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Category Archives: Programming

What is the difference between an inner join and outer join?

This is another one of those stupid questions asked during technical interviews that don’t really give an indication of whether you are actually qualified for the job.
Inner join
Say you have one table of CUSTOMERS and one table of ORDERS. Each row in the ORDERS table has a reference (foreign key reference) to a customer id [...]

Posted 12 April 2007 † Peter § ‡ Comments (0) °

What is Model-View-Controller?

One interview question that I’ve been asked repeatedly is “Describe the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern”. I guess that’s technically a demand, not a question.
Anyway, when you’re building software, if you really wanted to, you could put together in one place all the code that deals with 1) deciding what to show the user (View), 2) [...]

Posted 11 April 2007 † Peter § ‡ Comments (2) °

Open source RSS parsing API

There’s a package called ROME that will do most of the work of parsing various syndication feeds for you. Pretty neat.
https://rome.dev.java.net/
There’s also a Jakarta Commons project called Feedparser that looks similar but it’s listed under their “dormant” projects.
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/feedparser/

Posted 01 August 2006 † Peter § ‡ Comments (0) °

Why the programming posts?

I’ve started posting little blurbs about computer programming because it’s a good way for me to take notes for myself. Also, programmers often use Google to search for programming solutions and maybe my posts will be helpful to someone. For example, my post about setting no-cache for Struts gets a lot of hits.
I know [...]

Posted 27 July 2006 † Peter § ‡ Comments (1) °

flatten=”true” in Apache Ant

When building a war file using an Ant build script, you need to set flatten=”true” when copying the required libraries into WEB-INF/lib, otherwise the servlet engine will not be able to find the .jar files.
Example:
<copy todir=”${project.war.home}/WEB-INF/lib” flatten=”true” includeEmptyDirs=”false”>
<fileset dir=”${project.lib.home}”/>
</copy>

Posted 27 July 2006 † Peter § ‡ Comments (0) °