OpenSolaris 2008.11 provides a time slider for moving back into the past...

One of the biggest mistakes of today's fledgling MySQL programmers is their field type definitions, also known as data type or column type. Many are too quick to set up their tables, flying through the different options without giving it much thought. The time you spend setting up your tables will save you from many headaches later on down the road.

In case you missed it, rails 2.2 recently got released, finally promising thread safety among some other things. Thread safety has always been neglected by the rails core team, the standard way to scale up in rails (pre 2.2) is to run multiple processes, which makes deployment a lot harder (I think there’re at least 10 different ways to deploy rails apps at the moment, and people still come up with new solutions: apache+fcgi, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, thin, phusion, rack…).

Various options to distribute database backed caches and other application data that needs to be highly available but not necessarily be persisted in the database.

I’ve been building software for quite a few years now and as software programming techniques have advanced, so has the number of layers. Every once in a while a technology comes along which changes the way we think. Of late I’ve been hearing a lot about how cloud computing will allow us to scale our applications out. I think OSGi can give us similar results at a micro level by removing the traditional boundaries and layers on which our java applications are currently built.

The EJB 3.0 specification was a huge improvement from what we were used to in the early versions of EJB. Available as an early draft, EJB 3.1 has many more features and is even easier to use. Let’s take a brief overview of a few interesting topics being considered in this new and improved version of EJB.

Nanite is Engine Yard's latest addition to their cloud computing strategy: a "self assembling cluster of ruby processes" to form the backend of highly scalable web applications. InfoQ talked to its developer Ezra Zygmuntowicz and also got some news about Vertebra.

Presenting a solution to create graphics using either Java2D or the GWT with a single interface, based on the HTML Canvas.

How ofter were you asked by a client for a CSV (or excel) file with data from their app? I get asked that question quite often, so I wanted make the process as easy as possible. And guess what? You can create CSV files directly from MySQL with just one query!

OK it is now time to start our NIO.2 (Asynchronous I/O) expedition with the Thread pool. Bouuu dead lock are watching you! If you are new with NIO, I recommend you take a look at my series on NIO.1(1,2,3,4,5,6) before jumping into NIO.2

I’ve seen a lot of reports where people have trouble getting ASP.NET MVC up and running on IIS 6. Sometimes the problem is a very minor misconfiguration, sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of how IIS 6 works.

I got finally some time to write a simple CRUD web application with EJB 3.1 (JPA) and JSF 2.0 (facelets). Keep in mind that JSF 2.0 and EJB 3.1 are still in development and that some features are not yet implemented or can change. The goal was to make a simple GlassFish V3 Prelude project setup for a CRUD web application with EJB 3.1, JSF 2.0 (facelets) and maven.

Have you ever wondered how PHP echo’s a “Hello World” for you on the browser? Even I didn’t until I read about the PHP internals and extensions. I thought may be a few out there will be interested in exploring the other side of PHP, so here we go.

If you develop websites and do not use a UNIX prompt, you are at a major disadvantage to those that do. Knowing your way around a UNIX command line allows you to accomplish more in a shorter period of time and often offers a better way to manipulate, edit, and work with files on your server.

In Log Everything All the Time I advocate applications shouldn't bother logging at all. Why waste all that time and code? No, wait, that's not right. I preach logging everything all the time. Doh. Facebook obviously feels similarly which is why they opened sourced Scribe, their internal logging system, capable of logging 10s of billions of messages per day. These messages include access logs, performance statistics, actions that went to News Feed, and many others.

People have been wondering for some time about the release date of Jboss AS 5. As many of you know, Jboss 5 has been in development for quite some time and its release has been highly anticipated.

This is a step by step guide which shows how you can write an OpenID Authenticator for Tomact

This article describes how to use setup Apache MyFaces Trinidad and how to use some of the additional components (compared with the JSF standard).

There have been a number of significant developments in the enterprise software infrastructure market in the past several years. The application server market in particular, has been impacted and application server architectures are responding to new requirements. This article takes a look at a new breed of application server that is emerging.

GlassFish Gem 0.9.0 can be used to run Rails and Merb applications. Support another Rack-based framework Sinatra is coming up in the near future. This blog shows how to create a scaffold in Merb and run it using the GlassFish gem.

This screencast shows how you can create a simple Web application using JSP and Servlets in Eclipse 3.4, deploy it directly on GlassFish v3, use rapid deployment, and debug the application.

Quick little .htaccess trick today for ya’ll. This snippet will redirect any visitor who is not at at one of the provided IP addresses.

Version 1.0.1.GA of the JBoss Cache 1.4.x based Hibernate 3.2 Second Level Cache Provider has now been released containing some important fixes to get the standalone version of the cache provider working correctly.

There are different kinds of HTTP caches that are useful for different kinds of things. I want to talk about gateway caches — or, “reverse proxy caches” — and consider their effects on modern, dynamic web application design.

I'm one of the FishCats - so I had the chance to test Glassfish v3 intensively this summer. I have some serious customers - so I didn't posted about this, because of the program's name. I don't know whether it is beneficial for a freelancer / consultant to be named a FishCat