Archives for Brad Baker

Markdown Support For JIRA

Do you like Markdown?  Do you wish you could use it when reporting bugs in JIRA? Well good news everybody.  There is now an open source plugin for JIRA that gives you first class Markdown support. Its based on the excellent PageDown library that forms the basis of StackOverflow's markdown support.  One of the things I really loved about the PageDown code was that you could get a live client side preview of the rendered text as you typed. There are two components that are provided by this

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Getting Rid Of Unwanted Http Sessions

Java Servlet HttpSessions are deceptively cool.  They allow you to store away stuff for a user and they have a lifecycle that cleans up after themselves. Buy they do have a cost.  If you instance is open to the wider web, the sessions can chew up memory and hence if there are 1000s of sessions it can be chewing up heaps of memory. Sessions are also an inhibitor to producing web scale applications because of the cost and difficulty of "synchronising" the state between multiple servers.

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If you use Exceptions for path control, dont fill in the stack trace

This post contains general assertions about code performance and readability. Every such assertion every made in these areas can be easily disproved by a thought experiment, contrived test case or hyperbolic arguments. That said I think I am mostly right ;) Exceptions Are Slow Throwing exceptions is bad right. Its slow and makes the code unreadable. Well... kinda...maybe.. Webwork 1 has a flat configuration mechanism to look up names to values. Its like a chained hash map of configuration

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Well may we say "God save the Queen!" because nothing will save our cultural imperialism

Spoton Bevan, Correspondent for the y'Arts February 6, 2009 - 12:59PM Australia's cultural imperialism took another step backwards today with the inclusion of a a US language pack for JIRA. Created by JIRAs product manager, Brian Lane, it now contains a number of changes to text keys that will make JIRA more familiar to its US audience. "It will really help people organize their favorite issues and colors." said Lane. "It occurred to me it really should have been done." "I whipped it up over the

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Sharpening Our Functional Test Axe

In the book Dreaming in Code , the author mentions Axe Sharpening, specifically how development teams can spend too much time sharpening their axe and not enough time cutting down trees. "Give a person six hours to cut down a tree, the saying goes, and she will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe. In other words, most of us would rather spend time improving the tools that make a job easier than getting on with the job itself". However what if you axe becomes completely blunt? The problem

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