Accumulation of Win

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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Seriously. W.T.F.! Why are Apple Fanboys™ so afraid of open systems? Blogs and tweets are full of hate against open systems now. Did i miss on something that changed lately? Especially with the rise of Android (which just surpassed sales of the iPhone™ this year in Switzerland) the iPhone™ users seem to start to panic. Stop that! Why panic?! Just choose which phone works best for you! Is using the best phone on the market suddenly a sacrilege? Reminds me pretty much of some more radical religions… Why do you think people start switching to something like Android?  The iPhone™ is just perfect, right? No, it is not! And before you can even type a comment: no, the Android is not perfect either!

So what is it then? It’s not the slicker user interface! Not that the UI is that bad on Android, but to be honest the apps on iPhone™ just are a bit more sexy. No, I believe it is the fact that users realize that open stuff does give you some freedom and responsibilities – both of which getting taken away from people more and more in all aspects of life. Here is a list of things i believe are the most important reasons users start switching from iPhone™ Religion to Freedom, I mean… Android now:

1. A lot of apps which are available on both phones are either cheaper or even free on Android
2. You (as the user) are not forced to give your identity to anyone on Android
3. You can choose the source of your apps on Android, on iPhone™ there is only the App Store™, which is heavily observed and controlled by Apple™
4. You can choose the hardware that you like the most (for example do you prefer softkeys or keyboard, you want more battery life or 20cm HD display, you like to fold the phone somehow to cover the display? You want it to come slim or in cubes? Round or edgy? European or Asian?)

Please follow a clockwise path through the Temple™ while gently touching each of the relics on the tables in order to receive your personal blessing from Our Guru™.

Just recently the Apple Fanboys™ among my friends started complaining about the huge number of phones available with Android. I must admit that a lot of things to choose from might be overwhelming especially if you are not very informed in that particular area of expertise, but on the other hand it’s also not that difficult to browse some forums, go to a store and listen to the experts there and then just choose (!) a phone. In fact, you can choose depending on your taste or experience with other phones before – and it is not dictated to you what you should like from now on. By this process, some phones get more popular than others and those are the ones that evolve. Good concepts are taken over to the next generation of other phones as well, the rest dies out (i must admit, maybe too slowly but they die out).

It’s called diversity and it’s a good thing! Evolution has been succesfully doing that for millions of years! Adapting to requirements (in this case yours, the user) and getting better in each iteration.

But actually i am not in the mood to start a discussion on intelligent design (Steve Jobs™) vs evolution (Linux) – No question about it: I definitely want to take part in evolution (not get dictated a design) and nothing is going to change that right now. Stop complaining, switch phones or don’t, but go back to your Apple Store Temples™ and pray that after the evolution your species is not becoming the target of iXtinction™…

After Elephants Dream now this is another amazing short-film made using the open source tool blender, funded by the Blender Foundation. Production started last yeear in may and it has been released on 27. September this year at the Netherlands Film Festival (30. September online). I dont want to talk about the level of detail, the story or anything because just the fact that i post it should tell you that i love it – i think its worth to watch the 15mins just for yourself.

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

(via Asem)