This is how you can detect existing Node.js and npm, or automatically install a temporary Node.js if none is already installed. About the only things needed are make, bash, curl and git, which are usually available on all development / CI machines. (I’m planning to work around the requirements for curl and git, so those won’t even be needed in the future.) Put this at the top of your Makefile:

Then download the find-node-or-install script to the same directory:…

Did you know that there is a Java build system that does not use angle brackets? More and more projects are using Gradle as an integrated part of their development process. In short, Gradle provides a Groovy DSL for declarative builds based on build conventions. This blog post aims to give you a kickstart if you want to start exploring Gradle yourself by introducing some core concepts and commands. Installation If you have not used Gradle before, you must install…

I came across this problem recently: You can´t navigate using only the keyboard to a Hyperlink inside a RichTextBox in a desktop program on Windows 8. First I thought that it is always this way until I tried my program on a Windows 7 computer where it worked. I search the internet to find a solution/reason to this problem but couldn’t find one so I decided to make a behavior so that Tab to Hyperlink in a RichTextBox works the…

It has been a while since I was able to write any tutorials and continue on my last serie about OpenGL ES 1.x feels a bit out-dated so I start all over again but with OpenGL ES 2.0 but there are so many common things that I will be copy & pasting a lot. I really love all the comments I have gotten on my previous tutorials but I want to apologize in advance that I’m not able to answer…

In the last few years I have been asked to help savor several web projects gone bad. The quality of the projects, code, environment, documentation, and morale has been low. To know what I think is right in situations like this, I started asking myself the question, "What would a responsible programmer do?". Clarity Above anything else a responsible programmer values clarity. Not only does she value clear code, but also clear documentation, clear communication and a clear vision of…

In this blog post I will describe how you can use maven-failsafe-plugin wildcards to dynamically target test classes in your build tool. This is useful when you are using SpringJUnit4ClassRunner or other testrunners which does not, without hassle, allow you to use JUnit Categories. It is also useful when your tests depend on data being populated to a database (for a clean testenvironment). I chose maven-failsafe-plugin before maven-surefire-plugin since they run in different maven phases and in my case I…

The four of us recently visited the Confess, CONference For Enterprise Software Solutions, in Vienna. It was located at the Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center which was a nice place for the conference. Here’s a summary of some of the sessions during the conference. Couchbase – Michael Nitschinger Michael gave an overview of Couchbase and in particular the new features of the 2.0 version. Couchbase combines the features of an in-memory data grid and a document database with secondary…

REST Assured is a framework for easy testing of REST or HTTP services in Java and has recently reached version 1.8. The internals of REST Assured have undergone a major refactoring to allow JsonPath and XmlPath to be extracted to their own projects. This allows you to use these projects without depending on REST Assured itself. What does this mean and how can you benefit? Read on! Parsing documents with Groovy GPath Groovy has a very simple and elegant way…

At our recent talk at Confess 2013 in Vienna there were several developers working with mobile devices in the audience. This is great as the purpose of hypermedia in the API is to make life simpler for client developers. However, after the talk several of them raised issues regarding the high latency and low bandwidth of mobile phones. In this post I will try to address both these concerns.

As we all know, Javascript is a very flexible language. In the article I will show different ways to execute conditional code by using some common idioms from Javascript and general object-oriented techniques. Default values Javascript does not support default values for arguments and it is common to use an if statement or a conditional expression to set default values.

I usually prefer to use an or-expression instead. The short-circuiting or, ||, avoids the repetition of the conditional operator…

In this blog post I implement the same rock-paper-scissors domain using what I hope is idiomatic Clojure. By using immutable datastructures I show that snapshots of aggregate state is really nothing special and snapshotting should be implemented as a cache.

Update: This article was written as an April Fool’s joke, taking a stab at the fact that JSON is a closed, dumb, and pretty anemic data format. There are other interesting data formats available, such as extensible data notation (edn). JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is widely known as JavaScript’s data format, often used as a language-independent data interchange format. However, what I consider to be the three most powerful features of JSON are little-known. The main reason for this is…

In the previous blog posts on Deja vu we have seen how to add tracability in your code by applying the three constructs @Traced, @Impure, and @AttachThread. For green field projects you can simply structure your code for this kind of traceability. But typically traceability is more relevant for legacy code. Code that has neither tests nor documentation, but just sits there and occasional spits out an exception. What do you do about this code? You keep telling your manager…

I held a short introduction to behaviors in WPF this past weekend and I thought I would share it with a blog post. First watch out for the spelling. In British the spelling is “behaviour” this is also a correct spelling but since Microsoft is from USA we should use the American spelling “behavior”. Also because you get more hits if you use the “behavior” spelling when you search online. What is a behavior? A behavior encapsulate pieces of functionality…

A while ago we decided to upgrade Jackson from 1.x to 2.x (faster jackson). We were also using JAXB to map Java objects to JSON and Jersey for exposing our REST services and of course we wanted to retain those after the Jackson upgrade. The process is really quite easy once you’ve figured things out. Maven dependencies Before the update we depended on the following Jackson artifacts in Maven:

Where the jackson.version property was equal to 1.9.11. All of…

I am involved in a side project to create a minor visitor management application. One feature is to print name badges. This post is about my first experience to use DYMO:s LabelWriter 450 and their .NET SDK to communicate with it. Choice of label printer Internet is flooded with articles about the best choice of label printers and I have no previous experience with such printers. My choice of a DYMO LabelPrinter was a combination of price, positive reviews, nice…

I have been following the excellent BTW podcast and thinking a lot about CQRS and Event Sourcing. Inspired by Greg Youngs lecture on Functional Programming with DDD I have tried to distill what is the minimal things I need to implement an Aggregate with Event Sourcing in Java. In this blog post I will focus on the command side of things. The purpose here is to explain Event Sourcing in a way that is easy to understand without any unnecessary…

Recently I switched to Java 7 and then ran into a couple of issues. I had a Mac with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2) and Maven 3.0.4 (Maven installed using “brew install maven”). Both Java 6 and Oracle Java 7 was installed on the system with the default JVM set to Java 7: $ java -version

But Maven was picking up Java 6: $ mvn -version

The JAVA_HOME environment variable was set in ~/.profile:

but it was…

Yesterday we hosted some guests in a double session event regarding lessons learned developing Windows Store apps. First of all, thank you to all visitors! Secondly, thank you to Peter Bryntesson from Microsoft Sweden for a really good session. We, the XAML team at Jayway .NET, held on session on a bunch of topics – and we here present you with the slides. Enjoy! Robert Hedgate preaching about snapped vs full vs filled view. Peter Bryntesson on Javascript, PCL and…

Three of us recently visited Scandinavian Developer Conference in Gothenburg. Being backend developers we liked the Big Data track the most, but we also managed to see some good presentations about collaboration and web technology.