Last week Stephane Epardaud and Nicolas Leroux, senior software developers at Lunatech Research, presented “Nouvelles technologies de développement en JEE” at the Forum des Professions Informatique 2008 in Nice.

The conference was organised by the University of Nice and it was rather pleasant to discuss with the students and other I.T. professionals. Thanks again for the invitations.

This is also the start of a new Open Source project that will be used as a show case for new technologies (JBoss Seam, JPA, EJB 3, Hibernate Search, etc…). The project is available here. We will try to write some nice tutorials and articles about it. More to come on this web, so keep posted.

In the meantime, you can download the presentation slides in French (PDF, 0.5 Mb).

You can send your comments nicolas+fip@lunatech.com.

Abstract

This article talks about the process of validation in Java EE, more specifically about Hibernate Validation and Bean Validation. We start by describing why we need validation, what solutions are available, how we use them and why they are great. We then proceed to describe their limitations, and offer proposals for resolving those limitations in the hope that the future Bean Validation standard will incorporate our (or similar) solutions.

(more…)

This article describes how we implemented RESTful web services in our Seam-based Java EE web application.

(more…)

There is an accepted wisdom in software design that the way to gather good quality data is to reject ‘bad data’. The main tactic is to suppose that no data is better than incomplete data, which is why we are told ‘you must complete the required fields’. This sounds like a fine idea, until you observe people filling in a form and typing ‘unknown’ into half of the fields. (more…)

This article explains how to do programmatic log in, in a Seam 1.2.1 application. If like us, you want to allow your users to change their credentials once they are logged in into your application, you might be forced to log them out and to ask them to re-login. There is a nicer way to do this.

(more…)

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…)

User-interface instructions are the step-by-step instructions for doing something like testing software or installing a Windows application. These kinds of instructions are often hard to use. They are frequently incomplete and ambiguous, which makes it easy to get lost in a long sequence of steps, and slows you down by forcing you to make guesses at certain steps. This happens because the writer underestimates how much detail is required, or is just lazy.

(more…)

Most commercial software development produces project documentation, which is a software developer’s main use for a word-processor. This year, our intranet wiki became my word-processor; this article explains why. (more…)

Bullet lists are much used and abused, especially in business and technical writing. However, if you follow some simple rules of thumb, bullet lists can improve your writing’s readability and reduce duplication, instead of being a poor substitute for well-formed prose. (more…)

I just worked out how to use AppleScript to create recurring daily to do items in Apple iCal.

(more…)