A Collosus of Genius

Are you a java web application developer and you are working with JBoss Seam? Ok, then you might be interested in the following JBoss Seam performance problems (and their solutions). If not you should seriously consider leaving this post! It is rather long and dry and might make you never consider programing with Seam EVER (which can also be a good thing, but I will leave this discussion for another post). In any case: You have been warned.

Soo… I have recently gained some experience developing a medium/large web application with Seam and I also discovered a couple of pitfalls you run into when using this framework, especially in terms of performance optimization. At some point, I had pages of just average complexity, loading in more than 17 seconds! In this post, I will go over each of the steps that i did to speed up those pages to 3 – 6 seconds. During my code analysis, I searched through a couple of Seam performance tuning pages out there, but for some reason they did not really provide me the tweaks or straight solutions I was hoping to find. Many of the tips I found sounded very reasonable, but when I applied them to my project, there was barely any change in Seam’s performance! That’s why I publish my own list of performance optimizations, which definitely had a visible impact at least on my code and hope I can help those among you, who find themselves in a similar position like me. And even if my performance tuning tips are not able to help in your particular case, at least you will learn how to identify performance problems in your Seam project with this post.

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If you have a wordpress blog (or any other kind of website), you might come across this problem some day: you want to fetch multiple RSS feeds and merge their entries in chronological order into one feed. Don’t panic, I might have found the solution for you. On my WordPress blog you can see I have RSS feeds for the blog posts, the user comments and now also the shoutbox entries. Most visitors were not aware of the different RSS feeds on my page (and who could blame them?), so I decided to combine them all into one big feed. Here is what you need to do…

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Some dude actually applied genetic algorithms (searching an optimal solution to a problem by evolution) to find the best build order to a Rush on Starcraft 2. And its amazing that the algorithm actually revealed such a tactic, that more astonishing “violates several well-known (and well-adhered-to) heuristics used by Starcraft players when creating builds” – which means it has not been that much investigated by players yet. Why is this amazing? Because in a quick video the tactics shows to be extremely effective – making the player win 17 out of 20 within the first few minutes…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1ucvJomlY

[via lbrandy.com]

In recent discussions about apple’s boycott of adobe flash on its iPad we heart about them praising the advantages of their alternative bet on HTML5. What exactly does that mean and does that really give you the ability to implement more interactive content without any plugins? I just came across this graphic which explains the main features of HTML5 and compares which browsers are supporting them.

via http://www.focus.com/images/view/11905/