I’ve recently becoming interested in porting legacy PHP sites to JSPs. It seemed to me that one of the hardest parts of this problem was parsing the PHP code. Once a parse tree was created, the next step would be to emit equivalent JSP code. I went looking for an ANTL4 grammar for PHP,…
I’ve always had a fascination with compilers. As a Java geek, I’m also quite interested in the JVM. In order to learn a little more about both, and as a way to contribute to the open source world, I decided to implement a compiler for BASIC. So, jvmBasic consumes BASIC code and emits .class…
Jasper is the JSP compiler inside Tomcat. For reasons, mainly of curiosity, I wanted to build a Pragmatach plugin which exposes Jasper. Pragmatach supports some template engines such as FreeMarker, ThymeLeaf and Velocity, but I thought Jasper would be a good addition. I chose to use Tomcat 6, mainly because Tomcat 7 uses Servlet 3.0. Pragmatach…
When writing custom servlets, it can be quite useful to unit test them. In my case, I used a combination of testng and mockito. The basic idea is simple; mock a HttpServletRequest, and a HttpServletResponse and pass them to the custom servlet. There is a bit more too it, so here’s an example. final HttpServletRequest…
I recently found myself in a situation where mission-critical software was suffering from performance problems due to relying on a remote API which was both slow (as slow as 11sec / transaction), and unreliable. In this case, it turned out that there were multiple applications accessing this API, and every individual application was affected….