December 31, 2010

Revisiting Ziggy’s Book

I appeared to have stalled out on SPoE before I could finish it, so I’m flipping back to the reason for SPoE- Ziggy’s book. After taking a full year off of writing, I’m ready to revise the first of the two books. Last year I stalled out on the 3rd draft and was unable to get restarted; now I think enough time has passed to give me a fresh perspective.

December 24, 2010

Humble Bundle #2

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

December 13, 2010

SPoE: Hibernate Search and Spring 3 Integration Example

You’d think that documentation on creating a search engine for a Spring 3 MVC website would be plentiful- search boxes are on most sites these days, and it should be trivial to implement some type of search functionality in Spring MVC.Â Unfortunately, there is very little direct documentation on the subject,Â so I thought I’d write up what I did so others can benefit (and hopefully I hit enough keyword combos to have it be found).

December 11, 2010

SPoE: Loadtesting, Emails and Connections

So as I mentioned earlier, loadtesting with 70 threads failed because the default MTA on Ubuntu (exim) is limited by default to 20 concurrent connections (smtp_accept_max). Since I was using under 20% of the cpu and the bottleneck was an unconfigured mailserver, I really wanted to see where my app bottomed out, meaning I needed to fix the mail issue and keep moving. I should also mention that I switched to localhost to avoid getting myself in trouble by sending out 10,000 registration emails (when I checked the exim queue, there were 28.

December 9, 2010

SPoE: Performance and Errors Under Load

One concern I have with SPoE is that, should it get popular, it must handle traffic to a reasonable degree. Since I deal with misbehaving Java apps at work all the time, I decided to test mine and see how it behaved under load. I’m running tomcat via eclipse, trending memory usage with VisualVM, and running the test with JMeter. I decided to start small- simply registering a new account. With only 5 pages, the test flew by and gave me a false sense of security.

December 7, 2010

host change

yet again changing hosts. LE is getting too big for it’s britches.

November 28, 2010

SPoE Update: What’s New?

I’ve been slowly chugging away at SPoE in my free time here and there and have added a few bits that I’d like to share. Welcome Page – now displays recently modified Snippets and Reviews (although reviews are unimplemented). Snippets – Now have a publish flag to hide snippets from the public. If a snippet is unpublished, no one can review it.Â Snippet lists can be paginated now. Accounts – users can register, activate, edit, their accounts and change and reset their passwords.

October 13, 2010

SPoE: cleanup and status

I’ve been relatively quiet on SPoE because I’ve been focused. Users can now register, log in, log out, and view existing snippets. I’ve added a jquery navigation menu which looks slick in firefox but ugly in IE 7. I’ve also added wymEditor for adding snippets, despite the fact that it doesn’t save; I’m not sure if it’s the final choice, but it’ll work for now. The card system was a complete catastrophe;Â I was too focused on learning the framework and building out parts as I figured it out.

October 1, 2010

SPoE: Sketching in Eclipse

After my last round of mock-up tools fizzled out, I moved on to other things. Today I had a coworker inform me that Eclipse has a mock-up plugin. After giving it a spin, I have to say it’s the best of all the apps I’ve tried to use. I am amused that the solution to my problem has been sitting right under my nose this entire time. Sadly, it’s a non-free plugin, but I’m not sure what that means yet.

September 14, 2010

Mockups and Tools

IRC can be an excellent source of information, especially on the right networks, but every once in a while you have a conversation that is so disappointing you have to share it. <br></br>22:15 < morgajel> I'm using mockito to mock up a Dao, but I've run into an issue: What is the proper way to mock up chained getters, i.e. sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().createCriteria(Account.class).list()? a mock with a mock with a mock is considered bad form, so I'm not really sure how I *should* handle this.