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Showing posts from 2010

My issues with Spring

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One of the things I've had to come to turns with as a professional Java developer, is navigating the massive chaos of frameworks out there. It doesn't really matter which corner of the development stack we're talking, in Java we're sure there won't ever be just one official standard; if we're lucky, we can identify a state-of-the-art de-facto standard and if we're *truly* lucky, our choice will remain a good one for longer than a few years. One of those de-facto standards appears to be Spring . There is little doubt, that IoC ( Inversion of Control ), or more specifically DI ( Dependency Injection ), can be a great tool to decouple concrete dependency layers. However, in my opinion Spring introduces just as many problems as it solves, and here's my take on why. Everything and a Kitchen Sink While Spring does address IoC/DI, it also does a gazillion other things as well - as evident by looking at the Spring maven repo . On one of the project I was on, my

Android and task killers: Don't

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There's an awful lot of misconceptions regarding Android and multitasking out there. When you read help forums and the issue of performance tweaking comes up, a very popular answer is to use a task killer to close unwanted apps. Even venerable tech people like TWiT's Leo Laporte appears to have acquired this habit. I reckon that these people have no idea how Android actually works and/or are making erroneous assumptions pulled over from the world of traditional desktop computing. In the best case, nothing happens when you kill an application except you spend time manually doing something that would otherwise have been done for you automatically at a later time. Worst case, you crash an application or get up too late tomorrow because your alarm didn't go off. How Android does things At an architectural level, applications running on Android are actually not supposed to halt its process in the traditional sense as we are used to from most desktop operating systems. When yo

Android cubicle figure

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So my girlfriend, who is very artistic, has been doing some special clay modeling lately. Since I'm the kind of guy who likes to have lots of geek cubicle stuff (even if I do not work in a cubicle), what better to ask for than an Android figure. And lo and behold, this time I got what I asked for... hope this is a good indicator for the new year. Cute eh?