In my last post, I lamented that adopting new software technology should be easy but often isn’t. This is the case whether the software is new to us, new to the application we’re developing or even new in the set of features that will be leveraged. I focused on two common issues that plague many … Read more
Many developers cringe at the idea of having to introduce new technology into an existing application. This is often the case even when the developer has previous experience with the technology, be it moderate or extensive. For the sake of simplicity, let’s start by limiting our discussion to software. Things like libraries, frameworks and any … Read more
One of the best things about Obsidian Scheduler is how quick and easy it is to get it running jobs. With other tools, you might have to set aside an afternoon to get it going, but with Obsidian, trust me, it won’t take long at all. To show you how easy it really is, I’m … Read more
In my last post, I delivered on a reusable, file archival schedulable job. I promised to next look at doing something similar for file cleanup. File cleanup needs are driven by similar, if not identical, factors as those for file archival. Reiterating those, they are – limits of physical space, business or compliance requirements for … Read more
DevOps and full-stack have been popular topics in our industry for a number of years now. Unfortunately, they don’t always mean the same thing to every organization or even individuals within an organization. Rather than debate what they are or what they should be, this post will work through a solution created by the development … Read more
One of the first programming management books I was encouraged to read was Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams. It was a great read and I try to re-read it every once in a while. One of the topics covered is actually a term that comes from psychology – flow. Flow carries the idea of … Read more
We’ve all worked on projects that required us to do very basic tasks at periodic intervals. Perhaps we chose a basic ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor. If we’re already using Spring, maybe we tried their TaskExecutor/TaskScheduler support. But once we encounter any number of situations such as an increased quantity of tasks, new interdependencies between tasks, unexpected problems in … Read more
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
When I first wrote on this topic, I lamented that the de facto standard for scheduling jobs in Java applications is use of the Quartz scheduling library. Why? At the time, I explained: Enabling your application to schedule jobs with Quartz takes significant code and/or configuration. Changes in job schedule or other parameters require code/configuration … Read more
The use of Spring framework has woven its way into a large percentage of Java projects of all sorts. It has grown well beyond a dependency injection framework to a large interconnected technology stack providing “plumbing” in a large number of areas. Since it’s so often a part of our lives, we’ll discuss Obsidian’s support … Read more