One of the more exciting things I've learned about recently is doing behavior driven development (BDD) with a framework called easyb. Easyb allows you to test your system by defining behavior in stories and specifications in a way that allows your "non-developer" stakeholders to understand them relatively easily. [...] Since I've been doing a ton of Grails work lately, naturally I wanted to try to incorporate it into my Grails workflow. Fortunately, there's a plugin for that, the Grails easyb plugin.

This provides an overview of Java technology basics and explains how the technology fits into the context of contemporary software development. Links to relevant introductory Java content, other educational resources, as well as IBM downloads and products give you a rich starting point for further investigation.

So you’ve made your website, and it looks great! You’ve started to drive customers and traffic to your website but you’re finding that the money that you’re spending on pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation and online marketing isn’t converting to leads or sales.

Using the Luhn Check Algorithm, It's easy to generate valid credit card numbers. Here is my example of doing just that as well as validating them.

Apache Lucene is Open Source API that allows a Java developer (.Net libraries available) to write indexing and full-text search capable applications. I have been writing applications based on Lucene for the last 3 years and some of the applications have been deployed at large corporations. I know there are other libraries available to developers who wish to write indexing engine but this blog will solely focus on Apache Lucene

I’ve written a simple single sign-on solution (400 lines of code) in PHP, which works by linking sessions. This solutions works for normal websites as well as AJAX sites.

You have your site, full of content, visitors come and go every minute and your Google analytics account shows that your site is very popular. You host this site on a great hosting provider that has a good price/quality value and you are sure that 40Gbs of monthly bandwidth is enough to serve your visitors. Or not?

Application-testing and quality-assurance managers are under the gun. They must not only put out top-notch applications, but also deliver them fast. Effective communication between team members and across the IT department is a key component of achieving this, and some of the software to facilitate that communication is in the cloud.

Using an iterator to add parameters to a Struts2 component doesn't work because the iterator component masks the intended target. Using this new tag, you can add arbitrary parameters using an iterator.

When I set out to redesign this site, I had an idea: Could I make the stylesheet change based on the hour of the day? Sounds easy enough, right? So, I started searching the Internet for some code I could use. I’m a novice when it comes to javascript and php, so I was hoping to find some “plug and play” code, so to speak.

I want to show you today a Java class designed specially for creating messages that allows advanced value formatting, dependency on Locale and precompilation of the message template.

The topic of this post is how we go from that interface, to some kind of mechanism that can actually process the incoming requests and send the appropriate responses back to the client. Note that i make a difference between processing requests and handling them. Processing the requests is done by the Request Processor, and each request will be handled by its very own Request Handler. The Request Processor accepts all incoming requests, delegates the actual handling of each request to the correct Request Handler and will then send back all of the responses to the client.

It’s Tuesday morning and a bug has just been found in production. We were about to start working on a user story, but we need to switch gears and fix this bug. Our repository currently looks like the following...

Want to use Spring but don't want to use Java? Spring for Python is an Inversion of Control container for Python with several additional features such as aspect oriented programming. To learn more read on.

Tips to Maitain a Wordpress Based Site

Using Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio 2010

Last week I got to analyze a web page that spent 4.8 seconds in the onLoad event handler of a custom script file. It turned out that 2.8 seconds were consumed by applying a dynamic menu library (will blog about this one separately). The remaining 2 seconds were spent in jQuery selectors. The analysis showed that most of the selectors didn’t return any object and those that returned objects can be improved by using different selectors.

From blog posts to books, sorting a list of items by user rating is a very common task. In this blog post, we discover how the writings of an obscure 18th-century British minister lets us implement a “smart” ranking algorithm that takes into account the “wisdom of the crowd”, and presents a fairer and more accurate representation of results.

My goal is to help experienced procedural programmers make the transition to Haskell, not to provide a tour of language features. I don’t want to show you how to do imperative programming in Haskell; I want to show you how not to.

When you are growing your business or blog, a link from a popular blog can help a great deal. The question begs to be asked: Just how do you get a mention and link from these influential bloggers?

This guide will walk you through getting started with Magellan. You will need a copy of Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1.

Recently, I have been working on Query Optimization project. While working on it, I found the following interesting observation. This entire concept may appear very simple, but if you are working in the area of query optimization and server tuning, you will find such useful hints.

The past several weeks I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the work associated with and the consequences of rebranding something. In part, I’m talking about my Blog but also some of the products that I have developed and some of my services offerings through my consulting company. The process made me sit down, think about re-branding in general, and do some research. Here’s what I learned.

I have been looking for a good first layer of validating an url to see if it is valid. For checking the format of the url it seems to me to be the most logical approach to use regular expressions. Up until now I always discarded them as being to “geeky”, meaning i don’t consider it my life’s biggest goal to be typing (/?[]\w) all day long (so why did i become a programmer, aaaah yes to make life easier for other people)

useful write up on customizing Spring MVC @Controller method argument signature