caprez (Geneva and Lausanne / Switzerland). I haven't seen these folks since several years for some of them yet I can still pretty clearly remember what they taught me and there's not one single day where I don't benefit from these teachings in my job.

On the other hand, just as everybody, I really had much more often the occasion to work with terrible software engineers. I principally encountered two categories.

The first one is this kind of people that went to great engineering schools or universities and assume the time they invest in their studies is well enough and exempts them from providing any little additional effort to keep learning since they graduated. These people are fools believing they're great only because of some piece of paper assessing they have once been able to learn something. I hope all my very good french colleagues won't hate me for this but I have to say that specifically french engineers are subject to this bad tendency.
Unfortunately, life doesn't make any gift to anyone and most of them are sooner or later taught the hard way how they're wrong and start kicking their buts to actually start learning the job and make some progress.

The second category is way more dangerous. This is the kind of people that sell themselves as software architects without any real software development experience. These folks read lots of books, follow lots of software architecture blogs and assume that this exempts them from building their own experience before claiming being software architects. I'm not saying reading is not good, but I am pretty sure that it is in no way comparable to experience. Unfortunately, due to poor recruitment processes one one side, and the lack of good software engineers on the market on the other side, these guys manage to find a software architect job and end up taking software architecture decisions.

I am involved in the recruitment process in my current company (just as I was in my former companies). I take care of the technical assessment. I myself am usually a nice guy (well I think) and yet I show no mercy to candidates. I am pretty well aware that a mistake I make in this process might well lead me to work with bad engineers a few months later and this is a risk I'm not willing to take at all.
I am the guy killing those people. When I see someone coming in front of me with a resume claiming several years of experience in software architecture and not able to answer correctly the very first questions I'm asking him, it usually puts me in such a bad mood that I still keep the guy for the two hours that were planned and bury him 7 feet under ground. Hopefully the guy will work on a resume a little more humble before applying to another position (in another company, needless to say).
Just a word on "answering correctly": there is usually not only one good answer to a design problem or an architectural question, neither do I expect one. But I expect the candidate at least to build a proper conceptual model of the issue I'm presenting and to be able to outline a few solutions.

Now why am I putting all this online ?

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Following the initial release of the niceideas-commons package here : niceideas-commons 1.0-alpha-0.7, The niceideas-commons 1.1-beta-0.1 is released today.

Major changes are :

• Basic relation mapping support added to the DAO framework
• More helper and utilities related to resource finding and loading
• More utilities of various kinds
• Various bug fixes

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I remember the introduction of the brand new enum type in Java 5 (1.5) was a very exciting announce. However, when I finally switched from 1.4 to 1.5 and actually tried Java's flavoured enum types, I was a bit disappointed.

Before that, I was using Josh Bloch's "Typesafe enum" pattern (effective java) for quite a long time and I didn't really see what was so much better with the new Java native enum construction. Ok, fine, there was the ability to use enum instances in switch - case statements which seemed fine, but what else ?

Besides, what I used to find great with the "typesafe enum" pattern is that it could be tricked and changed the way I wanted, for instance to be able to dynamically (at runtime) add enum instances to a specific typesafe enum class. I found it very disappointing not to be able to do the very same thing easily with the native Java enum construction.

And now you might wonder "Why the hell could one ever need to dynamically add enum values ?!?". You do, right ? Well, let's imagine this scenario:

You have a specific column in a DB table which contains various codes as values. There are more than hundred different codes actually in use in this column. Related to this, you have a business logic which performs different operations on the rows coming from this table, the actual kind of operation applied on the row depends on the value of this code. So there are chance you end up with a lot of if - elseif statements checking the actual value of the code.
I myself am allergic to using string comparison in conditions so I want to be able to map the values from this column to an enum type in Java. This way I can compare enum values instead of strings in my conditions and reduce my dependency on the format of the string value.

Now when there are more than a hundred different possible codes in the DB I really don't have any intent to define them all manually in my enum type. I want to define only the few I am actually using the Java code and let the system add the other ones dynamically, at runtime, when it (the ORM system or whatever I am using for reading the DB rows) encounters a new value from the DB.

Hence my need for dynamically added enum values.

So recently I faced this need once again and took a few hours to build a little solution which enables one to dynamically add values to a Java enum type. The solution is the following :

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I've been facing an interesting problem with string manipulation in Java lately at work. The requirement was the following :

We have a field on some screen where the user can type in a comment. The comment can have any length the user wants, absolutely any. Should he want to type in a comment of a million characters, he should be able to do so.

Now the right way to store this comment in a database is using a CLOB, a BLOB or a LONGVARCHAR or whatever feature the database natively provides to do so. Unfortunately that's not the way it was designed. Due to legacy integration needs, all these advance DB types are prohibited within our application. So the way we have to store the comment consists of using several rows with a single comment field of a maximum length of 500 characters. That means the long comment has to be split in several sub-strings of 500 characters and each of them is stored in a separate row in the DB table. The table has a counter as part of the primary key which is incremented for each new row belonging to the same comment. This way we can easily spot every row part of the same comment.

Now another problem we have is that under DB2 a field defined as VARCHAR(500) can contain 500 bytes max even though the strings are encoded in UTF-8 in the database. That means we might not be able to store 500 characters if the string contains one or more 2 bytes UTF-8 characters. Working in a french environment, this happens a lot.
So we had to write a little algorithm taking care of the splitting of the string in 500 bytes sub-strings.

The very first version of our algorithm was quite stupid and ended up in splitting the string in a quite naive way: we converted the string to a byte array following an UTF-8 encoding and split the byte array instead of the string. Then each of the 500 bytes arrays was converted back to a string before being inserted in the database.
Happily, we figured out quite soon that this doesn't work as it ends up quite often splitting the string right in the middle of a 2 bytes character. The byte arrays being then converted back to strings, the split 2 bytes character was corrupted and could not be corrected any more.

Before writing as smarter version of the algorithm which would manually test the byte length of the character right at the position of the split, we took a leap backward and wondered : "Can it be that Java doesn't offer natively a simple way to do just that ?"

And the answer is yes of course.

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CommunityBoard is a sample multi-module maven / glassfish / eclipse Java EE project.

It realizes is a little Forum / Note publishing application. Its main purpose it to act as an introducing laboratory to Java EE programming. As such the functionalities are rather limited. Yet it covers the most fundamental aspects or issues with Java EE programing in the way it show hows to :

• write entity beans with bi-directional relationship;
• use these Entity beans in EJBs (Statless session beans);
• use other EJBs in EJBs;
• use EJBs in a servlet or a JSP located in a WAR (i.e. no processing of the @EJB annotation);
• build a multi-module Java EE maven project with jars, wars, ears;
• how to write JSPs with the JSTL (Ok I am not very proud of these JSPs yet they do the job) and
• deploy a multi-module ear within Glassfish and use a container defined datasource

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I've been working a few years ago on an architectural concept for some very specific piece of software my former company had to develop. The technical challenges were huge and the field was pretty complex. In addition, the timeframe was very little and we have had to rush a lot to get it ready and prototyped in time.

In the end we screwed up ... totally. The concept was miles away from what was required and we pretty much had to start it all over. Months of work were just good enough to be thrown away with the trash.

Not used at all to such failures, I decided to take some time to understand what happened, what went wrong.

My investigations led to the following story, a pretty funny though quite common developer tale :

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Wow ... This is and will most likely be the most pompous title for a post on this blog usually focused on much more concrete stuff.

Ok let's get into this :

First what is DWR ?

DWR stands for Direct Web Remoting - Easy Ajax for Java.

DWR is a Java library that enables Java on the server and JavaScript in a browser to interact and call each other as simply as possible.

Quoting the official website :

"DWR is a RPC library which makes it easy to call Java functions from JavaScript and to call JavaScript functions from Java (a.k.a Reverse Ajax)."
Read this : http://directwebremoting.org/dwr/introduction/index.html.

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Snake is a little C++/OpenGL project which shows a snake eating apples on a two dimensional board. It really is very much like the famous Nokia phone game except the snake finds its way on its own.

No nice textures, no sweet drawings yet, the world elements are mostly simple spheres. Trivial OpenGL features such as fog, lightning and shadows are implemented though.
Oh, and the snake it quite stupid at the moment. I wrote the path finding algorithm in an hour or so and I really need to come up with something smarter.

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The company for which I am working currently is the fourth for which I am a Java developer / architect. I am mostly programming in the Java language for quite a long time now, and I have to admit that I have my way of doing things and my little habits. I know a large amount of java libraries and use almost always the same sets for the same needs, with little variations.

But even with the very large set of java libraries available out there, there are a few classes or utilities that I keep re-developing myself again and again each time I start a new job. Not that most of these utilities are not already available somewhere but I dislike the implementations, or want something simple, or anything else. A few of these classes though are really unique by nature.

Well, lately I found myself tired of re-writing the same sets of classes again and again so I wrote them once more ... once and for all. I made from them an open-source and freely available project released under GNU LGPL license so that I can freely use them in my current company as well as for any future employer I might be working for.
Having done this I thought I could share them here.

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I'm working on a java application which makes an extensive usage of hibernate's relation mapping system. The later offers several ways to define association mapping. We mostly use many-to-one relation declarations. The problem comes from the database. It's a pre-relational, pre-transactional, legacy database running on a prehistorical IBM zSeries host. The data on this database is very often dumb or corrupted. The lack of a proper referential integrity support and the foolish design make us end up quite often following non-existent relations.

Happily, hibernate provides a semantic which allow the application not to bother when a relation is missing, just as the legacy app does. This semantic is the not-found="ignore" parameter on the relation definition.

However, the usage of this semantic resumes to open very wide the doors to oblivion.

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I'm looking for a new phone. The 3 models I found appealing are the ones mentioned in the title of this post. I'm posting here the criterions I ran through when looking at these phones and the reasons that make me choose one or the other.

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Functional programming addicts,

I'm following an Haskell programming course. It was a short course, though we ran pretty much completely through the book "Programming in Haskell" by Graham Hutton. My personal view on this is that Haskell is a great language which offers a concision rarely reached by other languages, even other functional ones. The book sucks though. It's follows a way too much theoretical approach which makes it quite cumbersome and not interesting at all.

I've been told though that Hutton's book is the reference for Haskell programming. On my side I really found the various tutorials I could find online much more useful than the thorough lecture of this book I've been pretty much forced to follow.

Anyway, as usual I made a nifty summary on this book, so help yourself :

Haskell summary

The summary stands on three A4 pages and should serve as a reference for those who are initiated to Haskell programming and seek for a quick programming reference.

Happy reading, HTH

Guys,
I have written a quite amazing summary on the book "Introduction to the theory of computation" by Michael Sipser. It's definitely not a replacement for the book itself as it lacks the basic explanation required to understand the presented concepts. But if you have read this book and you're looking for a short summary standing on 7 A4 pages, there you have it.

The summary focuses on the most important concepts presented by the book and holds the mandatory illustrations going along the various concepts. Well there isn't much more to say about it, so if you have read that book, check out this summary. You should be pretty amazed to see that pretty much everything actually is in it ... in less than 7 pages.

It's worth to mention though that it's quite a big file (3.8 Mb).

Summary Theoretical Computer Science

Good reading, HTH

This is mostly a place for a few thoughts about technology, software engineering or generally computer sciences I want to share. There have been a lot of hot topics in my techno-life lately and I felt a blog is the right way to keep track of them. Yet that's far from being the only thing I will use this blog for, there are times when I just want to shout at something in a very public way or, you know, things that thrill me or piss me off or whatever. And I need a place to keep my resume or so.