Stephans Blog

Using Groovy MarkupBuilders spoiled me for other ways to create HTML pages from code. Others think the same. But in some organizations you have to use Java and can’t use Groovy - at least when you can’t sneak it in.
So I tinkered around in Java to see what’s the best MarkupBuilder I can write […]

People most of the time use business logic in their templates, be them JSP, Velocity or Rails. They confuse business logic and UI logic. Those are two different things. I always found it very useful to make UI logic explicit and only have UI logic in my JSPs or templates. So when using IF JSTL […]

With all the innovation in annotations, see Web Beans or Google Guice, just a saturday morning idea: Why not drop the annoying get* convention and replace it with some annotations? The API wouldn’t be as short, but the usage of a getter looks nicer and more fluent. And of course the IDE could hide the […]

When reading about reflection on the beautiful code website I thought about solving some problems with reflection and finding new solutions to old problems. One problem is boring code when writing a copy constructor. A copy constructor is a constructor which takes another object and copies it’s attributes. This is often useful when copying objects […]

As several people pointed out in my last post that my version of reversing a string with recursion wasn’t tail recursive despite the fact that I wrongly thought it was. Not that it’s important in the context of a job interview for Java developers, whether one uses tail recursion or not. But I thought nevertheless […]

Someone has read my post about interviewing where I wrote about String reversal, but got it totally wrong. Ironic. He didn’t show much attention to detail, took quotes out of context, put things into my mouth that I’ve never said and concluded “Want a job? Reverse a string. The sad state of job interviews today.” […]

Lately I wrote about interview questions, specifically about asking how to write a String reverser method. When searching for a job as a PR-consultant my girl friend was sent a PDF to answer questions - which I guess the company uses to gather fresh ideas - and she had to send the answers back written […]

Interviewing developers for a programming job is hard and tedious. There are some excellent Guides, like the Joel Guerilla Guide to interviewing, but in the end you need to decide yourself to hire or not to hire. To get a quick idea about their programming abilities I have considered asking the String reverse question. Others […]

Gmail seems to have increased the size of my mailbox with their recent update. Nice, thanks.

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Lots and lots of people lament the explicit type system in Java, either they are dynamic ducks or inference intellectuals. Taken from the Boo manifesto:
“Nothing more tiresome than writing the same type name over and over just to make the compiler happy. I’m not talking against static typing in general (boo is statically typed), […]