I recently came across this Java code snippet we created for Open-Tides and still find it very useful in developing flexible and dynamic applications.

So, why is there a need to retrieve values using reflection? The answer is simple – to allow your application rules to be configurable through the database.

With the growing projects, we’ve decided to upgrade our test servers to a production grade server and setup virtual machines within the server. This move really makes sense because instead of allocating a workstation for each project as test machine, we are cutting it down into one server with multiple test VMs.

While there are a number of resources on the net talking about converting images to tiff in Java using JAI, I wasn’t able to come across one that works on a Mac. JAI is a separate download from the JDK and unfortunately, there are no mac version of JAI that can be downloaded from the Sun site. Upon reviewing the jar files included in OSX, I found…

Why I Choose Ivy? The main thing I like about Ivy is its simplicity. You can use Ivy with only ant installed on your system (and of course, java). This means that you don’t need to download any Ivy related libraries or when using eclipse, no plug-in is needed. You can run everything using ant, from installing the ivy library to downloading the dependencies.

We’ve been using Continuum for quite some time now. While Continuum does seem to do a good job managing our builds, its limited support for JUnit Test reports made us evaluate an alternative, Hudson. Hudson is the new guy on the block, aside from cool icons and more intuitive interface, this tool seems to be quite competitive and feature-packed.

A requirements document is a very powerful tool if used properly. This maybe the most hated task of developers, yet it is essential. As the saying goes – “Do the right things, then do things right“. Requirements documentation helps ensure that developers are doing the right things, before they do it right. Although new methodologies [...]