Java Enterprise Software Versus What it Should Be

A lot of developers end up in the Java “enterprise” world at some point in their careers. I know the term alone conjures up all kinds of reactions, and rightly so. Often environments where lots of interesting technical challenges exist end up being those that nobody wants to work on because they are brittle, difficult … Read more

Reusable Jobs with Obsidian Chaining

A lot of Obsidian users write custom jobs in Java and leverage their existing codebase to performs things like file archive or file transfer right inside the job. While it’s great to reuse that existing code you have, sometimes users end up implementing the same logic in multiple jobs, which isn’t ideal, since it means … Read more

Job Chaining in Quartz and Obsidian Scheduler

In this post I’m going to cover how to do job chaining in Quartz versus Obsidian Scheduler. Both are Java job schedulers, but they have different approaches so I thought I’d highlight them here and give some guidance to users using both options. It’s very common when using a job scheduler to need to chain … Read more

Configuring Clustering in Quartz and Obsidian Schedulers

Job scheduling is used on many software projects to enable both internal jobs and third-party integration. Clustering can provide a huge boost to reliability by providing fail-over and load-sharing. I believe that clustering should be implemented for reliability on just about all software projects, so I’ve decided to outline how to go about doing that … Read more

Why Developers Keep Making Bad Technology Choices

Today, software developers are faced with a great abundance of options when choosing how to design and implement systems. We are constantly bombarded with choice and are used to dealing with buzzwords like NoSQL, the cloud, REST, Map-Reduce and so on. However, developers in charge of designing systems can be easily seduced into incorporating technologies … Read more

Problems with ORMs Part 2 – Queries

In my previous post on Object-Relational Mapping tools (ORMs), I discussed various issues that I’ve faced dealing with the common ORMs out there today, including Hibernate. This included issues related to generating a schema from POJOs, real-world performance and maintenance problems that crop up. Essentially, the conclusion is that ORMs get you most of the … Read more

Easy Deep Cloning of Serializable and Non-Serializable Objects in Java

Frequently developers rely on 3d party libraries to avoid reinventing the wheel, particularly in the Java world, with projects like Apache and Spring so prevalent. When dealing with these frameworks, we often have little or no control of the behaviour of their classes. This can sometimes lead to problems. For instance, if you want to … Read more

Ignoring Self-Signed Certificates in Java

A problem that I’ve hit a few times in my career is that we sometimes want to allow self-signed certificates for development or testing purposes. A quick Google search shows the trouble that countless Java developers have run into over the years. Depending on the exact certificate issue, you may get an error like one … Read more