Blog

We recently had a tech talk about scalability as it pertains to developing web applications. Many best practises were discussed including load balancing, clustering, highly-available databases, eventually consistent application designs. In most web applications, the proportion of dynamic requests (application logic) to static requests (images, javascript, css, html, flash) is usually quite low. As a result, [...]
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Over the past 4 months I have intermittently been looking into the use of the Mulgara RDF triple store. Mulgara is an open-source RDF triple store that boasts to be able to handle up to 7 Billion nodes and was developed some big players in the semantic web space (Zepheira, Topaz and Fedora Commons). My [...]
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Recently I’ve been working on our in-house open source project, Tequila. It is a RESTful web service framework, and was lacking some familiar rendering capabilities out of the box. (See http://tequilaframework.org/ for project details). The formats that we thought may be useful were XML, JSON, and RDF, and so I set out to provide these [...]
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We use Spring quite a bit. In one project we use Spring MVC (I won’t get into a rant about whether that’s a good thing or not) and rightly or wrongly we use Spring themes within our UI. Yes I know JSP based UIs are so last century but sometimes if the shoe fits … One [...]
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Most Java applications will need some context specific configuration when deploying to a certain environment. This configuration could be username, password and JDBC URL for a specific database configuration or the details of an SMTP server for java mail deployments amongst others. There are many ways to to provide runtime configurations for Java applications. For web [...]
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