One of the benefits of using Confluence for our intranet wiki is the popularity of its plug-in architecture. One plug-in that has turned out to be unexpectedly useful is the Graphviz plug-in, which provides a quick and easy way to draw UML class diagrams without getting sucked into endlessly tweaking the diagram. This article shows you how. (more…)

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When you build an exploded J2EE package such as a .war or .ear, you may need to create a manifest file. This can be quite tricky, since the format of the manifest file is such that it is easy to get it wrong. Furthermore, some errors may cause your application to fail in mysterious ways. (more…)

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In this article on Visibility Solutions, I focus on a general classification of such solutions. My goal is to provide a concise and logical structure to discuss and assess concrete visibility solutions, like the ones we have developed at Lunatech. (more…)

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When you release a software application, it is nice to put the version number somewhere for identification purposes. One of our custom applications puts a line with the version number, URL of the page, any GET parameters and user ID of the logged in user at the bottom of every page. This helps tremendously when the customer logs a support issue. The version number helps especially when there are multiple versions of your application out in the wild. (more…)

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