Find Bugs

Highly recommend findbugs , we’ve been using it at work for a week or so and it finds lots of bad practices and naive code. Like me, in the last post here, it does’t like returning null all the time either. It recommends empty strings or empty arrays. Can run as a GUI, command line or Eclipse plug-in. We are going to write a batch file to integrate it into our source code control system and make it part of the code audit process as things are checked in.

Hibernate

Good tool , but I wish they’d stop trying to push EJB with it. Nasty dead technology that hurts to use.

Better Faster Lighter Java

Recommend this book . Buy it if you are doing anything with Java. I think the content is probably OK for non-techies as well, at least the first half of the book.  One of the authors wrote Bitter Java and Bitter EJB. These people know what they are talking about. I might even buy the pragmatic book on JUnit.

Exception handling in Java

Still trying to find a good clean way of handling exceptions. I remember reading something about Bruce Eckel of Thinking in blah (replace blah with C++ or Java or whatever) fame. TIJ is worth downloading and having around. I need to find some time to do some digging. Of course, there’s the obvious – just use Ruby on Rails and pass exceptions through to the flash handler, Struts does something similar when every exception has’t been eaten by a catch to be fair. Not sure that RoR is prime time yet. Some folk have told me that Rails does’t scale, but I do wonder if that’s the older version that’s now defunct. I can’t see why it wo’t, particularly if you are deploying under Apache.

Spiritual stuff

Highly recommend Living without Regret. About half way through it. I’m beginning to refocus on my Buddhist beliefs after a long time in the wilderness. This book is a good reminder and has made me think about some things. I underlined the piece about the 4 gates to freedom (p25):

  • Forget the Past. Walk away from the past and treat it like a city you have visited a long time ago.
  • Participate in what is happening now, do not hold back.
  • Drop any sense of I.
  • Let go of all notion of the future

The last point is about focussing on staying in the now. I don’t think it means don’t plan or think about the future – just stop yearning about it and being unhappy. Treat the future like you treat the past. I need to talk to my Dharma teacher but it has been so long I feel embarrassed. I know he wo’t mind, but that does’t make it any easier for some reason.