How long does it take to compile? We don’t ask that. It would be absurd. The fact that people ask how long unit testing takes mean they see it as an optional cost to be incurred. What I want to know is why they don’t ask for a similar accounting of the cost of NOT [...]

As a moderator on the JavaRanch, I often come across posts asking how to reinvent features that are available in most application servers. In JDBC for example, I’ve had people ask how to implement their own database connection pooling and how to create their own JDBC driver. Often times the developer is trying [...]

One of my favorite, often least used, open source tools for Java/J2EE applications is the Cron Job scheduling tool Quartz. Anyone who’s ever administered Linux or a web server is probably familiar with creating and modifying cron jobs to run a process at a specific time of the day/week/month. For example, you may [...]