The maven-dependency-graph plugin generates a transitive dependency graph of a maven project. This can be helpful in identifying unnecessary and unwanted dependencies.

The plugin generates a graphml file that can be viewed using a tool like www.yworks.com/products/yed

In this blog entry, I present a maven plug in that generates an XMI model from a pom.xml file and it's dependencies. XMI is an XML standard most commonly used to represent UML models. Most professional modeling tools can read XMI files. The XMI itself is not directly a visualization of the dependencies, but with a decent modeling tool, all kinds of fancy visualizations are possible.

This article is a comparison of seven CPAN modules for extracting information out of the User-Agent string passed to web sites by browsers, spiders, and other software agents. These are useful when processing log files, to produce analytics, and other purposes. You may even use it to change your application's behaviour, but that sort of thing is frowned upon.

And then, in a sort of poetic irony that makes this story almost seem like it was pre-scripted to Teach us a Lesson, JAVASCRIPT succeeded in doing what JAVA had intended to do. Microsoft, Java, Sun, Netscape, all were brought low by their hubris. But humble Javascript, the throwaway, 'you get 10 days to make this', blink-tag-replacing runt of a language was able to sneak onto every computer in the world thanks to its clever disguise. Servers are written in Javascript. Databases are built to talk Javascript. The people who build browsers and operating systems move heaven and earth to make Javascript just a tiny bit faster. Java's still out there, of course. In various forms. It probably makes sure your account is updated when you pay your water bill. It's making the underpinnings of your android phone work. It's figured out a way to play host to a zillion new trendier programming languages. But Javascript won the original prize.

CEDET is a Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools written with the end goal of creating an advanced development environment in Emacs. CEDET is hosted at Source Forge and is Free Software. You can view CEDET's CVS archive, project summary, and mailing lists at the CEDET Project page.

keymaster.js is a simple micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies.

Object-oriented programming has worked quite well – so far. [...] However, objects can deceive us. They can lure us into a false sense of understanding.

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This article discusses two examples, a Pacman game and a soccer simulation where antiobjects are employed as part of a game AI called Collaborative Diffusion. In Collaborative-Diffusion based soccer the player and grass tile agents are antiobjects. Counter to the intuition of most programmers the grass tile agents, on top of which all the players are moving, are doing the vast majority of the computation, while the soccer player agents are doing almost no computation. This article illustrates that this role reversal is not only a different way to look at objects but, for instance, in the case with Collaborative Diffusion, is simple to implement, incremental in nature and more robust than traditional approaches.

If there's one point that we want to communicate to the world, it's that SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more. Ten years ago it might have been true, but it's just not the case any more. You too can afford to enable HTTPS for your users.

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

There are two important reasons why bind_columns() is so awesome:

First, it greatly reduces the complexity of the code within the while() loop since you do not have to lookup in to an array ($sth->fetchrow_array()), de-reference an array ($sth->fetchrow_array()), or de-reference a hash-ref ($sth->fetchrow_hashref()). Instead the values themselves are available via appropriately named scalars.

Secondly, when using bind_columns() DBI is re-using the same scalars every time a fetch() is done which is much faster than creating an array or hash every fetch and typically causes the values to be copied one less time than normal. Benchmark it yourself – bind_columns() can make a huge difference when processing large sets of data.

Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes. The design allows for multiple calendar systems, while still providing a simple API. The 'default' calendar is the ISO8601 standard which is used by XML. The Gregorian, Julian, Buddhist, Coptic, Ethiopic and Islamic systems are also included, and we welcome further additions. Supporting classes include time zone, duration, format and parsing.