Developer Blog

Java/Scala and Highly Scalable Systems on AWS

Calling SOAP Web Services in Google App Engine

28 April 2009

We have taken the plunge and are begining to develop a couple of internal apps using GWT and Google App Engine (GAE) for Java.

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Public <=> Private DNS names in EC2

25 April 2009

Every instance in Amazon's EC2 cloud has both a public and a private DNS name. When dealing with my instances, I often find that I have one of these two names, but really want the other. For example, one of tools lists the status of our servers by their private DNS names (domU-11-22-33-44-55-66.compute-1.internal). If I need to log on to one of these machines to do something, I need to convert this to a public DNS name (ec2-111-222-333-444.compute-1.amazonaws.com). My solution so far to mapping between public and private DNS names has been to simply write down this information on a glass panel by my desk whenever I start an instance.

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IvyDE: Eclipse plug-in for Ivy

9 April 2009

If you're using Eclipse and Ivy (as we do here at Bizo), you definitely want the IvyDE plug-in. IvyDE will create a classpath container containing all of your Ivy dependencies, making it trivial to keep your Eclipse classpath synchronized with your ivy file.

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'On Demand' javascript reloading with jQuery

8 April 2009

So I was writing some "exploratory" javascript the other day. What I mean by "exploratory" is that I wanted to pull some data out of the DOM, but I didn't know the exact location of the data I wanted to retrieve.

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Another win for findbugs: is Math.abs broken?

7 April 2009

I was wrapping up some code today, and ran into a weirdly interesting findbugs warning:

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stupid simple xml parsing

3 April 2009

In the last few months, I've been doing a lot of XML parsing. It's been mostly small little parsers, in both java and python, trying to get some stats on different data sets. This is all on huge data sets, so streaming/stax type parsers. It's also kind of 3rd party data files, so of course the structure is crazy and weird :), or at least, I can't change it...

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Exposing SVN version and build time with Ant

30 March 2009

As a developer, I find that an application's most useful version number is its SVN version; once I have that number, I can head over to the repository and figure out exactly what code is running. This is extremely useful both during development (Did I upload the correct .war to my staging server?) and for ongoing maintenance (What version is running on this server that needs to be updated?)

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Dude. Sweet.

25 March 2009

Larry tipped me off to the new AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. This looks like it could be pretty awesome for integrating/viewing our EC2 instances.

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super lightweight cms

20 March 2009

We wanted to roll something out that would allow us to update some areas of our site more easily, and make the content a little more dynamic. Specifically, the News and Announcements page and the Behind the Scenes page.

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Contradictions

26 February 2009

So I've got a need to do some work in Rails. Since I've not really used it before, I decided to go through the nice tutorial at Rubyonrails.org. I'm running merrily along when:

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