AppDynamics is the rising star in the Application Performance Management sky.
Mirko gives a really good description why AppDynamics delivers the right solutions for todays distributed architectures in his Post “Troubleshoot Java in production – introducing AppDynamics Lite“. If you have not read it yet, head over to it now.
The key promise of AppDynamics is simplicity. Easy installation, easy operation and very fast results. In fact this sounds uncommon and hard to believe. But this is indeed the case, as proven by the following uncut screencasts.
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When developing a site in JSF many people like to use the Richfaces Framework. It is a pretty solid framework that comes wit a lot of functionality and nice components. It also comes with an Ajax framework called Ajax4JSF (also called a4j). When deploying this site then facing the Internet to production, many people start finding out that their applications eat a lot of memory, leading to unresponsive systems or OutOfMemoryError crashes. This is due to a design issue in JSF / A4J and cannot be easily fixed, but worked around. But lets start with an analysis of whats wrong with our otherwise nice application.
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There are many ways to do a good sprint retrospective, so we decided to try a new one every now and then.
This time we took the role of a painter, painting out impression of the last sprint into a formidable piece of art.
It might look strange at the beginning, but it quite nicely captures the impressions and feelings about the last iteration and provokes different thoughts than a simple list of items which could be improved. Lets see if we will use this method some time again.
As an example I am going to present you my painting. The ones from my team mates are interesting as well, but I would not dare to show them without permission 
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Not taking JavaDoc seriously can easily happen to any developer. Or maybe you haven’t read that specific part of it, you should better have read. If you did and cannot see a problem locally, you might be tempted to ignore it.
Here is an often ignored part from java.text.SimpleDateFormat JavaDoc:
* Date formats are not synchronized.
* It is recommended to create separate format instances for each thread.
* If multiple threads access a format concurrently, it must be synchronized
* externally.
Perhaps that warning isn’t strong enough, because it reads: “It is recommended”.
This leads to this highly dangerous line of code I have seen in almost every project and is likely to produce hangs in concurrently accessed code.
private static final SimpleDataFormat DATE_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy.MM.dd");But it gets worse with System.gc(). (read more…)
We at codecentric have hundreds of automatic builds run every day, sometimes they … fail. This post is not about lame excuses. “nah the build shouldn’t fail, that was a trivial change…” does not count. But there are situations where a build fails because … well nobody really knows.
Some people say: cosmic rays! But we know that is not true. To efficiently utilize a CI system without the need to troubleshoot a long time here some common issues we encountered and ideas how to mitigate them.
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I admit, this post is a bit “off-topic”. Recently we migrated this blog from using qTranslate to WPML for publishing in German and English. Main reasons were much better updates and a cleaner separation.
But one feature was missing because of that: We want to have comments from both languages below the postings (which are now two posts, where they have been one before). WPML doesn’t support this out of the box, but we were able to do this easily ourselves.
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