carcassi's blog

Dealing with real-time data in UIs (and others)

I've been working for a number of years now in the NSLS-II Control System group, creating tools that hook up to the control system.

Generics puzzle

Running integration tests and unit tests separately in Maven

If you, like me, need to build libraries that need to be tested against a live server (integration tests), here's what you can do.

Applets/JavaFx in OpenSocial/iGoogle (and bugs that need to be fixed...)

I have started to look for some framework to put together in the same web page different contributions from loosely coupled applications.

How to prevent an applet from being silently closed (with unsaved data)

It is generally a good idea to ask the user before closing an application without saving the data. If you deploy an applet, the situation is even worse: the user may get distracted, follow some link, forget what he was doing, and close the whole browser without realizing he closed the applet too. Fortunately, it's very simple to tell the browser to display a warning.

Two problems with generics in Java

Since generics were out and I started using them, there were always a few cases in which I couldn't make them do what I wanted. I always thought it was my problem, and that I didn't understand what was going on... Turns out: it's not. There are at least two things that are implemented in a way that break what I thought were very safe expectations.

Building a fluent API (internal DSL) in Java

In this post I am going to sum up things I have learned while creating a fluent API (or internal DSL) in Java. I'll talk about the search API I created for my current position: it's not a toy problem, it's a real problem, which has a significant amount of complexity. Because of that complexity, you get to see techniques and ideas that you don't usually see in toy examples.

Simple guide to checked exceptions

While much have been written on checked vs unchecked exceptions, I found very little practical, down to earth, advice on how and why to use them. Here are my thoughts after years of rumination.

Java plug-in wish list: JVM scope

The second generation plug-in really made me reconsider applet as a viable deployment method (though people who are not aware of the improvements think I am crazy). For the project I am working on (http://irmis.sourceforge.net/) we decided that the user interface would be a series of applets that communicate through a Java API to a REST Web Service.

Scripting Java with Javascript: trapping Swing events

A few months ago, we had to decide which technology to use for the front end
gui of our project. We ended up
choosing Swing/Applets due to the progress that they both have done in the past
couple of years.