IntelliJ IDEA is a great development environment. I enjoy it very much. It complements the OS of pleasure, Linux. I mostly the Ubuntu distro or a derivative. Here's a easy way to get yourself an IntelliJ launcher so you don't have to run the bin/idea.sh file if you don't want to.As a note: I'm still...

With the advent of mobile devices, tablets, and screens attached to your toaster, we as web developers -- er, ninjas -- can no longer be ok with creating markup and styles that only appear properly in a traditional desktop environment. Well, I guess we could, but we'd soon be defeated by much more g...

If you've created an internationalized website lately, you've probably implemented some sort of language chooser widget in your site ui to allow your users to indicate which language they would like to see content displayed in. What I often forget is that the user may have already made this indicati...

Unit testing is a required part of a healthy software development lifecycle. Business logic in MarkLogic Xquery needs the same insurance of superb testing as any other language.Principles: Come learn the motivation for unit testing and how test-driven development can increase your productivity writi...

Around the office, when someone security-minded finds out that I instant message (IM) over Pidgin (using Google Talk's service), there tends to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, because I am chatting in clear text over the wire. I am encouraged to use a clunky, Windows-only, proprietary, corporate, ...

One of the worst things to debug can be something that works just fine in your local development environment but does not work in a deployed environment. If you deploy to Tomcat, you can debug it remotely. If you use IntelliJ IDEA, you can do it with style.IntelliJ makes it easy. First, you want to ...

Recently, I've been working on a project where I've tried to use AES encryption for the first time. I didn't have to implement it myself, thank goodness, but I still ran into a few snags. Perhaps you can avoid my pitfalls and rise to new greatness on the peaks of glory and fortitude! This article ti...

By default, Java has a limit on the length of your encryption key. The limit, by default 128-bit, seems a little small and dated. So, let's break through that glass ceiling! With the hammer of Thor!I'm currently trying to do 192-bit AES encryption. So, I need to do a few things to get around this na...

With few exceptions, it seems that when a developer puts a iframe on his page, he wants it to be seamless on his page. In other words, he doesn't want the viewer to know that it's actually an iframe. To that end, there are a couple of things you can do to make the iframe virtually invisible.The main...

Have you ever needed to know the location of the actual file that houses the code that's currently executing? Well, if you have then you're not alone. I have been there myself. The answer might not be as interesting as some of life's deeper mysteries unveiled, but I was excited about it nonetheless....

There is an epic balancing act in software today, fought between customization and convention. When to build, when to buy? When to create new solutions or reuse those already created? What are the pros and cons to either? I don't think that there is a quick answer that is going to always be true for...

How do you log into a MarkLogic application to run as a user besides the default app server user? Use xdmp:login(), baby! User/role management can be awesome -- when it's done and coded. For now, let's sing out a few important things to remember about xdmp:login() and all its hidden secrets.My voice...

When a person looks at an Xquery module import, ... um, sorry... he usually gets distracted by something else before he can get to the semicolon at the end of the statement. They're seriously long! Few are the files in which one-line imports adhere to an 80 character width limit. Read on for my othe...

Jquery, Ajax, Json, Django -- this is quite a laundry list of technologies. In fact, it's pretty much the whole stack: client tech, server requests, over-the-network data format, and a backend app server. In the following slidedeck and example code, we're going to touch on the whole stack and not ge...

Sometimes you want to ensure that your xml document matches a given schema (xsd). Xquery on MarkLogic gives you a few tools to do this. If you want to validate your xml against an xsd, read on fair reader.First of all, you need an xsd schema to show the database what you expect your data to look lik...

Recently, we've been working on writing an API using xquery. We have wanted to make the API as solid as possible, since we're putting the brunt of the complexity of our system into this module of code. What might typing our parameters and return types give us? We are hoping for safety and readabilit...

I recently rebuilt my dev box into a Windows 7 environment, coming from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. The reasons were varied, and most weren't very significant at all. Perhaps I just needed another beast to tame. And an OS can be quite a beast. But, since I've switched to daily dev on Windows 7, I've be...

Jquery has made developing javascript fun and enjoyable. It is a fantastic library that essentially allows the creation of library extensions on top of it via plugins. Jquery plugins are surprisingly easy to write and elegant to read and use. Here are a few tips on where to find good plugin candidat...

The spectre of webdav has again appeared before me. This time's it's on Windows. My last experience on webdav was in the dojo of Linux. Now, my Linuxy nun chucks aren't quite as deadly. I must tame this beast. Here's a Windows-webdav must.Disable Internet Exporer 8's automatic proxyIf you don't do t...

Barriers are created all the time on software projects (by organization layout, role definition, project management, or indiscriminately) that keep developer knowledge separate. Sometimes these barriers are referred to as silos. We can create better teams and products for our organizations if we can...

In Agile software development, an iteration is a time period of work, where the full software dev cycle is completed. Iterations are iterative, done over and over again. And yet, many project teams find making the most of each iteration challenging. On my current project, I feel like an important pa...

Recently, I had the opportunity to look at a set of user stories on an upcoming project and apply a high level estimate to each. These estimates were going to provide a starting point for determining project timeline and schedule. Every time I'm presented with a request for estimation, I shiver a li...

Say words like generics, enums, or interfaces, and you've immediately transported to the realm of conjured whirlwind sandstorms and curved-sword-weilding assasins. Well, I guess we're going there, because I think this is pretty cool. Plus, undocumented, or at least un-reiterated to myself, and later...

For someone who spends mucho time daily on the interwebs, being able to jump around quickly is important -- both for focused productivity and ADD-inducing web surfing. Bookmarks have long facilitated savings your place on the web for a future return, but there are a few enhancements to the regular v...

It seems that in the IT, there are many, many conferences offered every year that people are invited to attend in order to glean something of use. Which are the good? Which are the bad? There are a few points that may make a differentiation.My IdealLocal venue - so I don't have to travel -- or a war...

My first xquery experience has been on the MarkLogic platform. The project that we just released was written entirely in xquery and on that platform. As our site continues to gains popularity, we continue to realize how little about xquery we knew or know. Sometimes and in some places, the site is j...

Jquery plugins are a joy to use, and they are surprisingly easy to write. Everyone that writes lots of Jquery code should seek to take potentially-resuable functionalities of code and put them into a nice, compact plugin. In the app I've been working on, we have a lot of user-generated content that ...

Jquery gives a great, easy-to-use mechanism for extending its API and creating your own plugins. For stuff that looks like it could be useful generally, you should really try to put it into a nice little plugin package. For submit buttons, there is a general thought that they shouldn't be clicked tw...

PNG was a file format that, among the original reasons for conception, was created to show the same color over different computers, with different OS's, and browsers. To this end, gamma, or lighting, correction was added. While solving the original problem, a new, bigger, badder problem was created....

Jquery and other sweeto js frameworks have some awesomeness to help you change the css classes of various elements on the page with ease and grace. They have some very convenient functions to add and remove classes. These are uber-useful and highly recommended for saving you precious time and gigawa...