Neo4j Graph Database Tutorial: How to build a Route Planner and other Examples

Often in the life of developer’s life there is a scenario where using a relational database tends to get complicated or sometimes even slow – especially when there are fragments with multiple relationships or multiple connections present. This often leads to complex database queries or desperate software engineers trying to handle those problems with their ORM framework. A possible solution might be to switch from a relational database to a graph database – and – neo4j is our tool of choice here. In the following tutorial we’re going to implement several examples to demonstrate the strengths of a graph database .. from a route planner to a social graph. ...

January 20, 2012 · 12 min · 2397 words · Micha Kops

Create Mobile Websites using Java Server Faces and PrimeFaces Mobile

The more smartphones and tablets are sold the bigger the need for a mobile version of a modern website. PrimeFaces Mobile helps us developers here and allows us to quickly create mobile websites that display well on an iPhone, Android, Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others. In the following tutorial we’re going to create a web application that is using Java Server Faces 2.1, PrimeFaces 3.1 and PrimeFaces Mobile 1.0 and runs on a simple web container like Tomcat or Jetty. ...

January 8, 2012 · 5 min · 990 words · Micha Kops

Writing Styles and Themes on Android

Using reusable styles and themes to modify an Android application’s look is really easy and helps to not violate thy DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle by typing styles in every single UI element again and again. In the following tutorial we’re going to write and apply some simple styles and a finally theme to a simple Android application. Prerequisites The following environment is needed to follow this tutorial … Java Development Kit 6 Android SDK An AVM with at least Android 2.2 / API Version 8 I recommend using Eclipse with the ADT Plugin installed ...

December 3, 2011 · 3 min · 634 words · Micha Kops

Managing Background Tasks on Android using the Alarm Manager

In today’s tutorial we’re going to take a look on how to handle periodically scheduled tasks on our Android device by using BroadcastReceivers, Services and the AlarmManager. Prerequisites The following environment is needed to follow this tutorial … Java Development Kit 6 Android SDK An AVM with at least Android 2.2 / API Version 8 I recommend using Eclipse with the ADT Plugin installed The Concept We’re going to create a first broadcast receiver that gets initiated at boot time. This component then should make use of Android’s AlarmManager API and schedule a cyclic task using an explicit intent. ...

November 27, 2011 · 4 min · 666 words · Micha Kops

Finding Memory Leaks using Eclipse and the MemoryAnalyzer Plugin

The MemoryAnalyzer Plugin for Eclipse allows us to quickly analyze heap dumps from a virtual machine and search for memory leaks. In the following tutorial we’re going to create and run a small application that is going to cause an OutOfMemoryException during its runtime. In addition, we’re forcing the virtual machine to save a heap dump and finally analyzing this data using Eclipse and the MemoryAnalyzer plugin. Prerequisites Java Development Kit 6 Eclipse Indigo ...

November 2, 2011 · 4 min · 704 words · Micha Kops

Testing RESTful Web Services made easy using the REST-assured Framework

Figure 1. REST-assured Integration Test Tutorial Logo There are many frameworks out there to facilitate testing RESTful webservices but there is one framework I’d like to acquaint you with is my favourite framework named REST-assured. REST-assured offers a bunch of nice features like a DSL-like syntax, XPath-Validation, Specification Reuse, easy file uploads and those features we’re going to explore in the following article. With a few lines of code and Jersey I have written a RESTful web service that allows us to explore the features of the REST-assured framework and to run tests against this service. ...

October 23, 2011 · 9 min · 1742 words · Micha Kops

Maven Tomcat Plugin: Adding Authentication to an Embedded Tomcat

The Tomcat Maven Plugin not only allows us to deploy our mavenized application to an existing Tomcat server but also to run our web application with an embedded instance from our project’s directory. Recently I needed to add basic authentication to such an instance and wanted to share the steps necessary here Prerequisites We just need Maven and a JDK … Java Development Kit >= 6 Maven 3 Project Setup I am using the webapp archetype here We’re adding the following configuration for the Tomcat plugin to your pom.xml – my final descriptor is this one pom.xml...

October 12, 2011 · 3 min · 616 words · Micha Kops

Android Widget Tutorial: Creating a screen-lock Widget in a few steps

In today’s Android tutorial we’re going to take a look at Android’s Widget API and how to make a widget interact with a service using intents. Figure 1. hasCode Android Widget Tutorial Logo We’re going to create a fully functional application that allows us to enable or disable our smartphone’s screen lock settings using a widget that can be placed on our home screen. Finally, I am going to show how to use a smartphone to test and debug our application and connect it to the IDE. ...

October 6, 2011 · 10 min · 2082 words · Micha Kops

Java EE 6 Development using the Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin

Today we’re going to take a look at the Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin and how it allows us quick creation of GlassFish server instances in no time and Java EE 6 application deployment. Figure 1. GlassFish + Maven With a few lines of configuration in your Maven’s pom.xml we’ve got a running GlassFish instance and are able to redeploy our application fast by pressing enter in our console. In the following tutorial we’re going to build a Java EE 6 Web Application with a stateless session bean and a web servlet and finally deploy – and redeploy the application using the Maven GlassFish Plugin. ...

September 20, 2011 · 5 min · 978 words · Micha Kops

REST-assured vs Jersey-Test-Framework: Testing your RESTful Web-Services

Today we’re going to take a look at two specific frameworks that enables you to efficiently test your REST-ful services: On the one side there is the framework REST-assured that offers a nice DSL-like syntax to create well readable tests – on the other side there is the Jersey-Test-Framework that offers a nice execution environment and is built upon the JAX-RS reference implementation, Jersey. In the following tutorial we’re going to create a simple REST service first and then implement integration tests for this service using both frameworks. ...

September 5, 2011 · 6 min · 1094 words · Micha Kops