There were some problems with my blog, as links did not operate as expected and the RSS feed was not a valid one. Everything should work fine now. Please report any further problems directly to me at huibert_aalbers@mac.com

I am currently working on Address Book URL Insider 1.1. I have cleaned up the code to make it less intrusive and therefore avoid possible conflicts with other plug-ins. Besides that I am also working on supporting RSS feeds. I expect version 1.1 to support RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0, with support for Atom coming in a subsequent release.

At IBM I sometimes create hands-on labs to help customer learn new technologies. However, since these documents are written in Spanish there is no public IBM site where I could publish them. That is why I have created a new section on this site called WebSphere Labs where these documents can freely be downloaded.

iWeb is probably one of the worst commercial Mac applications for creating web sites. I hope that most of its shortcommings will be addressed in version 2.0. However, even with its current limitations it still produces beautiful slideshows. That is why I have decided to use it in conjunction with my .Mac account to publish some of my pictures…

If you want to see them, click here.

I have completed the functionality that I originally envisioned when starting to work on this small project and therefore I have decided to publish it on my site. It can be downloaded here.

URL Insider is an Address Book plug-in that allows to display URLs within Address Book, inside a drawer, instead of having to open Safari. As you can see it doesn’t do much at this time, however, if there is interest I may continue working on this project and develop a full blown RSS Reader within the Address Book. As more and more persons publish their blogs over the Internet, it may make more sense to read them from within the Address Book than within Safari. At least that is what I think, but let me know what you think.

Today, after spending a couple of days working with iBlog I am finally ready to launch my blog. Wow this is exciting! I still expect my podcasts to be more interesting than my blog but I will do my best to keep this interesting.

I recently learned about an Address Book plug-in for Mac OS X that allowed users to check directions using Google Maps. You can download it from www.briantoth.com. What I found interesting was the fact that the Address Book could be extended. I decided to take a look at what could be achieved and I quickly created a plug-in that displays URLs in a drawer. It is amazing how deep you can get inside an existing cocoa application and modify it’s behaviour without breaking it.

It turns out that there are many ways to extend an existing application, proof-of-it is an excellent plug-in for Safari called SafariStand. This product is very interesting because it extends a product that was not even designed to be exteded through the InputManager extension mechanism.

There are many tools that help developers extend existing applications. I have started by using class-dump, a command-line application that will give you detailed information of all the existing classes and methods within it. If you are interested by this topic take a look at this page which contains a lot of useful information.

Well, I plan to continue to work on my plug-in to learn more about how all of this works and what the security implications are. If I feel that my plug-in can be useful, I will release it. I will let you know!

I have spent most of the week working closely with a customer who was complaining about their J2EE application performance. Normally it goes like this. The customer calls their sales rep and starts complaining about their application server performance. They usually threaten to move to application server from company A or company B if we do not fix the problem immediately. The fact is that since I have been working with J2EE application servers, in 100% of the cases, it is the application that is responsible for the performance problems, not the application server.

IBM has published some very good documents that explain what needs to be done to obtain the best performance from a J2EE application server. Although those documents focus on WebSphere Application Server, most recomendations apply to all J2EE servers. Go to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com and search for “websphere performance”.

However, if you do not have time to read a full book, you should at least read the article “10 (more or less) J2EE best practices“.

My own recommendation, on top of what the article lists, is to limit the creation of new objects in your code. Always check if there are no other alternatives, such as object reuse. My recommendation is to always apply strict scrutiny when new objects are created and always assume there is another way to do it. Use static methods when possible, but make sure that junior programmers are not instantiating objects in order to execute the static methods (a very common mistake).

Advanced Java IDEs such as Rational Application Developer will automatically detect these problems and mark them with warnings. Do not ignore them just because they are not errors that will prevent the code from running properly. Make a habit to produce code that is totally bug and warnings free. That is the best way to avoid all kind of problems.

I am finally entering the blogging world. The truth is that blogging never did seem very attractive to me. I guess that I have just seen too many uninteresting blogs out there. However, recently I have recently come to the conclusion that some of my experiences can be interesting to some people. I am not really sure what I will be writing about but it will probably centered around my professional life and my development projects, as I do not enjoy very much exposing my private life.