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SOA, BPM, EDA, ECM and all the other buzz words. Beware some post might not be so common as you think. We are not scared to go against main stream thoughts.
Technologies like java, maven, springframework, OSGi and front end technologies and frameworks like jQuery, DWR, Flex.
Finally to make this happen we need tools and of course a Mac (well some of us do). So we blog about that as well.
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By Ben, on September 1st, 2011
Today I came across a column posted (in Dutch) on Webwereld entitled "It’s a trap!". This column is responding to the recent decision at a LibreOffice/OpenOffice Workshop to put more effort into support for Microsoft‘s proprietary OOXML format.
Perhaps it is because I have been reading Pull. Perhaps it is because I have been working at a new company over the past year who are trying to address some related issues. But this column got me thinking about what the essence is of what we call documents nowadays and how this might change in the coming years.
Continue reading Documents the Pull Way
By Ben, on August 19th, 2010
The Netherlands is currently in the middle of a large project to change the way we pay for public transportation. We are moving from paying with a cardboard strip (called the "Nationale Strippenkaart", which must be stamped by the driver of the public transportation vehicle you get on) to a new system (the OV-chipkaart) involving an RFID chip on which you can preload money or one or more subscriptions. The idea is not new (the Greater London Oyster Card is a well-know example) but this is the first time I know of that it has been done on a nationwide scale.
Needless to say there have been problems along the way. Michel van Eeten, professor of Governance of Infrastructures at the Delft University of Technology, recently gave an interview to the Dutch engineering magazine De Ingenieur in which he explained how the project is suffering from an implicit choice of offloading all of the project risks (security, privacy, and so on) onto the customer. A few days ago I had a similar experience with problem offloading onto the public by this project…
Continue reading Public Transportation pass woes….
By Ben, on August 16th, 2010
By now I’m sure everybody has at least heard of REpresentational State Transfer (REST). REST is an architectural style that was first properly described by Roy Fielding in his doctoral thesis. Since Fielding published his thesis in 2000 the term REST has become very popular among web developers. Mostly for the wrong reasons of course — REST and the derived term RESTful have morphed into marketing jargon for people who really mean "building a web site" when they say "implementing a RESTful architecture".
One of the things that has gone wrong in the area of REST-the-popular-interpretation is that people think that "doing REST" is the same thing as "using HTTP" (another thing is that they think that REST is something you can do). The reason of course is simple: most people use the term REST to mean building a web site. And you use HTTP for that. And in fact I thought it was not a wholly unreasonable position because one of the constraints of the REST architectural style is such that you really would not want to use anything but HTTP as a rule.
However, today, all of a sudden, I stumbled on ultimate proof that REST really is as independent from HTTP as Fielding claims: a piece of software that uses the REST architectural style but not HTTP.
Continue reading Yes! REST really is not the same as HTTP!!
By Ben, on July 28th, 2010
Last Thursday (July 22nd, 2010) Rob Pike, a Principal Engineer at Google, gave a talk at the O’Reilly Open Source conference. In this talk he stated that established languages such as C++ and Java are too complex and not adequately suited for today’s computing environments. He then proceeded with some criticism of dynamically typed languages (that I share) and finally ended up plugging the Go language (which he co-developed) as a solution to the problem.
Now, Rob Pike is not nobody (in addition to being a Google principle engineer he has C and Unix credentials), plus the Go language has the Google brand name on it, so I thought it would be a good idea to check it out….
Continue reading An evening on the Go
By Ben, on October 27th, 2009
Starting with release 5.0, the Java language comes equipped with parametric polymorphism. Also known as generics, this language feature allows for a type (a class, interface, enum or other) to be parameterized with a type variable: a variable that represents some other type. This allows for the creation of Java code that is generic with respect to the type system (like when using java.lang.Object as the type of a method parameter) yet type safe at runtime (once you’ve chosen a specific type to use, the compiler can enforce that choice).
Even though parameterized polymorphism allows you to write code that is generic with respect to the type system, sometimes you want to write code that knows which actual type(s) it has been parameterized with. This article will examine how to discover that information, as well as the discoverability limits of the Java generic type system.
Continue reading Some notes on discovering your type parameter using the Reflection API
By Ben, on October 10th, 2009
First and foremost an apology to all regular readers: I fully realize GridShore is not intended to deal with Microsoft technology (or whatever detritus is collected under that name). However, this one is such a beauty of having to go the long way to get things done that I don’t want to hold back.
As with many a long and winding trail, this one started this morning with what seemed like a short hike across a small and uncomplicated footpath. You see, of late I have found myself making more and more use of the different features of Outlook (something to do with becoming more senior in my company…). Among others, I’ve found that I’ve started using the little flags to mark mails that I have to get back to. But I receive so many mails nowadays that even in a single day the flags get snowed under and pushed off the list. Of course I could just sort by flag status, but I prefer to have today’s mails at the top (rather than the flags and ticks from two weeks ago). So I had myself a bright idea this morning: I’ll just change the grouping of my mails to group by received date and then flag status within the date groups. Walk in the park, right?
Oh mother….
Continue reading The Long and Winding Road: a tale of grouping my mails using a user-defined field in Outlook
By Ben, on September 13th, 2009
The last few days I’ve been reading BAD Astronomy, a book by astronomer Philip Plait that describes common misconceptions, misuses and scientific abuses of astronomy. Partly written to be funny and partly to debunk the nonsense that arises from people misusing and abusing science, it’s a good and worthwhile read for anybody (especially if you have some spare time on your hands).
Philip C. Plait. Wiley 2002, Paperback, 288 pages, $5.99
Reading through the book I came to chapter 14, which deals with the doomsday advocates who swore up and down that the world was going to come to an end on May 5, 2000 due to a planetary alignment (more or less) of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It was quite funny to read Plait’s description of why this neither would nor did cause catastrophe for our planet. But more than that, the chapter got me thinking about how bad science is all around us and affects us in sometimes rather drastic ways.
Continue reading Bad science…
By Ben, on August 6th, 2009
This Monday my corporate laptop was upgraded. Last week I was in proud possession of an HP/Compaq NC6400, this week I have an IBM Lenovo R400 Thinkpad (an absolute Boer of a laptop, compared with the sleek and polished Compaq). It’s ugly and the control button is in the wrong place (which is inconvenient), but it has more RAM and a larger harddrive so I guess I’ll live with it.
Unfortunately, with the new laptop I was also downgraded: from Windows XP to Windows Vista and from Office 2003 to Office 2007. And no, those are not typos; I’ve been given new software with my new laptop and I hate every little bit of it. Vista is designed to kill your productivity and break your existing software. And even if you have software like Office (guaranteed to work due to the close ties between development teams), they make sure the new version is so bad that you can’t use that either.
Among my favorite bugs, failures and stupidies so far are the following:
Continue reading Upgrade woes and frustrations
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