For a long time, I’ve maintained a guide featuring some of my favorite online radio stations. Over the last 2 year, however, it had become a bit neglected. So today, I’m proud to present the updated 2010 version of the guide. I’ve purged the defunct stations, added a few new ones. I’ve also cleaned up the layout and added a little bling. So if you haven’t checked out the guide, or even if you have, now is the time to click through.
Reader Nacho Coloma got me thinking. A few weeks ago he mentioned Gradle as an alternative for Maven. Now I’m not ready to throw out Maven, but the alternatives are at least interesting. Most popular alternatives have one thing in common: they shy away from XML in favor of domain specific languages (DSLs). Those DSLs are in many cases a subset of some of the more popular scripting languages.
Read on for more about Gradle, Gant, Rake, Raven and Buildr.
In this post, a summary of some of the most interesting posts that have appeared on this blog related to Java. There’s a bit for everyone, there’s some Maven and Android, as some good documentation resources. And something about Java applets, because, for some odd reason, I still like them.
About 10 days ago, De Morgen, a Belgian (Dutch) newspaper, published the 60 best dance tracks of the last 10 years. 6 DJs and radio celebrities take their pick of what was good in the last 10 years. Unlike what you might expect, the lists where not littered with fluffy pop stuff. Most of it is quality material. Pleasantly surprised, I think this was a great idea. The only problem is that it’s quite difficult to listen to the lists as they are all embedded as separate tracks. So I’ve put them in a few YouTube playlists, which make them a lot more manageable .
If you’re visiting the site, you will undoubtedly have noticed the new design. If you’re following the site via the feed or e-mail, now is a very good time to click through and check out the new incarnation of Streamhead. In this post, I go over what went in to creating the new design and what is still to come.
In true open source spirit, I scratched my itch. No, not that itch. If you complain about open source projects, you have all the tools at your disposal to fix the problem yourself. Last week, I posted that it’s not straightforward at all to make Spring, Google AppEngine (GAE) and Vaadin work together in Eclipse. This week, I present the solution.
Update: I’ve added a necessary repository to the pom file. So if you had problems previously, please download the file again. Your issues should be solved.
As a lighter aside, here’s one more way to get into interactive fiction. The game-genre that has been going strong for 30+ years. JayIsGames, my favorite casual gameplay site, is holding an interactive fiction competition. The goal was to create an “escape” themed interactive fiction game. The quality of the entries is excellent, and most definitely worth a look.
Over the last month, I’ve been learning more and more about Vaadin. I’ve also become more and more convinced that this could be the future of rich Internet application development for Java. Vaadin is an incredible powerful framework that solves many of the front-end difficulties developers have to deal with.
In this regard, Vaadin is the missing link for Java web application development. My current favorite technologies are:
The latest craze in WordPress are theme frameworks. There’s a reason so many people are talking about and creating them. A theme framework allows you to quickly and easily create a new custom theme, while building on top of a very sturdy foundation. And the addition of child themes to WordPress has made it possible to upgrade the framework, without having to change anything to the theme that is using that framework.
In order to advance this site, I’ve been planning a major design upgrade. So be prepared for some changes in the coming weeks. I started with some research into theme frameworks. There are many, but here are three I liked:
Obtaining Services and Repositories in Vaadin
One problem that you’ll face in practically any application, including a Vaadin-powered one, is getting hold of data or external services. Usually this functionality is put in some kind of service facade, or for instance a repository. Vaadin presents a problem in this regard, because it uses classes on both client (compiled to JavaScript) and server. You can’t (and don’t want to) execute service methods on the browser. Luckily, thanks to modern frameworks and good old Java, this turns out to be incredibly easy.
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