Recommended Readings
Inbox Zero, Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail
I’ve become a big fan of Inbox Zero recently, yet I was unable to really do it because I was an Outlook user. Yes, laugh at me if it makes you happy :) Outlook sucks bigtime if you want to keep your inbox clean, and what Inbox Zero doesn’t promote is OUTBOX Zero! – which is what I do as well. In Outlook, for each mail I had to search for all mails having the same topic in order to find the sent mails as well, then delete all of them. Now, I’m a Thunderbird user, and I can view mails as threads, how cool is that? A feature I’ve always missed in Outlook, although it’s not entirely impossible to do this with Outlook, it sucks really bad. So with Thunderbird, I can delete entire threads by just one click and *bing* the inbox looks better. This requires to make reduced use of a “sent” folder of course. Now here comes Google and its GMail philosophy: “do not delete, just remove the label. The ‘all messages’ folder will serve as an archive for your messages” (this is not a real quote, it’s only meant to represent the idea). What the heck? This is absolutely contrary to the Inbox Zero principle. Thus, I’ve decided to ignore Google’s recommendation and make Thunderbird move deleted mails to the trash folder, from where I can exterminate them. Kind of disobedient, but who cares :-)
SVN – about branching and reintegrating
I recommend this article – it provides some valuable information.
JDK5 vs JDK6
Yesterday, I published an entry on our company blog about a funny finding during JDK5 to JDK6 upgrade. There might be more to come during the next couple of weeks, so if you’re interested in such stories, keep an eye on the codecentric blog :-)
Exception-Handling Antipatterns
Exception handling in Java is a very useful, yet often misunderstood mechanism. I wouldn’t call myself an exception(al) expert in this area either. While googling for something related to exception handling, I found this article today:
Tim McClune on Exception-Handling Antipatterns
Tim provides several examples of the most common mistakes or bad-coding-fails as far as exception handling is concerned. Read it! :)
Carol McDonald
I’ve been reading Carol McDonald’s Blog for some weeks now. She is a Java Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems. She has a pretty impressive career summary:
Before returning to Sun in 2007, Carol worked 2 1/2 yrs as an Architect on massive OLTP Spring/hibernate application to manage > 10 mill loans for the consumer credit division of a leading automoblile manufacturer and a leading bank. Before joining Sun the first time in 1999 Carol worked on Pharmaceutical Intranet applications for Roche in Switzerland, a Telecom Network Management Application for Digital (now HP) in France, a X.400 Email Server for IBM in Germany, and as a student intern for the National Security Agency. Carol holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, a B.S. in Geology from Vanderbilt University, and is a Sun Certified Java Architect and Java Language Programmer.
I first stumbled across her blog reading the “MySQL for developers” article, which was a really nice piece of information. Right now, she is reporting about REST using Dojo, JAX-RS and Comet – sounds very interesting. Take a look :-)
Nice article about JMeter
Back in 2007, I spent some time playing with JMeter. I created several scripted tests with data input etc. but got distracted by other topics back then. Today, George Barnett of Atlassian has published a very nice article about JMeter in the Atlassian Developer Blog. He explains how to write a test and how to create graphs from the results. He is planning to cover advanced topics in a series of articles. Read it!
codecentric blog launched
My employer, codecentric GmbH, has recently launched a Java-related weblog. Read it! :)