Blogging the days...

When you're in the business of creating Java Web Services today, be it JAX-WS or JAX-RS, one of the difficult things to get right is actually documenting the entities from a API developer point of view, especially in the scenario where your model is the code. The main problem comes to the fact that a JAXB annotated model doesn't map anything to the generated schema contracts (be it  WSDL or WADL+XSD) and classes. This is understandable as Javadocs don't exist at runtime and there is no specific JAXB annotation that maps to the xs:annotation, xs:documentation and xs:appinfo schema elements. Various tools like enunciate and all provide some support to to compile time generation but from my point of view the generated wadl + schema (my main scenario) is not the same quality as is the runtime generated ones. Can this be improved? Some guys at the The Distributed Systems Group (DSG) of the Information Systems Institute at the Technical University of Vienna certainly thought...

I have to admit that I succumbed to the temptation of starting SimSity Social several months ago. As a game that intrigued me even when I was a kid and a genuine fan of God/simulation games I just couldn't resist. All in all, I can say that even though the mechanics are not quite what a stand-alone simulation game usually brings to the table, the whole package is on the whole pleasing and engaging. This however is not the subject of this post, this post is about some strange cities that my neighbors have built.  This one is really special, very good distribution of population-boosting buildings and zones approach for businesses and factories. Can you say anal?  Also very interesting vertically aligned buildings in columns shuffled between businesses, not obvious way to get high population but to be honest, I don't think he cares that much. Especially with all the police/hospital/firefighting facilities. Can you say square?  This on...