Spartan Java

In case you are not doing it already, using asynchronous logging is generally a good idea. You don’t want your application to slow down if the server IO is a little behind flushing all that logging to the filesystem. By making it asynchronous your application can continue running without having to wait for the log lines to be written to their final destination.

My personal choice for Java logging is log4j, there are a lot of different frameworks (including Suns own logging API), but log4j works great and is extremely flexible.
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Back in April I wrote about Java to/from JSON serialization using XStream. After developing several AJAX applications using PHP and JQuery, I found that for a lot of scenarios a very simple approach is not only easy but very effective. In the case of PHP, you can effectively enable AJAX in your apps using jQuerys $.getJSON() and PHP json_encode().

I think we can use a very similar approach for Java web applications, enabling the use of AJAX through a very simple, elegant and extensible architecture, without the use of complex frameworks and extra configurations.
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I recently faced the problem of encrypting something in PHP and decrypting it using Java, this proved to be a little more of a challenge than what it initially seemed like. (continue reading…)

In our first installment we reviewed the front-end part of developing a paginated list using AJAX and Java. Now we will dive into the back-end of our pagination mechanism.
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You have to display a list of items in a web application, for each item allowing several operations (ie modification, deletion, etc.). The list can potentially be quite long, so pagination is required.
This scenario is common in backoffice web applications and public web sites, be it for administering information or as search results display, etc.

I’ll describe a simple way to implement a lightweight pagination engine that minimizes load on the server and gives the user the better experience possible. In this first installment I’ll focus on the front-end side, describing how to lay out the HTML, load it using AJAX and implementing the basic operations the user needs to navigate in your paginated list.
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If you ever deployed an application in a corporate environment, where an IT Security officer likes to keep a tight leash on who knows each system password, you probably needed to figure out some sort of security mechanism to store the passwords your application needs to connect to some database, access a web service, etc.

The most obvious and straightforward approach is to use a symmetric algorithm, like 3DES or AES, with an encryption password hard coded in your application to decrypt/encrypt the sensitive credentials. This has several cons:

1. Anyone with access to the source code of the application can decrypt all sensitive data, ie you can’t guarantee the security officer that someone from your team/company won’t abuse this
2. Anyone with access to the binary files of the application and a good de-compiler can decrypt all sensitive data, ie the security officer can’t even trust his IT production staff
3. To change the encryption password you have to re-deploy the application

And these are just the 3 most important issues that come to mind in 5 minutes…

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