Posts Tagged ‘Java’

RESTful Java Web Services must not return void to iPhone HTTP Services

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

After many sessions of debugging and even memory inspection not yielding fruit, I’ve finally discovered what caused my previous RESTful demo apps to have sporadic behavior, in addition to the memory leak of the synchronous call.

Today’s problem solving summary:

  1. XCode projects cannot have commas anywhere in the path up to the location where they are stored or else you’ll get an error message of:
    ld: -filelist file not found: <Project Path>
  2. All RESTful web services called via the NSURLConnection APIs must return a non-null payload.

    This bit me because my “Add Contestant” function was adding the contestant and returning void. I now return a string of “Success” to satisfy this requirement. The observable failure is very quiet, which made it so hard to debug; every other web service call appears valid, but never actually makes a call across the wire. This was proven via TCPDump. All the web service call callbacks are properly called in the Objective C side of the program. It just silently failed and passed back a null payload in the response data structure.

All the code for this project is available on GitHub and will be updated with the results of the adjustments based on the above findings by tomorrow.

iPhone & Java Web Services Development, Mind Map Image

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

I’m working on some updated course materials for iPhone & Java Web Services training and, by popular demand, am putting up the Mind Map I created as the master reference for the courseware. The graphic is open source for the community to leverage and benefit from. Have fun with your iPhone exploring of some new topics you might see on this Mind Map, and let me know in the comments the parts that interest you the most…

Also, here’s a link to my iPhone tagged Delicious bookmarks.

iPhone Development MindMap

Creative Commons License
iPhone Development Mind Map by Matthew J. McCullough is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

JMeter & Plugins

Friday, December 26th, 2008

I noticed a post on JMeter EJB plugin. It is a short but well written example. My ears are a bit more attuned to Apache JMeter these days after I wrote the first OSS Groovy plugin for JMeter last month. One of my clients is now using it for scalability testing of a JEE application. I highly suggest you take a look and consider contributing ideas or code to the project. I’d be glad to have other contributors.

JCP Executive Commitee Results

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I applied this year to the EC elections of the JCP for a seat on the Java SE board. I got 15.8% of the vote, but alas, did not win a seat. The PR release for this can be read here.

Standard / Enterprise Edition Executive Committee
Number of eligible voters: 948
Percent voting members casting votes: 26.9%

The top two members have been elected and will serve for the next three years.

Intel Corp. 46.4%
Keil, Werner 24.9%
McCullough, Matthew 15.8%
Tiwari, Shashank 12.7%

Other NFJS Denver Reviews

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Several other attendees, namely Tim Berglund and Mike Brevoort took some excellent notes on the specific sessions they attended at No Fluff Just Stuff. If you want a recap of the sessions so you can best choose what to attend when NFJS hits your city, take a moment to read their summaries.

No Fluff Just Stuff and Open Source in the Enterprise

Monday, November 17th, 2008

My attendance this weekend of the NFJS tour in Denver, CO proved once again to be as valuable as ever. With a heavy penchant for Open Source and its rapid innovation, the speakers showcased technologies that weren’t even on people’s vocabulary lists just last year. And take note, these are not just technologies for the sake of technology. The speakers such as Ken Sipe, Venkat Sumbramaniam, Stu Halloway, Neal Ford, and more served out a steady stream of reasons why each new technology is a game-changer in its given space.

A quick top 5 list of the best presentations (that I attended):

  • Hacking, The Dark Arts by Ken Sipe
  • Towards an Evolutionary Design by Venkat Subramaniam
  • Git by Stu Halloway
  • Failing with 100% Test Coverage by Stu Halloway
  • Mylin by Brian Sam-Bodden

If you have an opportunity to get your employer to purchase a seat for you to attend a stop on the NFJS tour, do it. If you are self employed, then don’t even think about not going. This is one of the best ROI’s of any conference going today. As Ken Sipe said in his keynote address, you must increase your networking, you must increase your knowledge portfolio, and you must continue to constantly change and improve as we IT professionals work in literally one of the most dynamic industry verticals in the world.

A very interesting article from InformationWeek also touches on the impact of Open Source, like TerraCotta in the Enterprise. With so much Open Source presented at NFJS, one can’t help but imagine the NFJS attendees are the drivers of this migration.

SwingX No Longer Funded

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Well, it looks like Swing continues to be a technology that has matured enough to be left out to pasture. In addition to the Swing team departures at Sun, the most recent related event is that SwingX, one of my favorite libraries, has stopped being funded. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as most applications are heading to the web nowadays unless they have a hugely compelling reason to be on the desktop (Development IDEs, CAD, Drawing, Graphics apps). JavaFX continues to be the also-ran in the RIA lineup against Flex (forefront) and Silverlight (2nd place).

Ambient Ideas on the iPhone

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Ambient Ideas has officially been accepted into the iPhone Developer Program, meaning we can finally deploy beta software to actual handsets and completed products to the iTunes / iPhone Application Store. Keep an eye out for our upcoming presentations at DJUG on iPhone + Java Web Services integration.

iPhone Developer Program - Ambient Ideas Accepted.png

Appcelerator at DOSUG

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator visited the Denver Open Source Users Group for our October meeting and gave a great presentation on how Appcelerator is an abstraction layer from your choice of backend web service provider (Java, PHP, ruby, .Net) and also provides a tag library that gives you access to the best of Prototype, JQuery (coming soon), YUI, Scriptaculous, and more.

The best part is how easy it is to try out Appcelerator. Just load up this page and start playing. You’ll be hooked in no time and ready to download the SDK installer for your platform of choice.

DJUG October – Ken Sipe on JMX, Spring, MBeans

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Attended DJUG’s October meeting, which was sponsored by NFJS and had Ken Sipe as presenter. He gave two presentations, the first on Spring and JMX, the second on 7 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. The room was packed. It was standing room only.

JMX Presentation Takeaways:

  • You need to use JMX.
  • Would you fly a plane without instruments?
  • Then why fly software without JMX data on its in-flight status?
  • Java 5 and above has MBean server.
  • JSR 3 (literally, the 3rd JSR ever) = JMX
  • JDK 6 -> Even Simpler -> GetPlatformMBeanServer()

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