In January we started on an ambitious project called “the Strap-on project”. The infantile name aside this project is about rewriting our entire front-end tier using Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS), written by Nicole Sulivan, as the secret sauce to achieving the desired results. Why OOCSS? At FINN we ha...

Ever needed to profile the tree of JSPs rendered server-side? Most companies do and I’ve seen elaborate and rather convoluted ways to do so. With Tiles-3 you can use the PublisherRenderer to profile and debug not just the tree of JSPs but the full tree of all and any view templates rendered whether ...

One of the ways of getting inspired and educated about technology here at FINN is through our “Tech-Dag” (which means something along the lines of Day of Technology). This year we have a packed program which consists of workshops and a bunch of lightning talks. Workshops Clojure workshop Alternative...

Let me begin with an example, from every days scenario at work. You are at the end of the sprint and have some errors reported. You think that the quality of code and tests are good enough for release. Based on this the reported bugs the failures are minor and won’t have big impact after fixing them...

We’re proud to see a contribution from one of our developers end up in the Tiles-3 release! The front-end architecture of FINN.no is evolving to be a lot more advanced and a lot more work is being done by client-side scripts. In order to maintain first time rendering speeds and to prevent duplicatin...

When a developer is finished with a development issue, it must be tested. People often think the goal of testing should be to find all the errors. Well, it’s not entirely realistic. Actually, it’s impossible! Despite the title of “quality insurance” testers can never really ensure level of quality, ...

We have finally made an effort to put some of our repos out on GitHub under the finn-no organization. It is not exactly filled with stuff right now, but we aim to put a lot more of our libraries and tools out here. Currently there are a few repositories out there: eventHub Awesome Board[Gone] eventH...

The annual Smidig conference in Oslo, Norway was held last week and as usual people from FINN.no made a big contribution to the conference. We hade three lightening talks during the two day conference and there were about ten attendants in total. This community event brings together newbies and vete...

FINN.no has recently released new pages for real estate ads. Larger images, broker business cards and tabs for additional information are some of the new features on this page. A long process of in-depth users interviews, workshops with real estate brokers, user testing of design sketches and severa...

If you’re a student or just someone who is looking for a job you might be wondering: “How could I get to work for FINN.no?”. One guy found an answer and is now one of the key developers on our iOS applications. We did an advert for summer interns last year and he was one of the people who came in to...

I was introduced to the World Wide Web back in 1995 while being a student at Molde College, Norway. What fascinated me the most was that I could learn how to create stuff for the web by just viewing the source code of other web sites. This blew my mind and since then I have built a career working wi...

In the post Putting a face on quality we talked about how we wanted to bring our end users closer to our developers by visualizing tweets about our service. This was only one of many tasks we performed in order to get a better feel on how our work effects our users. In this post we’ll show you what ...

We have reworked our graded browser support matrix which was released last year. Following the Laws of Simplicity we reduced the complexity in order to make it easier for everyone at our company to understand. We cut a lot of the version number into targeting latest for browsers which are frequently...

Inspired by seeing how much fun and how much innovation is going on at hackatons all over the world we finally go round to hosting one ourselves. The first ever hackaton event at FINN.no was hosted on the 22-23. of june. At FINN.no we are accustomed to working in cross functional teams, so it was on...

The debate whether to use constructors, setters, fields, or interfaces for dependency injection is often heated and opinionated. Should you have a preference? The argument for Constructor Injection We had a consultant working with us reminding us to take a preference towards Constructor injection. I...

The topic of ensuring quality in the services we provide is a much debated topic in our industry [1]. It tends to focus upon things such as testing and how to best automate it to try and reach a state of zero defects. These initiatives are great and we should all pursue them in our daily work. These...

In a multi-tier application who can be responsible for XSS protection? Must security belong to a dedicated team…or can it be a shared responsibility? Today XSS protection is typically tackled by front end developers. Let’s challenge the status quo. New Applications vs Legacy Applications For protect...

As a professional web developer you should use the bleeding version of Google Chrome, so you’re prepared what your users will see a few weeks ahead. But the dev version tends to be a bit more buggy (naturally), and you have to test that your page works with both the beta and the stable version. Goog...

FINN.no are blessed to be based in the same country as one of the brightest young stars when it comes to testing in JavaScript and applying Test Driven Development: Christian Johansen (the poster above was used to promote the event). He works as a developer at Gitorious during the day time, but he a...

It’s easy to include a style sheet for small-screen mobile devices, but what if you specifically want to target touch devices. Then you also need to include devices with larger screens. The iPad has a resolution of 1024x768, but many desktop users also have this resolution, so you can’t just increas...

FINN recently created a position called Technical Leader which is going to be our champions of technical excellence. One of the objects for this two-day field trip was to get everyone in the same room and share ideas and challenges from a technological point of view. Quality does not cost … it pays ...

The title of this post is of course a blatant lie. Mobile development is nothing but pain from here until eternity (no, not really). But, luckily the brave developers at FINN.no aren’t scared of a little pain and therefor we decided to do a mobile development trippel header gig to showcase some of t...

Development at FINN.no was quick to jump on the Constretto library. It’s a great addition to any application making it easy to handle different environments and profiles with just the one build. When using Constretto at FINN.no one problem we found with the API is that it creates very verbose client...

Inspired by the kick-ass developers of Yahoo! and their work on Graded Browser Support (GBS) we at FINN.no decided to adopt graded browser support as a way to communicate what level of support we have for different combinations of browsers and platforms. Creating the support matrix FINN is the large...

This article has been rewritten for Tiles-3. tech.finn.no/the-ultimate-view-tiles-3/ A story of getting the View layer up and running quickly in Spring, using Tiles with wildcards, fallbacks, and definition includes, to use the Composite pattern and Convention over Configuration providing a minimal ...

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