Patterns

Patterns are very common nowadays and everybody at least has experience with a Factory, an Iterator (duh..), a Facade or a Singleton.

It wasn’t always like that. The book that got it all started is called “design patterns”, by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides. I tried to read it, but the book just wasn’t for me. 
But now I found a more readable and fun source that discusses patterns. Via an article about the Google singleton detector (“singletons are evil and need to be destroyed”) I arrived at this pattern index by Cunningham & Cunningham. It is a great collection with many funny and serious patterns in all sorts of categories. I particularly like to read the organizational patterns and anti-patterns.

Singleton, hingleton, mingleton and fingleton

Some new words arrived in Java town, taken from the Google singleton detector user guide
Hingleton Derived from “helper singleton,” a class which turns another class into a singleton by enforcing that class’s singularity. 
Mingleton Derived from “method singleton” a class which has any static method that returns some state without taking any parameters. 
Fingleton Derived from “field singleton,” a class which contains a public static field.

Continuous integration (part 2)

A few articles earlier I wrote about tools for continuous integration, but as they say.. a picture says more than a 1000 words..
Check out the site that goes with Paul Duvall’s book ‘Continuous integration’; ‘http://integratebutton.com‘. The book describes about 50 practices related to continuous integration and on the website you can see some movies that zoom in on these practices. It’s a very comfortable and easy way to learn some new things.
Also -the book is quite good -it is awarded a 10 out of 10 horseshoes at the good old JavaRanch.