Month: January 2012

Tested odoepner.github.io on all major browsers

I just tested my personal “résumé” – British folks would say “CV” – website at odoepner.github.io successfully on IE8, IE9, Firefox 3.6 to 9, latest and older Chrome versions, Opera 10 and 11 and Safari 4 and 5.1. It works on all browsers and looks fine.

You might wonder if I have all these browser installed? No, I don’t. I used the amazing browserling.com service that runs all the various browsers in virtual machines “in the cloud”, and embeds the UI in their website. Cool stuff and currently free for everyone to use!

One caveat with browserling.com is a tool called IETester that they use to emulate the ancient IE5.5 and IE6 browsers. Its seems to have bugs related to PNG graphics which prevented reliable testing. So if anyone out there still uses IE5.5 or IE6: Please visit odoepner.github.io and let me know if you can see the photo of me on the page with the transparency effect.

On the newer CSS3 capable browsers, my site now sports drop shadows and rounded corners, using border-radius and box-shadow.

I also tested W3C standards compliance (HTML5, CSS3) and all my pages did pass those tests as well, except for some stuff caused by bugs in the CSS3 validator at w3.org. What a nice way to end the computer oriented part of the day …

Maven integration (m2e) for Eclipse 3.7.x (Indigo)

Sonatype’s Maven integration for Eclipse (m2e) has been migrated to eclipse.org and is now available from the default update site for Indigo.

This means that you no longer have to add any Sonatype update sites as mentioned on the old (now outdated) m2eclipse site.

In particular, this also means that the old “m2e-extras” update site is obsolete for Eclipse 3.7.x and later. Things like WTP integration or Subclipse integration are now available as “m2e connectors” through Window – Preferences – Maven – Discovery.

All of this is very poorly (or not at all) documented on the new m2e home page and some people had problems with these changes.

Programming principles for Java methods

Topics I want to cover in the future about Java methods:

  • Minimalistic coding style [1] [2] [3] [4]
  • “Fail early” (or “fail fast”) principle [1] [2]
  • “Return early” principle [1] [2] [3]
  • Object creation methods (to allow final)
  • Type generic methods (process a T vs create a T)
  • Functional style: stateless static methods vs interfaces
  • Javadoc: On interface not implementation
  • Method naming guidelines
  • Strategy parameters (often anonymous interface implementations)
  • Exception handling methods (try-catch-finally, throwing exceptions)
  • How to avoid setter/getter madness
  • Method chaining API style (static factory method, builder methods)