A Birds's Eye View of Maven

One of the things that we do on a daily basis is use Maven to build our projects by issuing build commands such as mvn install. Maven then looks at our project’s configuration file, affectionately known as a POM, magically figures out what do and, hey presto, your build is complete. I imagine that we do this so often that we never think about what’s going on behind the scenes, and in some cases without ever understanding what’s going on either.

Is Java's String Class a God Object?

In October I wrote a blog entitled Top Trumps in God Objects where I talked about the discovery of an object I’d found with 167 disparate methods that linked this object with all other parts of the application and, as you’d expect, followed the general criteria for a God or Monster Object. It was recently pointed out to me that method count alone isn’t an indication that an object is a God Object

Isn't Java a Civilised Language?

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to learn iOS programming. My boss decided that I was more of a ‘computer scientist’ rather than a developer, and this meant that I could apply my knowledge to developing an iPad application or two - all I’d need to do was to learn Objective-C and the iOS SDK: after all, how hard can it be?

Using Spring’s SimpleMappingExceptionHandler

My last few blogs have talked about Spring’s @ExceptionHandler annotation and how you can use it to deal with errors on a controller by controller basis to give you fine-grained control over how you handle errors in your code. The question to consider now is whether or not you always want such fine grained control, to which I’m guessing that in certain circumstances the answer will be no, and so to accommodate this Spring have provided us with the SimpleMappingExceptionHandler.

Spring 3 MVC Exception Handlers and @ResponseStatus

My last couple of blogs have covered Spring’s MVC @ExceptionHandler annotation outlining where and why you should use it. Today’s blog wraps up the discussion on the basics of @ExceptionHandler by taking a look at the companion annotation @ResponseStatus.

Spring 3 MVC Exception Handlers and Multiple Exception Arrays

My last blog was the first in a short series of blogs examining Spring 3 MVC’s exception handling annotations. It covered the basic usage of the @ExceptionHandler annotation with a few pieces of demo code and no contrived scenarios. Today’s blog continues where I left off and examines @ExceptionHandler in more detail.

Spring 3 MVC Exception Handlers

The majority of the Spring 3 error handling sample code that I’ve come across only ever seems to give the simplest overview of its usage, yet how we handle errors is, some would say, more important than how the normal code works. This was borne out the other day when I came across a simple ‘GOTCHA’ in a Spring 2 error handler that brought a whole website down and almost killed the server, but more on that later.

Today’s blog examines the scenario of creating a simple Spring 3 servlet exception handler using the @ExceptionHandler annotation.

Unreachable Catch Block - A Most Unobvious Bug

Earlier today I was working on some HTTP comms code adding a few changes, which are of no consequence here. One of the things that the code did was to read data from a server and, if the read failed, then it re-newed the connection and retried the read. The code ran something like this: