2018 Mar. 14

Let's Encrypt now provides wildcard certificates

Josh Aas, ISRG Executive Director at ISRG, the entity behind Let’s Encrypt the free automated and open Certificate Authority announced that they’re now providing wildcard cerificates. While they had planned to do so starting in February, they had to postpone this feature due problems with their TLS-SNI domain validation that tied up a lot of their developer resources and prevented them from testing the ACME 2.0 protocol required for wildcard certificates.

2017 Mar. 15

Sipping a Mockito to the tune of Java 8

Testing applications that use Java 8 language features with a mocking framework that doesn’t offer an adequate support can be quit cumbersome, tiring and error prone. Each and every of these properties is something that you don’t want to list in relation to your tests. With Mockito embracing Java 8 in it’s current 2.7 version (and every other 2.x version), help is near, so it’s time to grab a (new version of) Mockito and relax to the tunes of Java 8.

2016 Dec. 19

EOTP (End of the Project) - Wicket-CRUDr

Meet the elephant in the room, wicket-crudr is pretty dead. After no commits for more than 2 years it still targets wicket 1.5, the latest version of wicket that I used. It still uses Java 7, which might be good for some years at least but I haven’t checked the dependencies in two years either. So after over 9000 lines of code, an oloh-estimated value just above of 100 thousand dollars and lots of fun, I’m officially abandoning the project. If anyone wants to continue and give it an overhaul, just drop me a line.

2016 Dec. 11

Hibernation seasons are over (for now)

So after about three years, I remembered that I have a blog out there that I haven’t been actually maintaining or contributing to all those years. When faced with the decision of either abandon ship or keep the stuff in a safe way, I opted for a forth variant, keeping the stuff in a safe place while still contributing to it. So the first step was to move everything out of my personal server so that possible future breaches wouldn’t spill out to that machine and the projects living there. The second step was to ditch serendipity as a blog software to reduce the number of active components and thus possible points of failure. Running a Java centered blog powered by PHP felt strange anyway. In the end that led me to github pages and a blog consisting of static pages provided by jekyll.

2013 Jan. 30

Automagic optimization in Java - Part II (Method Inlining)

One of the most intuitive optimizations the JVM performs is method inlining. It addresses two performance issues and if kept in mind might lead to a code that’s better structured and readable. Methods as a concept are quite expensive. To call a method, the JVM has to find the target for dynamic invocation, has to store the current scope on stack, has to jump to the method in question. After executing the method, the JVM has to retrieve the saved scope from the stack and resume working where it left of. Additionally method calls reduce the effectiveness of other optimization methods.