David Dossot

This blog is the formal introduction to the CRaSH console for Mule on which I've been working for the past month or so. I've decided to interview myself about it because, hey, if I don't do it, who will? What is CRaSH for Mule? It is a shell that is running embedded in Mule and that gives command-line access to a variety of Mule internal moving parts. It's built thanks to the excellent CRaSH project, a toolkit built by Julien Viet and sponsored by eXo Platform, which allows the easy creation of embedded shells. What can we do with it? Well, it's easy to find it out. Let's connect to CRaSH for Mule and ask for help: As you can see the range of actions include gathering information, like statistics and names, but also performing actions, like restarting a connector or even stopping the broker. Why is it better than JMX? Behind the scene CRaSH for Mule relies on JMX so ... (more)

My Final Word (Almost)

In "Final Parameters and Local Variables", Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz rants against the generalized used of the final keyword in Java code. For him, this is a "trend' and an "idiotic coding standard". I'm a firm believer of the complete opposite. As a software developer, I spend most of my time reasoning about code. Anything that can make this reasoning easier is welcome. Good practices like short methods and descriptive names fall in this category. I believe immutable variables do too. Immutable variables simplify reasoning because they ensure a stable state within a scope, whether it'... (more)

IDlight Launched!

I'm super excited to announce the launch of IDlight, my very first SaaS. I'll promote it further after the week-end, but I wanted my blog readers to be the first to know :) IDlight is an API that allows applications to retrieve public profile information. Among other things, it uses established and emerging standards like Webfinger , XRD and hCard to retrieve and parse public profiles. It unifies all the retrieved data under a unique schema, which makes it easy for applications to consume in a consistent manner. Please give it a try and share your feedback directly on idlight.net. ... (more)

Beware Phony Model Objects!

While I am refactoring huge amounts of code out of EJB2 (and trying not to break too much things), I have noticed a bad design pattern that is so noxious I thought I should blog about it. I call this the Phony Model Objects (PMO) antipattern. It basically amounts to sharing as first class model objects entities that should never be publicly exposed. These bad citizens may look inocuous at first glance. In fact, they oftentimes carry a deep functional dependency on the technical framework they depend from or are subject to change at a different pace than actual domain objects would ... (more)

Conversation with a Web Thread

DD: Hi Mr. Web Thread and thanks for joining us. WT: My pleasure. Do you mind if I stay in the pool? DD: Hmm? Sure, why not. So, can you please tell us how is your life nowadays? WT: Life has been pretty good. I have become very popular recently and came to perform some massive gigs in highly trafficked web sites. I really like this pool. DD: Mmhh, okay. How do you think developers treat you, nowadays? WT: Well, I am glad you ask. I think things have improved a lot, thanks to the emergence of concepts like continuations and AJAX. Still, I sometimes get badly beaten by some reckless cod... (more)