Spock – Starting your trek

Ready to add a little diversity to your Java testing? The Spock framework could be a good place to start. Continue reading

Linux – Building libxml2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The pre-configuration script for libxml2 does a pretty good job, but it doesn’t quite catch one missing dependency on RHEL 5 Continue reading

PHP – Building PHP 5.4 with IMAP on Red Hat Linux

Adding IMAP support to your PHP build on Red Hat Enterprise Linux can involve navigating some pretty obscure error messages, not to mention some pretty old-school builds Continue reading

Spock – Sharing conditions across then blocks

Using helper methods with the Spock specification framework helps avoid duplicating conditions across multiple tests Continue reading

Java – Monitoring your PermGen space

Java OutOfMemory: PermGen space errors are a nasty surprise that may be lurking in your freshly deployed applications. Here we look at a couple of ways to keep an eye on your PermGen usage. Continue reading

Java Web Apps – Running regular background tasks

Wrapping a ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor with a servlet context listener provides a great, lightweight way to run regular background tasks in a Java web application. Continue reading

XSLT – Using lists and maps as template parameters

XSLT 1.0 doesn’t make it easy to pass lists, maps or arbitrary XML as template parameters. Fortunately most current transformer implementations support a solution out-of-the-box. Continue reading

CXF – Adding security by IP whitelisting

Creating a simple Interceptor class to enforce IP address based security for an Apache CXF web-service Continue reading

CXF – Java first web services with existing JAXB classes

If you’re exposing existing Java code containing JAXB generated value objects as a Java First JAX-WS web-service with Apache CXF you might run into an unexpected problem. Continue reading

Java – Whitelisting IP subnets

Whitelisting IP subnets rather than individual addresses can alleviate some of the drudge of managing your security configuration. Continue reading