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.

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Lunatech is looking to hire some clever Java EE developers for our Rotterdam office. If you are interested in joining a great company, please have a look at our job posting.

It is hard to find qualified and motivated Java developers, but we know you are out there. If you have ever considered working in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and want to work in an amazing office with a great team using the latest Java technologies, please contact us.

After Nicolas and I said that ‘Seam is the next Struts’ in our JavaPolis presentation, Max told us that ‘Gavin will hate that’, which is funny because of how it takes our statement out of context. This article is the context.

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To a software developer, ‘marketing’ is more likely to be a department that another kind of people belong to, than an activity that everyone should participate it. This could be because people outside The Marketing Department are actually forbidden from involvement, or even because of the Dilbert TV series episode where he accidentally destroys a successful company by introducing a marketing department. Although no single book is likely to restore this disastrous reputation among developers, there are at least a few good ones that entertain while broadening the picture a little.

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Until recently, my desktop PC was running Linux, like all of the other desktops at Lunatech. Since it was time to get a new PC with powerful hardware, I took the opportunity to join the laptop users and switch to an Apple Mac for software development. I now have my favourite development machine ever, and not just because it is shiny either.

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One of the cool startups we are involved with, Wipido, now supports embedding video channels into your own websites. This is my experiment to see if it really does work as advertised on the tin…

Wikinomics is a book about the mass web-based collaboration that has emerged in the last few years. It explains well-known phenomena such as Wikipedia and Flickr, as well as new kinds of business such as InnoCentive, which introduces a peer-to-peer model to scientific research.

The only annoyance is the book’s relentless repetition of the key points, as if it were not a fairly simple idea, so although I recommend the book, you should skip half of it.

Tags: wiki, wikinomics

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research.

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…)

On a recent project, I misjudged the customer’s non-functional requirements: a more polished result turned out to be more important than time to market, so we had to add an extra round of enhancements before the first release. I now realise what I forgot to ask - do you want expensive software?

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In The Seven Habits For Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey says some useful things about task management (habits 1-3), but obscures it in excruciatingly tacky language. The ideas are fairly straightforward, and boil down to four ‘generations of task management’: task lists, scheduling, prioritised tasks, and urgent versus important tasks - the quadrant model. The interesting part concerns what you should be doing in the first place - why should even have a list of tasks, and how you know what is important to you. (more…)