Nirav's Contemplations

Future of a Java programmer

2010-05-01T12:34:00.006-04:00

As a long time Java only programmer professionally, I have been pondering about how things are changing around me as a Java programmer. Ever since I remember I had no choice but to use subset of C++ dialect (Java lang) with an extremely rich class library and ecosystem (Java platform). In last few years there has been a drastic shift in number of languages targeting JVM. For example: dynamic (

Eclipse Refactoring for legacy code

2010-03-07T12:58:00.004-05:00

It has been quite sometime since I wrote anything on this blog, twitter probably spoiled me. If you are following me on twitter, you probably noticed announcement of a small eclipse plugin for automated refactoring for Legacy Code. Before few months, I wrote an LTK refactoring mainly in Scala (yes, eclipse plugin in Scala language) to forward static method calls in a Java method to an

Real Refactoring

2009-08-13T21:00:00.012-04:00

A lot of really good material has been written about refactoring. However, just like a lot of other things in software development, refactoring is also victimized by becoming the buzzword implying 'rewrites' and every other thing that is not refactoring. A lot of people really don't understand what they mean when they refer to 'refactoring', this post aims to provide a systematic explanation of

Scala v/s Java arrays

2009-05-12T22:01:00.010-04:00

Here's a Java puzzler for the curious (and a good interview question too!). Given a array merge method below, what will be the output of following program? public class Generics { static class A { } static class B extends A { } public static void main(String[] args) { A[] copy = merge(new B[] { new B() }, new A[] { new A() }, new B[1]); System.out.println(copy.length != 1); } static Z[] merge(

Fork/Join Concurrency with Scala Actors

2009-05-05T22:23:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wondered why there are no special frameworks to address concurrency in a Java based application? Considering Java's rich (NIH) ecosystem, I do wonder why I have to write same old state management code while introducing even a small amount of concurrency in Java application.The reason why I think it is almost impossible to consider concurrency as an aspect in arbitrary application

How Scala's pattern matching can replace Visitors

2009-04-21T22:29:00.015-04:00

The primary motivation of Visitor design pattern is to separate model traversal from operational logic. A visitable model takes the responsibility of model navigation while the behavior is defined by arbitrary visitors. In this post I will try to explain problems associated with Visitors in general and how Scala's pattern matching feature can eliminate such problems cleanly.Consider a simplified

Your Language is not SLOW!

2009-04-16T21:38:00.003-04:00

Do you really give a thought when you say "Ruby is slow or Python is slow"? Just because Twitter moved their back end messaging to JVM doesn't necessarily make Ruby any slower than it already was. If a language runtime can't handle concurrent load or long running processes it is not a limitation of the language!This is dejavu for me as Java was considered "a slow language" back in 1.1 days when

Scala: First impression

2009-04-09T22:21:00.004-04:00

If you are curious enough about programming languages then you probably have heard about Scala - the 'statically typed' functional and object oriented language. Scala is the new sun rising to balance 'the burn factor' between functional and object oriented schools of thoughts.Unlike what this paper suggests[pdf], The reason why I think Scala exists is because functional v/s object oriented

OPath ported for Java object model

2009-03-24T23:04:00.010-04:00

I have been thinking about alternate uses of OPath I created for EVars plug-in. And it occurred to me that I can very well use it for my unit testing (which involves pretty complex insurance object model) and for things like JSPs where I really hate to write ten lines of Java code just to display some value.So I wrote a port of OPath for Java object model (less than 200 lines of real code).

EVars Update

2009-03-22T22:58:00.005-04:00

Based on the awesome feedback, I have been doing some offline development on EVars plug-in lately. I have added some basic documentation on wiki. Installation is now easy, let P2 do the work to install/update the plug-in (it's a struggle to host update-site with google code).One of the most exciting feature (Which I can't stop talking about) is value based filtering. Now you can have all the

Improve your debugging speed with EVars Eclipse plugin

2009-03-10T19:37:00.012-04:00

Update: Added alternate link to screen-cast. Workaround to start plug-inI have been debugging a lot lately which included open source libraries, closed source web-service engine and parts of closed source application server (WebLogic). During this painful debug-fest I felt a strong need for several features missing in Eclipse (NetBeans as well, for that matter) . Debugging closed applications is

Two types of Architects

2009-03-09T20:05:00.000-04:00

I am amused by these creatures called 'Architects' in software development. In recent phenomena, They are available under numerous headings such as 'Software architect', 'Solution architect', 'Front end architect', 'Enterprise architect' and so on. To me, in what they really do, there are only two broad types of architects. My brain timed out while guessing fancy names for them so their

Formal grammars, parsing etc. for dummies

2009-01-30T18:49:00.015-05:00

I thought it may be useful to post summaries of what I have been reading recently. In this post, I will try to explain some basic grammar and parsing stuff in as simple way as I can (omitting all the academic complacency) .A grammar defines a language with a set of rules of type x -> y, where x is left hand side of the rule and y is right hand side of the rule. x and y can be either expandable or

Mutual recursion fun with Eclipse Debug model

2009-01-21T19:22:00.012-05:00

I rarely come across real-world data structures which are inherently mutually recursive (a.k.a. Daisy chain recursion in CS literature). Recently, while writing a plug-in related to eclipse.debug, I came across this interesting data structure. Source Eclipse.orgObserve the IVariable ←→ IValue relationship (although most

Introducing PyConsole!

2008-12-05T23:37:00.004-05:00

I have been pretty inactive this year, unlike what I planned (yawn, haven't heard from DLTK since June either) . I started learning Python earlier this year and felt the need of an embedded python shell inside Eclipse. This was something PyDev is missing [Edit: Simone pointed out that PyDev already has this neat feature, I was late to discover it] as compared to other python tools in Linux such

Productive keyboard shortcuts for Eclipse Editors

2008-08-16T14:35:00.008-04:00

I've seen very few developers using true power of Eclipse editors, so I thought of listing few very handy shortcuts that can significantly improve your source editing and navigation speed with Eclipse.1. Ctrl + J / Ctrl + Shift + J : Inline search, meaning you can type on the fly to search text in current editor. You can use Up/Down arrow keys to navigate between matching text fragment in forward

Synchronizing client requests using Ajax

2008-08-06T11:08:00.005-04:00

Before few months I was dealing with a problem where I needed to synchronize the server call sequence on browser. The problem was something like this: Client code will open new window navigating to a different page, but that should happen only after post on current page. The link that new window was opening needed to be server synchronized because of database updates etc. on server. Being

What's wrong with HP Quality Center?

2008-08-05T17:00:00.006-04:00

This entry is rant so you might just want to skip it.HP Quality Center (formerly Mercury) is a, how so amusingly called, web-based test management tool. You will find a lot of marketing information if you ask Google, most of which is irrelevant and may only have 1-800 number for support; because they know when you are looking for it on web, you are in trouble and no one can help you.

How to: Always eagerly load objects from database with Hibernate 3 (without changing configuration xmls)

2008-04-24T15:40:00.007-04:00

So it was getting annoying to debug my app. with Hibernate 3 for it's 'lazy load everything by default' feature. Every time I wanted to see what's the value of some collection I will see these weird CGLIB proxy members lurking in debug views.CGLIB$CALLBACK_0 org.hibernate.proxy.pojo.cglib.CGLIBLazyInitializer@9be3aaclass$net$sf$cglib$proxy$InvocationHandler interface

Unusual tip to find refactoring hot-spot

2008-03-13T09:19:00.004-04:00

Disclaimer: This post contains generalization based on my experience, it may or may not be applicable in every state of code-base resembling this situation.Most of you have probably been through this list of smells to refactoring. In Recent refactoring sessions I discovered a new (at least unusually new) way to identify "hot-spot" needing refactoring.This might be in turn related to some other

How to find which jar file contains your class at 'runtime'

2008-03-04T16:39:00.002-05:00

If you ever wanted to know which jar your class belongs, or wanted to access the meta-information from that jar file (such as certs from Manifest.mf etc.), here's how you can do it. public URL getJarURL() { URL clsUrl = getClass().getResource(getClass().getSimpleName() + ".class"); if (clsUrl != null) { try { URLConnection conn = clsUrl.openConnection();

Six reasons why you should know internals of your IDE

2008-02-25T20:44:00.005-05:00

May be this is overwhelmingly obvious to geeks, but I am going to describe it nonetheless. This might not significantly impress non-developers or the people and programmers (yes, they are different) who can't describe the word 'tooling'. A developer's productivity is highly dependent on the tools they use, whether it's a fancy big fat IDE platform or an editor as abstemious as VI.Apparently, the

State of Eclipse based Python Development Tools

2008-02-12T18:39:00.000-05:00

For starters, Python Interpreter console isn't a bad place for trying hands on the language. But if you plan on building larger programs with it you will need a good development environment, There are plenty of integrated development environments for Python today. Most of them are freely available open source projects, some have specialized support for GUI building while some are general

Climbing the Python hill

2008-02-11T09:01:00.000-05:00

Finally I have started working on new year's resolution. As a part of it, I'm learning a dynamic language called Python.There are several reasons why I'm a new Python convert. One of them is not because blogosphere keeps intimidating Java programmers that they are writing crap. And I've honest sympathy for those who hold the assumption that Java is dead and other strangling naive opinions like

How to Auto Increment version (build id) with Ant

2008-02-06T16:25:00.000-05:00

For those who are still stuck with manual ant builds, this tiny little tip will tell you how to auto increment the version number with each Ant build. Follow the steps:1. Create a file say build.number (or change the name to one which gives you pride)2. Add the following target to your build.xml file, change entry key to whatever you want the property name to be:<target name="