Danny’s Blog

Twenty years ago, my first job was to assist visitors of the Computerette–something of an Internet café without the Internet. This small company had been started by someone who did freelance jobs coding some very obscure Cobol dialect. While he kept doing his well-paid job, he hired me to take care of the shop. Besides [...]

JavaBlackBelt is a fast growing community whose members take tests to assess their skills in various Java-related topics. The tests themselves are created also by the site’s members. A small number of Ruby enthusiasts is currently working to add a Ruby exam to this Java-oriented site. I interviewed Mr. John Rizzo, one of JavaBlackBelt’s founders, [...]

After yet another inspiring presentation by Romain Guy at last year’s JavaPolis, I’ve taken more interest in programming Swing. I programmed desktop applications for many years, using mostly Delphi. Now, after some years of web application development, discovering Swing is like finding back a long-lost friend. Why oh why did we ever turn our backs [...]

Five days after my nightly arrival in beautiful Antwerpen, I drove back over those same dreary roads to Holland, to my home. Five days that have flown by. I’ve been completely submerged in mixture of Java and a little Ruby. Everything I heard about, everything I spoke about, even dreamt about, was Java. I’ve got [...]

Okay, okay, I’ll humbly admit I was wrong. A little bit. About ehm… that Groovy thing. An inspiring session by … about the Grails framework made me see things from a different perspective. There’s actually some quite nice features in Grails that could well be of use in Rails (or in some cases, Rails on [...]

Wednesday afternoon, JavaPolis really got into gear for me. I saw short ‘quicky’ sessions on Unitils (don’t like the name but some of the features (assertion through reflection!) could be very useful to me, as I’m writing tests on a daily basis) and Strecks (Struts extensions that can easily be used in an existing Struts [...]

When expectations are high, you’re invariably up for some disappointment. Charles and Tom were unable to demo Rails-in-a-war-on-Glassfish; but at least they gave a warning in advance. But I definitely expected something more–or rather something else–from Eric Evans’ university session on domain-driven design (ddd).
The afternoon session on scripting languages went well enough anyway–or at least, [...]

Just arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, for the JavaPolis 2006 conference which starts tomorrow morning. Same venue (Metropolis, where I stopped on the way to pick up this year’s goodies bag), same hotel (Astrid–yeah I know it has a tacky name but it’s really not that cheap). Fortunately, the state of Antwerp’s wireless networking has advanced [...]

Yesterday evening I attended a session on domain-driven design (ddd) at Sogyo’s offices, a nicely converted farmhouse located somewhere in the center of Holland. I was amazed to hear Ruby and Rails being used as an example of domain-driven development. One of the presenters even claimed that Dutch Rubyists Remco and Michiel (who reached 2nd [...]

So much to do in this hot and cold summer (July: 36 degrees, August: 16 degrees) and so little to blog about. In case anybody wonders, this is what I’ve been up to lately.
Gone back two years in time: After I finally left the WebLogic project in May, a little later than planned, I was [...]