Blogs

As a quick note today (July 26, 2014), I’m glad to see that many Java developers and beginning Scala developers have said that the Scala Cookbook is the best Scala book available. I wrote the Cookbook from the perspective of a Java developer (as opposed to something like a functional programmer), and I’ve also taught computer programming classes for many years, so I considered these people to be in my target audience.

I don’t like to write basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) code, and furthermore I don’t like to charge clients for writing such basic code. As a result, I wrote a tool I named the Cato CRUD Generator to generate this code, rather than having to write it manually.

Over the last few days I’ve updated Cato so it can generate Play Framework CRUD code (Scala code, to be specific), including the following:

When I write software for myself, I usually think of my software application from the perspective of a business analyst, and write down short user stories, as shown in the image of the index card. First I write the stories, and then I cross them off when I finish them.

I ran across this story about Sencha Touch speed and an app named Fastbook. In short, the video at that link shows how a Sencha Touch mobile app is faster than Facebook’s native iOS and Android apps(!). Here’s a little text from the story:

Over the years I've done a lot of Java programming, including Java database programming, and I've tried to document a lot of what I've learned about database programming.

A very long time ago I wrote these generic Java database programming tutorials:

I just ran into a situation of getting a Drupal 7 "PDOException Unknown MySQL server host" error message while running Drupal 7 on a GoDaddy server. The full Drupal 7 error message looked like this:

A few days ago I was reminded of the Java String format method, and the ability to use printf syntax with this format method, so I thought I'd share a quick example of it here.

Here's a quick look at the String class format method syntax, which demonstrates the power and simplicity of this "Java printf" syntax:

Java String/array FAQ: How do I create an array of Strings in Java (i.e., a Java String array)?

I wrote this article because I can never remember the Java array syntax myself, so I use this page as a reference. There are a couple of ways of declaring and using Java String arrays, and I'll try to cover those in this article.

1) Declaring, sizing, and using a Java String array

The first way to use a Java String array is to (a) declare it in one step, and then (b) use it in a second step. Within a class, you declare a Java String array like this:

Just a quick note today that I just released a free PDF booklet titled, “Play Framework Recipes”.

Just a quick note today that in a few days I'll pass a little milestone, and have over 150 Scala programming tutorials on my alvinalexander.com website. This is in addition to my Scala Cookbook, which will be released soon.

In related news, Scala 2.10 was recently released. Here's a link to What's New in Scala 2.10 on the official Scala website.