prag·mat·ic - dealing or concerned with facts or actual occurrences; practical.

How to run a method 10 minutes after startup

2011-09-21T13:53:00.003+02:00

I had this use-case where I had to run a method 10 minutes after the tomcat start-up, but it should run only once. My first idea was to simply use a @Scheduled task, like all other tasks we have and just run it once. The problem is that there is no way to use annotation based scheduling and run a task only once. So I came up with the following solution: @Service public class SomeServiceImpl

Minimizing downtime on Amazon AWS

2011-09-21T11:42:00.000+02:00

Last week I wrote an article for Peecho about our infrastructure, here is a snippet and the link to the entire article: As we argued in another article, being fast is the secret to scalability. Automation makes you speedy. It helps ruling out as many commodity tasks as possible. So, we decided to share a few tricks about increasing your uptime with automation. Downtime is bad. It moves your

Scalability on a shoestring

2011-09-08T14:35:00.003+02:00

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about Peecho together with Sander Nagtegaal for Highscalability.com. We are a start-up, so the most important thing that we considered before we started was simply money - or rather, the lack thereof. Although we required some serious firepower, the fully operational system should cost no more than a few hundred bucks a month. This article explains how

S3 File upload with Java and Spring's RestTemplate

2010-11-18T16:19:00.000+01:00

At Peecho, we use many of the Amazon AWS services. For example, we use EC2 for our virtual machines and S3 for all of our storage. Because of the scalable nature of S3, theoretically, we could serve an infinite amount of users uploading files to our platform without stressing our machines or infrastructure at all. The only drawback is that connected apps will have to upload their files directly

Eclipse open implementation & open interface.

2010-11-11T15:33:00.001+01:00

Tired to always use CTR+T on a method to select the first implementation (even if there is only 1) with your keys and open it? There is a plugin for this: Get it from the eclipse update site (feature: implementors): Alternatively, use the Eclipse update site at: http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/updates/ Or from the homepage of the project itself: http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/

Check if url exists.

2010-10-27T16:34:00.002+02:00

Lets do a quick blogpost about something that really isn't that hard, but i've never done it before, so some sample code could speed up other people that want to do the same. If there are better ways to do this, please let me know. The idea here is to check if a file on the web exists before actually downloading it, lets say a PDF file. Someone submits a url to a PDF file, but you want to process

The ISWFContext and Embedded fonts in the Text Layout Framework.

2010-03-19T09:21:00.010+01:00

In our product we are making intense use of the new Text Layout Framework. This framework is still in beta, and with beta versions come problems. This week after updating to a new version, our embedded fonts stopped working all of the sudden. I really digged deep in this one and tried to narrow it down as much as possible. The problem occurs when using a mixture of embedded fonts, the TLF

Embedding fonts, Unicode ranges and the horizontal tabular character...

2010-01-06T09:56:00.006+01:00

I ran into this very strange bug in the flash player while working on a project. The problem appeared when using flex 4's TLF (text layout framework) with embedded fonts (using cff). In other projects I added the unicode ranges to the css file like lots other blogs describe (like: http://blog.flexexamples.com/2007/08/07/specifying-certain-unicode-ranges-for-embedded-fonts/), you do want to set

Java, ImageMagick and Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command)

2009-12-01T12:11:00.008+01:00

Today I needed a to show a 50MB EPS file in the flash player on the client. I chose ImageMagick (a c++ image manipulation library) to convert the image to a jpeg because there really aren't any good java libraries who can do this kind of stuff without draining all of your resources on the server.ImageMagick wasn't hard to install at all, the guide on http://www.imagemagick.org is pretty clear and

Flex Accessibility Option

2009-11-16T14:37:00.005+01:00

A couple of days ago I updated to the latest nightly build version of the flex sdk (4.0.0.11686) because of some bugs I encountered. After updating my code everything seemed to run smoothly and the bugs I previously had where fixed in the nightly build.After a run through our build server and a deploy to the test environment, the application seemed to have stopped working. The only clou I got was

10 steps to improve your Vista installation

2009-05-16T12:55:00.007+02:00

Finally, I switched to Vista, I decided to give it a try. I never used Vista before, but I heard (a lot) of complaints from co-workers who had all sorts of problems with Vista, mostly performance troubles. I did some research on the internet and tweaked my Vista install in a pretty simple way and greatly enhanced performance and the overall annoyance level of Vista, even without disabling the

Remote object reference pooling in Flex

2009-04-07T12:29:00.002+02:00

Ever tried to compare object by reference when using remote objects and failed? Or wondered why you have so many instances of the same object in memory.. This blogpost will describe why and when this happens, and offers a solution including source code. The problem appears when building RIA applications based on the domain driven design principle. Typically you will have a domain layer in your

Scroll behavior in flex

2009-02-05T11:19:00.002+01:00

Most of the sites we build are using textarea's to display multiple lines of text. However all scroll functionality is handled internally by the TextArea component (or more exact the underlying TextField). Which means if you have a page that scrolls and you have a TextArea component somewhere, the scrollwheel won't work if you have your mouse directly above the text in the TextArea.Fortunately

A simple bamboo notifier tray icon

2008-12-20T13:22:00.007+01:00

We build all our software using the continuous integration tool Bamboo. After searching the internet for a while I still couldn't find a simple tray icon notifier for bamboo, so I decided to create one myself. You can find the project located at: http://bamboo-notifier.googlecode.comBamboo notifier is an Adobe AIR application that runs in the system tray on various platforms, it notifies you of

Using the flex framework RSL's in Flex 3 using Ant

2008-11-29T19:53:00.003+01:00

Using RSLs will save you over 300kb of your swf filesize. Flexbuilder has build in features to compile your swf using the rsl libraries, but offcourse we are building on our build server using ant. Using the flex frameworks RSL's from ant is easier said then done. Appearantly this Ant mxmlc target does not implement this feature yet. This feature is shipped with the next flex version (Flex 4

Some thoughts about CMS, Webdav and SVN integration

2008-11-29T18:50:00.004+01:00

Most projects use some kind of content management system to create and edit content for our applications. In this post I want to share some ideas on a Subversion and Webdav based content management system. Please read on after the break!There are a lot of projects written in java with some frontend technology like JSF, Flex or AJAX. Most of these web-applications need some sort of storage

Smoothing your images in flex

2008-11-27T18:02:00.005+01:00

Do you have jagged edges in your image when you show an image in flex?There is a solution!Using the Image tag in mxml to show your images you can set a property calling 'smoothing', when you set this property your images will look much better in your browser. The thing is this property is not available from mxml. They way to go to set this property is as follows:<mx:Image id="img" source="

JFall presentation slides online

2008-11-13T22:02:00.003+01:00

I gave this presentation on 12 November at the JFall organised by the NLJug (The Dutch Java User Group). The JFall conference is the largest java conference in the Netherlands and visited by about 1000+ people. The talk is about different types of frameworks available for flex; think about ioc, mvc or test frameworks. And the different frameworks out there like cairngorm, puremvc and prana. The

Moved to a new blog

2008-11-13T21:39:00.003+01:00

I decided to setup a new more personal and more professional looking blog, from now on I will only post to this blog. I will try (can't promise anything ;)) to post a little something once a week to keep the blog updated and feed the world with some hopefully helpfull posts to the developer community.

As3 compiler bug

2008-10-29T11:53:00.000+01:00

written by Marcel PanseI was refactoring some code today in my flex as3 project and ran into a very strange compiler bug. What i did was selecting a bunch of code from a switch statement en pasting it in some other method. When i came to the point the entire switch statement was empty i forgot to remove the statement. As i continued refactoring and came to the point that it actually compiled, but

Bamboo Build Details Ant Task

2008-09-24T16:19:00.000+02:00

What is it?I build an ant task to get status information about bamboo builds. The task is build for and tested on bamboo 1.2.4. The current features include:• Getting latest build number and latest build status (by build plan)• Getting the status from any build (by build plan and build number)Why is it usefulAs a developer I want to have fully automated deployment on my environments. I can

Flex not working properly in Google Chrome

2008-09-09T12:51:00.001+02:00

For some reason flex isn't working in google chrome when u use the history enabled methods. It seems like google chrome automatically redirects back to the previous page when you change the location url in the browser. For example try www.parleys.com with your google chrome browser. Try navigation around and you will see you can't get away from the 'home' page of parleys..Chrome is build upon

Announcing project Scrumbox: Opensource Scrum project management tool.

2008-09-08T16:32:00.000+02:00

At our company we do all our projects using Scrum. Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with agile software development. A lot of projects use for example JIRA for their issue tracking. JIRA just isn't the best tool when you work with Scrum. Don't get me wrong, JIRA is a great tool, just not the tool for the job. There are some JIRA plugins to generate

Hibernate annotations: Reversing the bidirectional relationship

2008-07-15T12:27:00.000+02:00

written by Marcel PanseMaking a bidirectional relationship in hibernate using annotations is easy. Just make a ManyToOne at one side and a OneToMany at the other. Use the mappedBy property to make the relationship bidirectional. I thought this means when editing the Collection side and saving this collection side, that hibernate would update the foreign key automatically at the other table.For

Flex: setting unicode ranges when using a TrueType Font saves over 300kb

2008-07-13T14:45:00.000+02:00

written by Marcel PanseThere are a few ways of using fonts in a flex application. The default way of doing it in flex is using 'device fonts'. This means flex will not embed any fonts into you swf file, but it will use the font on the clients computer instead. Flex will try to find a font on his computer that is the closest to the font you configured in you css file.The following example