Draft !

Today, all developers have heard of Unicode : this character encoding allows all characters of any language in the world.

This article outlines the basics of Unicode through some key points for Java developers.

It also talks about the influence of Unicode on the JVM, like how characters are stored into a String and why you have to get cautious when using char and <code...

Why the need for WebSockets ?

We already have sockets (C programmers know them well), XMLHttpRequest (core of AJAX techniques), Long polling (like comet, …). So why the need for WebSocket ?

Here is an exerpt from the WebSocket RFC’s abstract :

The goal of this technology is to provide a mechanism for browser-based applications that need two-way communication with servers that does not rely on opening multiple HTTP connections (e.g., using XMLHttpRequest or <iframe>s and long polling).

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Time zones in XML Schema and Java

For interoperability reasons, it often makes sense for applications to transmit dates and times as xsd:dateTime strings, as this standard should serve all common cases.

XML Schema’s dateString type was inspired by the extended syntax of ISO 8601 : a sample string would be 2000-03-04T23:00:00.000+03:00 (March 4th, 2000, 11:00:00 PM in a time zone that’s 3 hours after UTC).

ISO 8601 also defines another (more compact) syntax : <code...

I’ve been used to great Eclipse plugins to deal with SVN-versionned projects for a long time.

Nowadays I’m using Mercurial (a.k.a. Hg) a lot and it became more handy to me to use Tortoise-like products, which integrate directly into the OS’ file manager.

I’ve come to use the following solutions for the different platforms I’m working with (on Ubuntu 12.04).

Mercurial for Nautilus

TortoiseHg works fine, but I had to add a script to have the corresponding “Actions” menu...