Lately a user was complaining that he sees a wrong birthdate in our app. I asked our business guy to verify if it differs by one day just to ensure that we don’t have a timezone bug here. Actually this wasn’t the problem but my business guy went mad. “How can it happen that we’re even talking about bugs like these?”

Of course he’s absolutely right but date and time problems are not as simple as they might seem to be: Imagine you were born on 9 June 2006 18:00 in Munich (that’s 6pm if you are using a 12-hour clock). The timezone Australia/Sydney is 10 hours ahead of Munich so at the same moment in time the clock displayed 10 June 2006 04:00 in Sydney. This doesn’t affect your birthdate. It will always remain 9 June no matter where you are. It did affect the opening game of the FIFA world cup which took place at the same time in Munich. …

React Native displays a red screen when an error occurs in debug mode:

The great thing here is that you can jump to the source file by clicking the relevant line of the stack trace. This is incredible helpful if the error is located in your dependencies. The node_modules folder of my current project counts 731 subdirectories. Searching manually is absolutely frustrating.

In my case the source file was always opened in Visual Studio Code while I’m developing with Intellij IDEA. I never knew how to configure this until I noticed this hint:

When you see Red Box with stack trace, you can click any stack frame to jump to the source file. The packager will launch your editor of choice. It will first look at REACT_EDITOR environment variable, then at EDITOR. To set it up, you can add something like export REACT_EDITOR=atom to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc depending on which shell you use. …

The German QWERTZ keyboard layout was not made for developers. Often needed keys like brackets and braces are unnecessarily hard to type. The layout is also not ideal for some applications or often used character combinations. Ever wondered why the creators of vi chose slash and question mark for forward/backward searching? Just take a look on a English QWERTY layout. You may also find motivations for using a slash to close html tags or using the combination of dot and slash for the unix filesystem.

You could have more fun and increase productivity with modern keyboard layouts like Dvorak or Colemak. These were made with typing efficiency and ergonomics in mind. But if you switch to them you’ll really have to invest time to learn them. Also you won’t find a MacBook with correctly labeled keys and either you or your coworker will start crying when you do pair programming next time. …

I just started my first Ionic 2 application and struggled with adding Lodash as dependency. Since TypeScript 2 adding npm dependencies should be that easy:

npm install --save @types/lodash

You don’t have to deal with other tools like typings anymore. However the next build failed with this transpile error:

[12:06:18] transpile started …
[12:06:44] typescript: node_modules/@types/lodash/index.d.ts, line: 11444
 ‘]’ expected.

The problem is that the current version of the declaration file expects TypeScript 2.1 whereas Ionic 2 is using TypeScript 2.0. You need to search for a matching version and install the correct one:

npm view @types/lodash # check the dist-tags
npm install --save --save-exact @types/lodash@ts2.0

Don’t forget the save-exact flag. Otherwise your coworkers will run in the same problem after fetching.

RESTEasy logs every thrown WebApplicationException with it’s full stacktrace:

This may be helpful in case of a status 500 Internal Server Error. In case of a client error like 404 Not Found it just bloats your logfile and doesn’t provide helpful information. RESTEasy provides a NoLogWebApplicationException to avoid this but then you won’t find any information about these errors in your application logfile. You can easily improve this by implementing your own ExceptionMapper:

Of course you should always provide a helpful error message when throwing a WebApplicationException:

After almost one year of silence Oracle presented an update to the Java EE 8 roadmap at JavaOne: Java EE 8 by the end of 2017 and EE 9 one year later. As far as I know they didn’t explain why they stopped their work for so long or why they left the community in the dark about that. OK, but at least some progress now.

The new roadmap introduces two new JSRs (Health Checking and Configuration) and also proposes to drop Management 2.0, JMS 2.1 and MVC 1.0.

Especially the plan to drop MVC triggered controversial discussions. The statement behind this decision is that MVC does not match with Oracle’s new cloud strategy. Honestly I’ve no idea why “the cloud” could be an argument against a RESTful web application framework but luckily Oracle explains this in more detail in the new Java EE Community…

When you’re implementing a file upload you most probably want to limit the size of the upload. But how do you know the size? Reading the Content-Length header should be obvious but can you really trust it?
No, the client can send whatever he wants, correct?
There are a lot of creative ways to be really sure for instance (using JAX-RS and Commons IO):

byte[] data = IOUtils.toByteArray(inputStream);
if (data.length > MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE) {
   return Response.status(413).build();
}

Don’t do this. You’re loading the whole stream into your servers memory. The memory of your server is limited. It will crash if there’s no memory left. …

When I started to work on janedoe (random data as a service) I did not want to host any of the required tools on my own. Why? It really hurts to maintain tools for a project on which you don’t work constantly. The need for an urgent patch always arises when it is least expected and most inconvenient.
Why Continuous {Integration|Deployment|Delivery}? I think that the borders between these three things are fluent and many people are using them without a clear definition of what they are really doing.

What I wanted is:

• Of course a hosted version control system and a build server which executes my unit and integration tests after every commit. …