First glance at Scala

Today I took a first glance at Scala at the Paris JUG monthly meeting. Scala is a programming language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
I have not compiled a single line of code in Scala yet but I saw enough code to get a decent idea of it.
When you think Scala, think about the functional programming paradigme. A function can be a value.
The first speaker, Sader Drobi, showed us a few examples of code to illustrate the advantages of passing a function as a parameter.

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DAO design pattern in a session bean ?

I have recently been challenged by a colleague with a .Net background about the way I sometimes use session beans in web applications. Indeed, I like to implement DAOs as session beans. Some people argue that it’s best not to directly implement CRUD methods in session beans. The main reason being that they prefer to … Read more

Design prototypes and more with Axure

I heard about a tool which seems to be helpful to design prototypes that help design web applications when functionalities are still not final.

You drag and drop components and generate prototypes or specifications (word), with no programming. The generated code of the prototype is HTML and JavaScript.

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Book review : JBoss AS 5 Development

Before reading this book, I already knew the author, Francesco Marchioni, because of his web site –  http://www.mastertheboss.com/ – which is dedicated to JBoss. So it was with enthusiasm that I wished to get a copy of the book and I was not disappointed. Indeed the book is like the web site : practical, rich in samples and useful information.

Generate a report from an SQL Server 2008 Anaysis Services OLAP cube with iReport and JasperReports

Software versions that i used :

iReport 3.6.1
JasperReports 3.7.1
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
Tomcat Web Server 6.0

I was recently tasked to generate a report through JasperReports/iReport
with data coming from an OLAP cube stored in SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services.

It was rather tricky because it seems there is no default Query Executer Factory that can handle MDX
through the XML/A protocol for SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services.

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Executing MDX queries against an SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services database in Java

If you are looking for a quick way to connect to an OLAP / multidimensional database like
SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, here is the procedure.
Be aware that you need to set up XML/A HTTP access for SQL Server Analysis in IIS first.
Basically you need to load a component that enables data exchanges between a client and SSAS.

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I am not a GAE virgin anymore

Well, I do not have much spare time to take a deep look at all the new technologies that come around but i always try to check at least the minimum. Google App Engine offers a nice tutorial : http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/gettingstarted/ I did not run into any major problem. The result is a very basic and … Read more

Google Wave = skateboarding

Despite attending a presentation with a live demo at the Paris JUG this week, I think this picture sums up well the idea I have about Google Wave at the moment. And that most people have. 😀

Scrum applied to a POC project

I just finished working on a short project where for the first time I used the Scrum agile method. We needed to create the very first pages of a portal based on a Liferay, a free and open source enterprise portal. Due to the very short time we had (3 weeks) and which is inherent … Read more

VMware virtual machine with Windows 7

I have been using VMware workstation and VMware player lately. I am really impressed and it is amazing to see the benefits it can bring. For instance one can load a machine running with all the software needed to do web development. Today I created a virtual machine from an iso file containing Windows 7, … Read more

Rich Internet Application Statistics

This Flex app is an interesting one. It shows the percentages of deployment of the main RIA plugins (Flash Player for Flex, Silverlight Player for Silverlight, JRE for JavaFX), in real time, based on about 41 sites, during the last 30 days. Apparently, regardless of the OS and the browser, almost 70% of the desktops … Read more

Scalability (with Terracotta)

Last night, I attended a meeting about Terracotta and the presenter was the creator, Ari Zilka. Among his slides was what i found an interesting slide about Terracotta’s advantages : scalability and availability. I reproduced it here. Scalability is a term often used in the computing area. Writing data in memory is less scalable than … Read more