Everyone agrees that TDD (test-driven development) is a good thing and yet very few people do it. why? I believe that one of the reason is pure laziness.  It is too much work to click “Run Test” every single time, however there is another more important reason and that is the “feedback loop”, which in… Continue reading

Download SQL Server jdbc driver from here. Open command prompt and cd into the directory until you see the sqljdbc4.jar file. Run the following command, which will mavenize and install the package in your local .m2 repository. mvn install:install-file -Dfile=sqljdbc4.jar -DgroupId=com.microsoft.sqlserver -DartifactId=sqljdbc4 -Dversion=4.0 -Dpackaging=jar Now add the dependency in your pom file <dependency> <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId> <artifactId>sqljdbc4</artifactId>… Continue reading

To print a formatted xml string in Java, first convert the raw string into a Document object, then use Transformer class to format the output like so: Now simply call this method to print the formatted xml string for e.g., Continue reading

To set up layout pages in Spring you could use SiteMesh. The way you set it up is as follows: Add the latest version of sitemesh to your pom file, during this writing it was v2.4.2 Create a new decorators.xml file within the WEB-INF folder, this file is used to describe where your layout page… Continue reading

In this series we will go through setting up a basic web structure that deals with importing resources (css/javascript), we’ll slowly progress this app in subsequent blog posts by adding layout/master page support as well as reading values from config files.  I will primarily use xml configuration for these setups, you can also do it… Continue reading

For some applications there might be times when expensive resources must be cleaned up properly or there might be times where your clients are being irresponsible and forget to wrap your class in using statements resulting in memory leaks or open database connections.  These might be a good time to implement the following strategy by… Continue reading

JavaScript by default gives you full access to the browser’s url property through the global window.location object.  Let’s use this following url as an example: “http://www.demo.com/Sports/Running/Shoes?item=1&size=10&color=green” To get the full url use: To only get the origin use: With these two properties you can extract any values that you want using regular string functions, such… Continue reading

Recently I have been writing some applications using the Onion Architecture one of which is here: Github.  I guess I’ve been using this pattern for a long time, I just didn’t know the name for it until I read Jeffrey’s blog, which is a very good read.  One thing that you have to consider though… Continue reading

UnitTests should be given the same level of respect and care that we put into writing production code, if it is not readable and maintainable then you might as well remove it.  I’ve always struggled with refactoring test code that contains mocked objects that I want to invoke some method on within my tests.  This… Continue reading

Before I even begin to write about this topic let me clarify one thing.  This is an example of the infamous Service Locator pattern or some call it an anti-pattern.  There are tons of articles on the internet, and I suggest you read some of them before you begin to implement the following sample code. … Continue reading