Confessions of a Public Speaker

I am currently reading this book and I find it extremely good. Give it a try!

Luxembourg and Hotel California

One of my colleagues says that Luxembourg is like Hotel California- you can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave. It makes sense :-)

IPAD

Another revolution coming from Apple. It seems like a very interesting product and I believe it will get a strong adoption. I wonder how it is going to change the book market. Could it be than in few years no one will buy paper books anymore?

WebLogic- EJB3 uses Spring

WebLogic makes use of Spring in order to manage dependency injection between EJBs. Quite interesting approach, an EJB on top of Spring stack.

A Little Less Conversation

Joel Spolsky wrote one more interesting article about the risks of too much communication. Can be found here.

A tricky SQL question for an interview

When doing your next interview try to ask the result of the following boolean expression in SQL:

TRUE OR NULL
FALSE OR NULL
TRUE AND NULL
FALSE AND NULL

I can ensure you that a significant part of the interviewees will fail.

Fundamental Rights of the European Union- Article 3.c

Article 3.c states "the prohibition on making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain". Speaking deep down from my ignorance in terms of legal matters, I wonder how the legal prostitution in The Netherlands goes together with this article...

Java Posse- Holiday Special 2009/2010

The holiday special from the Java Posse is a must. There is not much about Java in this episode, but it is a excellent source of ideas about all sort of gadgets, books, etc. I just wish they would make this special before Christmas, so we could get some interesting ideas for presents.

And of course, as requested many times by a lot of people, we are still waiting on the special episode about books!

EJB4- One whish to the list

This is an old wish which unfortunately never got into the spec (I can only blame myself as I never submitted it to the spec work group). Why does a deployment descriptor has to be part of the EAR/JAR? Why not allowing the DD to include a reference to a second DD located somewhere else (filesystem, remote server, etc)? Alternatively we could say something like "find a DD with this name in the classpath and use it", avoiding the need of hard-code references to a file name.
I know that in theory having a self-contained EAR is a good idea. But more and more it is handy to change certain features dynamically without having to provide a new application file. Lets use interceptors as an example. One of the most common usages is to have a default interceptor which logs and measures any access to the EJBs. Most of the people do not want to go to production with such feature, nevertheless they want to be able to trigger it should there be an unexpected serious issue. Having an external DD would allow production support to easily activate/deactivate such feature. If a new application has to be deployed then there is a whole process of building it, deploying it, etc. More than that many companies have formal procedures which do not allow a new EAR to be deployed without certain quality validations that can take up to days. Of course some will say- "just create a properties file, stick a boolean there, make your interceptor look at that boolean, are you are done!", but I do not like such approach, the interceptor will still be used all the time, it just does not produce any output.
This time I promise I will be submit this idea as a proposal, as soon as I formalize it and there is a new EJB spec being written.

Right to the Integrity of the Person

Article 3.1 of the Fundametal Rights of the EU states that "Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity". Where do we draw the line of what is mental integrity? How many of us are under such a professional pressure, where there is no respect whatsoever for the mental integrity? I think modern societies are far from respecting one's mental integrity.

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

I was recently introduced to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. I am ashamed to admit it, I should have gotten acquainted with this 2 years ago, when the text was written, but it is better late than never.
It is interesting to go through each of one of these rights, and to note how some of them are clearly forgotten in some working environments. Lets for example start with the first one:

Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.

If we go to some of the poorest countries in the EU, we find plenty of people which have to work in the most unthinkable environments, forced to work in conditions which go beyond human dignity. So plenty of work to do in order to enforce right 1 at the work place!

EJB and Dynamic Dependency Injection

It is unquestionable that the more we get the more we want. DI brought EJBs into a whole new world. But what about support for DDI? Why do I need to say that I depend on a certain EJB with a certain name? I rather say I depend on an interface and during runtime I will give the name of the EJB implementing such interface. This would allow us to define the dependency depending on runtime conditions.