Everything beta

A short two months back I posted an article describing how to upgrade to Spring 3.0 M2. Spring folks are releasing at breakneck speed and so I got busy again upgrading spincloud.com to Spring 3.0 M3 released at the beginning of May. Just yesterday (June 3rd) the team released Spring Security 3.0 M1 and I decided to roll this in Spincloud as well. Upgrading Spring Security from 2.0.4 to 3.0.0 M1 For Spring Security 3.0.0 M1 I'm … read on »

Level 2 cache is one of the most powerful features of the JPA spec. It's a transparent layer that manages out-of-session data access and cranks-up the performance of the data access tier. To my knowledge it has been first seen in Hibernate and was later adopted by the then-emerging JPA spec (driven mostly by the Hibernate guys back in the day). As annotations gained strength and adoption, L2 caching that was initially configured through XML or … read on »

     When Google announced that Java is the second language that the Appengine will support I almost didn't believe it given the surge of the new languages and the perception that Java entered legacy but the JVM is a powerful tried-and-true environment and Google saw the potential of using it for what it is bound to become: a runtime environment for the new and exciting languages (see JRuby and Grails). The JVM is the new gateway drug … read on »

I have been thinking to write about this subject a while back when project Spincloud was still under development. I was even thinking about making this the first post on my blog. The idea is simple: you have location-based data (POIs for instance) stored in some database (preferably a spatial DB) and now you want to perform a select statement that will indicate the area that should include the points we want. In case of Spincloud's … read on »

As I'm using the ubiquitous Hibernate 3.3 as the JPA 1.0 provider for Spincloud, I decided to try out another one. I had tried OpenJPA (spawned from Kodo JDO) when they only supported build-time bytecode enhancement and it was a pain to make it work. It worked all right but boy what a pain. There's now an agent to provide on-the-fly enhancement but I'll take transparent enhancement anytime. I've heard about EclipseLink before. The … read on »

Selecting a web hosting provider is a tough job for any web developer that wants to put a Java/JEE web application online. The choice is much simpler when it comes to publishing a PHP web site and there are a load of cheap (and sometimes quite reliable) PHP hosting providers to choose from with LAMP being the de facto standard in the web hosting world. But when it comes to Java hosting providers the picture … read on »

In the spirit of beta I'm upgrading spincloud.com to Spring 3.0. I'm using version 2.5.6 currently but it's missing REST support and I had to use Carbonfive's REST library which worked like a charm. Now it's time to get back under Spring's fold and use their built-in REST support. Spring 3 opens the door to a lot of new features so I'm eager to try it. I'm using Maven2 to get the jars and Ant to … read on »

In Part 1 we imported world political borders into a database table. In this second part we'll use the table and generate a script that will be used to add the borders overlay to Google Maps. We'll use the cool Ruby and some fancy GIS words along the way. We left-off with a database table containing all borders. The goal today is to produce a Javascript file that will be used for overlaying polygons representing countries, over … read on »

One thing I needed when designing the Meteoalarm mashup for Spincloud were the political boundaries for all European countries. With them at hand, I would use the polygon overlay from the Coogle API and fill the country polygons with the respective weather warning colors. This first part is a tutorial on how to import world political borders into a MySQL database table. The second part in these series will use this table to create a script that … read on »

I launched Spincloud on New Year's day. I didn't expect a flood of traffic to hit the site since -let's face it- there was nothing groundbreaking. Spincloud was born from my idea of having access to the world weather in one step or less and I'm pleased with the results so far. Spincloud gains adoption every day and this is only due to the people that saw something new and exciting in it. There are blog … read on »