How To Read A Maven Plugin Documentation

I recently came along a tutorial that describes "How to skip Maven unit test example". The author certainly had the best intentions - but finally he messed things up. This would not have happend if he had a look at the plugin documentation. If you once understand how to read it - plugin usage will be simple.

Software deserves documentation

Building software is a tough process. A lot of disciplines are involved to specify the requirements, to define the software architecture, to manage the data, to test, to integrate and to run the software and possibly to do a lot more thinks. Different processes - from waterfall to agile - try to handle these tasks in different ways and they produce different documentation artifacts.

Java Mission Control - (yet) another JVM monitoring tool included in the JDK

Oracle launched Java 1.7 update 40 on Sep 10, 2013. This version includes the Java Mission Control JVM monitoring tool.

After having a look at the demo I thought it would be a good idea to test the tool myself.

Java Code Conventions from the last century

I find it very helpful that Java Code Conventions exist for a long time now. They really "improve the readability of the software, allowing engineers to understand new code more quickly and thoroughly" (from the Code Conventions web page).

But while the Java language evolves the code conventions remain the same. Since the Java Code Conventions were last updated in 1999 several new Java language features were introduced including lambdas in the upcoming version of Java 8.

My Technology Radar

ThoughtWorks published a recent version of their Technology Radar these days and Neil Ford did some explanation on it with the recommendation to "Build Your Own Technology Radar".

I thought this is quite a good idea and so I wrote it down. Keep in mind that I am a Java backend developer so the topics that appear in this radar are affected by this.

Using Apache CXF SOAP service with customized JiBX databinding

This post gives a brief overview on how to build an Apache CXF SOAP service with JiBX databinding.

Apache CXF is an open source services framework that helps building JAX-WS and JAX-RS web services. JiBX is a XML binding tool for Java. To understand the post it is necessary to be familiar with Apache CXF and JiBX.

Monitoring Windows Tomcat Service with Java VisualVM(and how I finally failed)

Local Java Applications that are running as a Windows Service can not be monitored with Java VisualVM without some extra efforts. I recently tried to monitor a Tomcat service but I could not find it after starting Java VisualVM. I wondered what was wrong and found the best answer in an old Netbeans Profiler Blog post: "Monitoring Java Processes Running As a Windows Service". The reason why I did not see the Tomcat Service in the application tree was: