How to convert legacy code into OSGi bundles at runtime

Knowing what a proxy is is good. Knowing what you can do with one is even better.

I became a bit of a JavaScript fanboy while writing Simply JavaScript last year, so it was especially thrilling to get to sit down with Douglas Crockford—possibly the world’s biggest JavaScript fanboy—and geek out on our mutual love of JavaScript at Web Directions South 2008 a couple of weeks ago.

Stale caches causing inconsistent user experience and response times? Yahoo developers proposed an extension (stale-while-revalidate) to address this problem. We implement a proof of concept Ruby caching server for this pattern.

On this post Joe Stagner introduces his experiences with Aggiorno, Artinsoft's latest project which automates a lot of time consuming tasks for web developers in the form of web refactorings. From the post "[aggiorno] takes your web page and fixes errors, removes the use of deprecated constructs, restructures your syntax for XHTLM compliance and more."

At some point as a front-end developer I think we all have to draw a line for HTML validation. Strict validation is not a holy grail you need or can crusade for. It improves your code but has also it’s downside. For example target:_blank is no longer available, you need a javascript snippet to get around it. And when you get there, what’s the point? Your template no longer really validate. The target attribute doesn’t validate because you can’t choose for the user to open a link in another window, but you decided to do it anyway!!!

Adobe has released a new vector graphics specification for Flex called FXG, but some feel they should have kept with the standard SVG spec and extended it, instead of muddying the water.

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee.

I've often wondered if it was possible to use Ajax to reload the main content of a web application without reloading the header, menu and footer. SiteMesh allows you to move these common elements to a decorator that gets wrapped around each page.

In response to another blog post -- an approach to exception handling: when exceptions (checked or unchecked) should be thrown, caught, logged, wrapped, swallowed, or allowed to pass through. These aren't really hard & fast rules, but more the approach I take to these questions.

Trying to figure out the best ways to handle exceptions, which mostly seems to be context-sensitive. Checked/Unchecked? Swallow or re-throw? Are there any rules-of-thumb to always follow?

The guys over at Artinsoft just released a refresh to their aggiorno web assistant tool, from their website "aggiorno represents a new generation of tools for software developers that uses advanced transformational technologies, for turning any existing website into a valid, findable, accessible standards compliant one"... it really is a great tool and totally worth it to check it out.

Now that the EJB 3.1 Public Draft is available, here's a list of its main ease-of-use improvements and features, along with their corresponding sections in the spec. This should make it easier to quickly find some of the most relevant material.

Jean Deruelle, Project Lead of Mobicents blogs that Mobicents is the first Open Source SIP Servlets 1.1 server to pass the TCK. JBoss is now the only vendor to have implemented both the SIP Servlets, and JSLEE specifications.

Corporate rivals have temporarily sunk their differences to find ways to fine-tune the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a variety of popular dynamic languages.

Pet peeve time: screaming technical inaccuracies in blog posts do a huge disservice to the root problem being discussed. If you're going to discuss hijacking DNS errors for the purposes of advertising, then please do so - don't call them DNS "error pages" (there are no such things) or refer to them as "404 errors".

Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows, the founders of Kaazing talk of the need for two way communication and compare it with established request-response and Ajax models of communication. They also touch on how WebSocket can be used in JavaEE applications and its impact on existing architecture and code.

Coding Standards

I believe that the AJAX/DHTML model is broken...at least for widespread adoption. Here I explain why lack of standards and huge fragmentation is killing widespread adoption of browser based rich UIs.

As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features.

A small writeup about how to create CSS sprites for the ones struggling with figuring out why their top and left coordinates are malfunctioning, repetitions isn't working and so on. Pretty detailed and easy explained I feel, though then again I don't get to have an opinion I guess ... ;)

Today we would like to announce that WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3. A while back, we posted that we scored 100/100 and matched the reference rendering. Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering, we have passed the third condition, smooth animation on reference hardware.

I am writing this article as a sequel to the Measuring Programming Progress By Lines Of Code article. Let me please talk about another common metric - measuring the amount of extra hours a software developer has done.

Bjarne shares his perspective on everything from his favorite toy growing up, to his dream about the future of computing, to his greatest fears about how multicore technology might evolve.

Invitation to Jaroslav Tulach's API Design Fest!