Mark van Cuijk

One of the WCB guidelines tells you to use the proper coding conventions and prescribes the use of CheckStyle with a GX-specific configuration file. One of the things this configuration file makes you do is prefix all member fields with the "my" keyword. When you do this in Eclipse and then use the "Generate Getters and Setters" tool, you'll get methods like getMyAdvice() if you're not careful.

For keeping code maintainable, it is wise to make a clear division between different tasks in a project. The GX WebManager architecture allows such separations to be made in a very clear way: using separate WCBs. However, in practice it might sometimes be difficult to decide in what way to split up functionality and how to keep the code connected. In this post I describe one way of keeping the code connected: the EventManagerService.

In the early days of WebManager 9, I did a content migration by reading data from a set of XML files and storing them in WebManager. That was a hell of a job! The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing about the same thing, but this time it was much easier. Why? We now have the Connector API and the Content API!

One of the good things of Java is the “create once, use everywhere” message. The modular architecture of GX WebManager supports this message in the form of WCBs. But, given a nice source tree, how can you create a nice ZIP file that contains anything you need to share? You just add some additional things to your pom.xml and MaVeN will do it for you!

Have you already visited my LinkedIn profile? I would like to know that, but I cannot directly ask the browser to provide this information and certainly the webserver doesn't know. But there is a way to find out and link it to WebManager personalizations.

I'm trying to do a lot of work in a day, but somewhere between 12:00 AM and 1:00 PM there is a break. The GX Public department is located in Eindhoven and we are famous for these breaks, because we eat tosti.

Some notable differences between Europe and the US are measuring units: in Europe we don’t use inches (except for television sets and computer screens), we don’t have gallons, we don’t do miles and we definitely do not use Fahrenheit. As part of baking an apple pie last weekend, I had to preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius and I was wondering what amount I need on the Fahrenheit scale, so I decided to connect a form to the public CelsiusToFahrenheit WebService to give me the answer.

One of the aspects of my job is to write Java code. It’s a nice task and I like it, but I’m not addicted to it. So once in a while I don’t want to write Java code, because I think at this planet there must be at least one person that already wrote what I need and that decided to share the code. With MaVeN I can easily include a Java library written by a third party, so in 15 minutes I can parse all kinds of CSV files.

The WebManager architecture allows panels with a user interface to be created very easily. However, when trying to generate a stream to the browser, I discovered nobody has done this the way I wanted and therefore I couldn’t rely on some existing documentation. Today I’ll write about streaming content to a browser from within a panel, streaming content from a browser back to the server and something about reading a ZIP file in Java.

Starting with WebManager 9, most data is stored in the Java Content Repository. This has a lot of advantages, most of which were intended, but some are a nice bonus. A couple of weeks ago I found a nice feature in the JCR API called the ObservationManager, which basically provides an interface to asynchronously monitor changes made to nodes in the JCR.