epmills.com

Note-to-self: Add Prefetch Technologies and Blog o’Matty to my list of feeds.

Also, check out Blastwave for OpenSolaris software.

I’ve been coming up to speed on Git and swallowing up every tutorial and blog entry I can find.

A few days ago, I ran into Jonathan Rockway’s very entertaining blog entry Git Merging by Example.  Great read and very instructive.  But I was particularly amused by Jonathan’s quote:

I love the “Merge made by octopus” message; I am seriously going to have a t-shirt made that says that. I like it when sea creatures help maintain my code.

You know what?  I love when sea creatures help out as well.  So, to that end I’ve constructed a little bumper sticker in honor of Git and Jonathan.  Here’s a preview:

If you’re interested in getting a hold of one of the bumper stickers, leave a comment.
Sorry it’s not a t-shirt, Jonathan, but maybe someday…

Note to self: check out AddAll for good values on books, both new and used.

From the “Huh, well that’s cool” department…

Today I figured how to run a background process from within a web application that utilizes Spring 2.0 or greater. At first, I investigated all sorts of ways of adding multithreading to a web application before stumbling upon this gem.

The key is that Spring provides a class, TaskExecutor, that allows you to run a background task by simply creating a class that implements the Runnable interface and hooking it up to your application with some simple configuration.

In short, as Spring allows Java web developers to program using POJOs and not against a set of interfaces, TaskExecutor and its cohorts allow us to do background processing using simple classes instead of forcing us to handle the ugly details of multithreading and synchronization ourselves.

Thanks, Spring dudes! Once again, you save the day.
See Chapter 23 of the Spring Framework documentation for more information.