The most interesting technical links I've encountered in April:

• Getting Started with Tdd in Java using Eclipse [Screencast] - you will see not only TDD in practices but also a number of best practices applied and some inspirational novelty (at least for me) ideas  such as creating one test class per test configuration (and thus multiple test classes for a single "business" class); I really recommend this even if you are not interested in TDD
• NoSQL links (as everybody these days, I'm also at least observing the NoSQL movement):
  • Why Twitter selected Cassandra (brought by the great myNoSql blog) - why they choose Cassandra over other alternatives and instead of the current solution of mysql with memcache
  • Cassandra at Digg: Looking to the future with Cassandra (9/2009) - why Digg considered switching to Cassandra (which they also did)
• Testing
  • Easy data-driven testing with Spock - the Spock framework based on the popular JVM scripting language Groovy (99% Java + 1000% added) introduces a custom domain-specific language (DSL), which makes testing of a method using different data incredily easy and readable, with all the power of Groovy at hand; see the post and you will see immediately what I mean

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My older posts are available on my JRoller blog
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File-based User Authentication under WebSphere 6

When developing a web application for the WebSphere Application Server you sometimes need to enable security because the application expects HttpServletRequest.
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I've decided to publish links to the most interesting blogs, articles and pages that I've stubled upon in a particular month. Enjoy the first dose! (In no particular order.)

I recommend the post 43 Essential Controls for Web Applications,which presents - with screenshots and short descriptions - the most used and useful javascript/ajax widgets for web pages, from the basic ones like auto-complete/suggestions and sliders through a calendar for less known yet very cool ones like sparklines. Read it to learn what's hot and you shouldn't miss in your application! (Warning: The number of widgets on a page is inversely proportional to its quality.)

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Enforcing a common log format with AspectJ

Andy Wilson has recently blogged about the
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Broken Eclipse shortcut under Gnome for Occurrences in File

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Some weeks ago the extremely useful features of Eclipse Open Type and Open Resource stopped working, throwing an uninformative  Error instead, no matter which version or JRE vendor. I was desperate. Until finally I found a bug regarding this issue
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Released DbUnit Test Skeleton 1.1.0 - also in Maven Central

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Colin Eberhardt, the co-author of the Simple Logging Facade, has written a very good article The Art of Logging, which should be a compulsory reading for every developer especially in the server side development domain. It's good both as an introduction as it covers all the important aspects and also for experienced developers because it has some very valuable insights.

Few ideas and sentences that really should be stressed:

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If you have an open-source project and want it published into the Maven Central repository - even if it itself isn't build with maven - to make it visible to all Maven users without any special effort (at least once you set everything up), read on.

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I needed to compile AspectJ classes (.java with annotations) with ajc and I wanted to have that integrated into the Maven build process. I tried several means, finally finding the one that worked.

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Did it ever happen to you that your logging didn't behave as expected? Here are some tips how to find out what's going on.

Commons-logging (since 1.1)

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The book Portlets in Action being written by Ashish Sarin, which I've already mentioned and which looks really promising, has been made available via the Manning Early Access Program. As of today there are two chapters available and you can read the first one "Introducing Portals and Portlets" for free.

What I find to be the most attractive features of this book is that it concentrates on the "new" JSR 286 also known as Portlets 2.0 and goes beyond teaching portlets with its intorduction of Spring MVC and Ajax libraries suitable for portlets.

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PatternTesting is a mature open-source project that enables you to automatically check at the compile- or run-time that architectural/design/implementation decisions are implemented and bad practices avoided in the code. The main differences from tools like FindBugs and PMD are that you can implement tests spanning multiple files (classes) and that aside of compile-time checks there are also run-time checks (using AOP with ApsectJ) to do things like "ensuring that there are no more than 10 calls to the database per user case" and providing better error messages in the case of e.g. IOException.
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Introduction

This blog describes my experience with using
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