Alef Arendsen

Alumni
Blog posts by Alef Arendsen

Adding an Atom view to an application using Spring's REST support

Engineering | March 16, 2009 | ...

In Spring 3.0, Spring MVC will be augmented with REST support. This post describes how to use the REST support to implement an AtomView on top of a simple sample application. Follow this step-by-step process to see how easy it is to implement an AtomView on top of a simple application with the new REST support in Spring MVC.

Step 1: Download the application skeleton

Attached to this blog entry, near the bottom, you will find a simple download that holds a skeleton for a web application. Inside, you will find all Spring 3.0 binaries needed for this application, plus a few extras needed for the Atom functionality. The Spring binaries are based on a nightly build and might be replaced with the final builds once Spring 3.0 has gone final.

Next, load up the project in Eclipse, using the 'Import > Import Existing Projects into Workspace' wizard (from the File menu). The application is a simple Eclipse Dynamic Web Project with all the infrastructure for Spring MVC setup. So if you are familiar to Spring MVC…

Next Amsterdam Java Meetup - March 13th

Engineering | February 24, 2009 | ...

Due to the extensive travel schedule of yours truly, we haven't had a meet up since last September. It's been almost half a year, so it's about time for another one.

But, before we move on, I'd like to make point out a new Google Group that we have set up, to keep you posted about this. I received a lot of requests to set up a mailing list over the past few years, so from now on, the main place to keep an eye on, for new Java Meetup dates, is the Java Meetup Google Group. Sign up there to get the dates delivered right to your inbox.

Okay, on to the details for the next meetup:

  • When: March 13th 2009
  • Where: De Jaren - Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam (map, below)
  • Time: starting 5.30pm
  • What: drinks and chats, about... well, everything

From Central…

Amsterdam Java Meetup - September 12th

Engineering | August 20, 2008 | ...

Now that the holiday season (at in the Netherlands that is) has almost ended, I thought it would be time for another Amsterdam Java Meetup. So, we reserved the good-old Jaren in the Nieuwe Doelenstraat again, for having a few (paid-for) drinks with fellow Java developers and everybody else that wants to join in.

We're doing this in the same week as the Core AOP course, held in Amsterdam, which is quite convenient for me, since now I'm sure I will be in town as opposed to some of the other meetups where I couldn't be present myself.

Again, the location is the same as last time. As usual…

Runtime Error Analysis in the SpringSource Tool Suite

Engineering | April 14, 2008 | ...

Three weeks ago, the SpringSource Tool Suite was released. Christian, in charge of this product blogged about it already and we also have a webinar available for those of you that want to get up to speed with all of the functionality it currently offers. In this entry, I wanted to highlight the runtime error reporting functionality specifically.

When I'm programming, sometimes, the console window shows dozens of stack traces due to some error I've caused. Sometimes, I'm lucky and the stack trace looks familiar. If so, then the problem is probably easy to solve. Sometimes however, the…

Q2 Amsterdam Java Meetup - May 23rd 2008

Engineering | April 08, 2008 | ...

It's been a while... for the Amsterdam Java Meetup that is. I've been traveling a lot and haven't been able to organize another meetup past quarter. But here we go again: the (almost) quarterly Amsterdam Java Meetup with free drinks (or at least, the first few rounds) will be hosted in grand-cafe de Jaren in Amsterdam (see below for more info on the location) on the 23rd of May. You can expect many Java devs (usually between 50 and 80 people turn up), technical as well as non-technical discussions and of course, the latest gossip in the Dutch Java industry. We'd love to hear from people from…

Spring Dependency Injection & Java 5 (including slides and code)

Engineering | March 18, 2008 | ...

I'm writing this as I'm on my way to Cairo. We're flying just West of Italy and I have clear view on the Italian coast line, with its blue waters and waves gently moving towards shore. It must be nice down there now. I'm heading to Cairo for a meeting of the Egyptian User Group, organized by Ahmed Hashim, who no doubt will have done an excellent job, I'm sure of that. I'll be presenting on Spring with the theme this time being Dependency Injection, type safety and Java 5. Yesterday (March 14th that is), I did almost the same presentation at the Profict Wintercamp in Loenen, NL for an audience…

Capturing failures and system state (part I)

Engineering | January 07, 2008 | ...

At The Spring Experience, I hosted a session various aspects. One of them was the Hibernate synchronization aspect that I described last week. Another was an aspect capable of capturing first failures and system state, sometimes called First-Failure Data Capture (FFDC). I hosted this session to show off some aspects that are very useful, but that people might not have come across in practice yet. I often hear people asking about aspects other than logging, tracing, transaction management and security. The Hibernate synchronization aspect and the FFDC aspect are nice examples I think.

Introduction

The objective of FFDC is to capture as much information about the current state of the system when an error occurs. The following entry explains how this aspect works and how you can use in your own applications.

Let's…

Before a JDBC operation, flush the Hibernate Session (includes TSE example code)

Engineering | January 04, 2008 | ...

Mixing code in one and the same transaction that uses an Object-Relational Mapper with code that doesn't, can cause issues with data not being available in the underlying database when it should be. Since this is a situation I come across once every now and then, I figured it would be helpful for all if I write down my solution to this problem.

In short: what I will present in the remainder of this post is an aspect that triggers the underlying persistence mechanism (JPA, Hibernate, TopLink) to send any dirty data to the database.

I presented this aspect by the way during one of my sessions at The Spring Experience last December and this post also has the source code for those of you…

Amsterdam Java Meetup Q307, September 21st

Engineering | August 02, 2007 | ...

It's time for the next Java Meetup again. I decided to postpone the 7th installment of this quarterly event in Amsterdam until right after summer, because most people here in The Netherlands take a couple of weeks off in August or so.

I've looked at our internal schedules and it seems September 21st is the only day left in September, so I hope it fits with other people's schedules as well.

We'll be doing it at the same location as last April's meetup, as this is pretty convenient for us and everybody seems to be fine with it. The first Java Meetup ever was held in my favorite Amsterdam hangout…

Debunking myths: proxies impact performance

Engineering | July 19, 2007 | ...

In a recent blog entry Marc Logemann touches on the subject of proxy performance. In his entry he asks for a white paper by 'the Spring guys'. I don't want to spend (p)ages and (p)ages on discussing the differences up to the nanosecond between proxies and byte code weaving mechanisms, but I do think it's valuable to re-iterate once again what the differences are and whether or not this discussion matters at all.

What are proxies and why do we use them?

Let's first shortly revisit what proxies are used for (in general, and in Spring). According the Gang of Four (GoF) book on Design Patterns a proxy is a surrogate object or placeholder for another object to control access to it. Because the proxy sits in between the caller of an object and the real object itself, it can decide to prevent the real (or target) object from being invoked, or do something before the target object is invoked. prox.jpg

In other words, proxies can be used as stand-ins for real objects to apply extra behavior to those objects--be it security-related behavior, caching or maybe performance measurements…

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