XPath evaluation performance tweaks

    I have recently played with XPath evaluation in Java. I must admit that default configuration of XPath processor in JDK is really broken. I was able to achieve some really significant performance gains with just a couple of simple tricks.

Destructive habits

    I have been using JUnit for quite a long time. I have recently done some coding with TestNG and I was a little bit shocked when I saw the assertion exception for the first time.

The marriage

    Howdy! I have been recently involved in many marriage related things and I was not able to update my blog frequently. The last period of my private life was really intensive. On the other hand, this is a technical blog so something technical needs to be mentioned - the silence should be broken!

Java volatile keyword by example

    Volatile keyword seems to be a little bit enigmatic at first glance. It is rather rare to see that keyword on a daily basis. How does it work? What effect can it have on the program execution?

JMeter and WebSphere MQ Series integration

    JMeter is a popular tool for executing load tests. There is much information about it on the web. However, integration of JMeter with WebSphere MQ Series (JMS provider) is not that common. Let's try to do it!

Ignore particular tests on failure with JUnit

    Why on earth would you like to ignore some tests if they failed?! - you may ask. If they failed they must be red and they must draw your attention or even cut your fingers. In general, it is true. However, there is no ALWAYS and there is no NEVER.

Simple in-memory caching with Spring 3.2 and Google Guava

    There was a proposal (not really original :)) that we can use cache to relieve external system and make our own system faster. It should be a really simple in-memory cache without any replication and fancy mechanisms. It should only have max-number-of-elements and expiration-time-after-write properties. Can that requirement be implemented in Spring easily?

A gentle touch of functional programming with Java 8 - prime numbers

    'Functional programming' are buzz words nowadays. Let's try to play a little bit with that. The only assumption of this post is... to have some fun :).

Multiple SOAP headers in Apache Camel's Spring WS endpoint

    Life is all about abstraction. When you read this article you do not think about electrical impulses which travel through your brain between synapses. When you drive a car you do not need to know the internal details on how it works. By no doubt abstraction is good. But is it always that good?

Liquibase and PL/SQL with Oracle DB

If you have ever dreamed about Continuous Delivery (CD) you surely thought about deployment which is fully automated. It implies automated management of database scripts. With the help provided by Liquibase it is easy to add some automation to database change sets deployment. However, there is a small downside in Liquibase implementation that makes it a little bit trickier to execute PL/SQL pieces.