I was recently asked to help out on a project with the aim of recommending how to implement some additional event handling functionality. I had a look through the source code and suggested a change to an existing interface implementation, plus a few other bits and pieces; all pretty straightforward or so I thought. Later, one of the developers said ...

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog saying that developers learn new languages because they’re cool. I still stand by this assertion because the thing about Java 8 is it’s really cool. Whilst the undoubted star of the show is the addition of Lambdas and the promotion of functions to first class variables, my current favourite is default methods. ...

I’ve recently been following the #isTDDDead debate between Kent Beck (@kentbeck), David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh), and Martin Fowler (@martinfowler) with some interest. I think that it’s particularly beneficial that ideas, which are often taken for granted, can be challenged in a constructive manner. That way you can figure out if they stand up to scrutiny or fall down flat on ...

I’ve recently been taking look at Java 8 and have got hold of “Java 8 In Action” published by Manning. The first thing that struck me is how one of Java 8’s unique sales propositions is functional programming; functions are now first class variables, you can pass them around your code as you would an int or a String. This ...

If you’ve read the previous five blogs in this series, you’ll know that I’ve been building a Spring application that runs periodically to check a whole bunch of error logs for exceptions and then email you the results. Having written the code and the tests, and being fairly certain it’ll work the next and final step is to package the ...

My last blog on Spring’s support for Matrix Variables concentrated on explaining what they were and why you’d want to use them. Having sorted out the what and the why, this blog is all about the how and how you use them. I also gave several examples of Matrix URIs and so, it seems good idea to demonstrate some code ...

Spring 3.2 introduced support for processing something called ‘Matrix Variables’ and probably like most developers, I’ve never heard of them. So, after some research, this blog is my understanding of what they are and what you can do with them. As usual, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. When I first read about them a whole bunch ...

It seems that I’m finally getting close to the end of this series of blogs on Error Tracking using Spring and for those who haven’t read any blogs in the series I’m writing a simple, but almost industrial strength, Spring application that scans for exceptions in log files and then generates a report. From the first blog in the series, ...

If you’ve read any of the previous blogs in this series, you may remember that I’m developing a small but almost industrial strength application that searches log files for exceptions. You may also remember that I now have a class that can contain a whole bunch of results that will need sending to any one whose interested. This will be ...