Video Manipulation using HTML 5 and Javascript

Some funny stuff can be done using HTML 5, canvas elements and the video events API. In the following example we’re using these techniques to apply graphic effects to a video embedded in a HTML page.. The Goal Please take a look at the following screencast on YouTube to get an idea of what the final example looks like or just take a look at the demo page. As you can see a video is rendered and a clone is displayed with a strange swirl effect applied. ...

August 5, 2012 · 3 min · 636 words · Micha Kops

Integration Testing IMAP, SMTP and POP3 with GreenMail

Having written some e-mail handling, sending or receiving library you’d like to run some integration tests against a real mail server? Then GreenMail might help you out here .. the framework is not quite new on the market but it is really easy to setup IMAP,SMTP or POP3 services with it and it comes with some helpful libraries making your life a bit easier here. That’s why I’ve come to the idea to share some examples for setting up different server instances, creating user accounts and – at last – fetching and validating e-mails… ...

July 30, 2012 · 9 min · 1845 words · Micha Kops

Aspects of Functional Programming in Java

Functional programming is a trending topic these days and a lot of Java programmers are hot for the features that modern functional programming languages might offer. Waiting for Java 8 and native closure support is a nice thing but for now we’re going to take a look at several Java frameworks that are trying to implement typical structures from those functional languages where possible using the capabilities of the Java language to emulate elements like higher-order-functions, closures, options and others … ...

July 16, 2012 · 16 min · 3233 words · Micha Kops

Task Scheduling in Java EE 6 on GlassFish using the Timer Service

Creating cronjobs or scheduled service executions is made really easy in Java EE 6. Scheduled tasks may be created in a programmatic style or simply by adding some annotations to an EJB. In the following tutorial we’re creating some simple scheduled tasks and let them run on an embedded GlassFish instance using the Maven Embedded GlassFish plugin.. Java EE 6 Maven Project from Archetype First of all we’re creating a new maven-ized project using one of the appropriate jee6 Maven archetypes ...

June 22, 2012 · 5 min · 956 words · Micha Kops

Creating updatable Java Applications using Getdown and the Getdown Maven Plugin

Many programmers have suffered when trying to setup an environment to handle updates for their application without much effort. Some tried Java Web Start for this purpose and many encountered difficulties with this approach. Now there is getdown that aims to replace Java Web Start by offering a simple architecture to handle updates that is fast, realiable and the only thing you need is a normal http server. Though getdown lets us handle our updates really easy it is possible to make this process even easier with the getdown maven plugin. ...

May 27, 2012 · 5 min · 885 words · Micha Kops

Compiling CoffeeScript with Maven

CoffeeScript is a neat language that is transcompiled into JavaScript but is more predictable and allows to write the same code with 1/3 fewer lines and of course with a (imho) nicer syntax. CoffeeScript is nice but a vivid integration into our application build lifecycle with Maven is better and that is what the following example is all about. Maven Dependencies Though there are some alternatives, we’re using brew here so please add the following dependency to your Maven project: ...

May 18, 2012 · 2 min · 375 words · Micha Kops

Arquillian Tutorial: Writing Java EE 6 Integration Tests and more

Now that the long awaited stable version of the Arquillian framework is released I wanted to demonstrate some interesting features of this framework that really eases writing and running of integration tests for Java EE 6 applications in many different ways. In the following tutorial we are going to create some real-world examples using Enterprise JavaBeans, Contexts and Dependency Injection, the Java Persistence API and we’re finally running Drone/Selenium tests against a JEE Web Application that is using Java Server Faces. ...

April 26, 2012 · 8 min · 1576 words · Micha Kops

Wiring made easy using OSGi Blueprint and Apache Karaf

The OSGi Blueprint Container specification allows us to use dependency injection in our OSGi environment, declarative import and export of OSGi services, registering lifecycle listeners and wiring dependencies into our services with a few lines of XML code. In the following tutorial we’re first building an OSGi bundle classical style and afterwards take a trip into the advantages of the Blueprint specification. Our OSGi container of choice here will be Apache Karaf a lightweight container with a lot of nice features and – of course – blueprint enabled… ...

April 16, 2012 · 9 min · 1705 words · Micha Kops

Hibernate Search Faceting: Discrete and Range Faceting by Example

In today’s tutorial we’re exploring the world of faceted searches like the one we’re used to see when we’re searching for an item on Amazon.com or other websites. We’re using Hibernate Search here that offers an API to perform discrete as well as range faceted searches on our persisted data. Maven Dependencies Needed For simplicity’s sake am I going to use an HSQL database for persistence, in addition the dependencies for hibernate-entitymanager and hibernate-search (of course) should be added to your pom.xml ...

March 26, 2012 · 5 min · 986 words · Micha Kops

Snippet: Mixing Scala, Java in a Maven Project

Having just returned from the Atlassian Camp 2012 I just toyed around with Java and Scala and wanted to share the following snippet that demonstrates how to mix code from both languages in a Maven project using the maven-scala-plugin. Setting up the Maven Project First create a new Maven project in your IDE or by running mvn archetype:generate. In the next step, add the dependency for scala-library and the scala maven repositories to your pom.xml and hook the maven-scala-plugin to Maven’s lifecycle. My pom.xml finally looks like this one: ...

March 23, 2012 · 2 min · 327 words · Micha Kops