Last November 14-22, Ideyatech held a technical training class entitled “CMIS/SC2MS Platform Technologies”, the second of a three-part training program specifically designed to provide technical knowledge on operation and maintenance of case management systems developed by Ideyatech, Inc.

Cohesive, readable and expressive, easy to debug, refactor, enhance and easy to unit test. These are the qualities of good software code. However, there are factors which hinders most of us from achieving these. When a software is handed over to a number of developers over the years, code degradation happens.

Generic types added in JDK 5.0 provided enhancement to type safety in Java. For example in using Collections, generic types allow restricting the type the collection would contain as opposed to pre-JDK5 wherein collection classes accept anything that extends from java.lang.Object (which means almost everything!).

There are two types in Java Programming Language. The first is primitive type such as int, double, and boolean. The second is the reference type such as String, List, and Set. Every primitive type has a corresponding reference type, called a boxed primitive.

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.

“No Class is an Island” —Joshua Bloch. Have you encountered having duplicate values in a Set? How about adding an object to a list and then the list’s contains method say that it did not contain that object? How would you solve this? Where do you start tracing?

How can you ensure that during development, all developers works on the latest database schema to reduce code conflicts? And during production roll-out, how can you ensure that applications on different servers are compatible and consistent with their respective database schema?

After experiencing a number of production roll-outs, on both blade and rack mounted servers, I began to think about the advantages of one over the other. In general, blade servers sounded like a better approach, but it appears to be more of a marketing hype than reality.