Since 1872 it was clear that writing by mechanical means would have become obsolete the laborious and unsatisfactory performance of the pen.

I was asked to add an extra encryption to json formatted data exchanged between clients and a RESTful web service.

This is the second monitoring about the post campaign Free Software PDF Readers, launched by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in 2009.

The first monitoring is available in the post “adoption of Free Software PDF readers in Italian Regional Public Administrations”.

I was adding declarative transaction management support to a Spring 3.1.1 based web application when I got the error:

28-apr-2016 9.38.15 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext listenerStart
GRAVE: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'myService' defined in file [...\myProject\service\MyService.class]: Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.aop.framework.AopConfigException: Cannot proxy target class because CGLIB2 is not available. Add CGLIB to the class path or specify proxy interfaces.
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:527)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:456)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory$1.getObject(AbstractBeanFactory.java:294)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:225)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:291)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:193)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.preInstantiateSingletons(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:585)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.finishBeanFactoryInitialization(AbstractApplicationContext.java:913)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:464)
    at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.configureAndRefreshWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:385)
    at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:284)
    at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:111)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.listenerStart(StandardContext.java:3972)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4467)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:791)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:771)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:526)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:637)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:563)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:498)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.start(HostConfig.java:1277)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:321)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1053)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(StandardHost.java:722)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1045)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:443)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:516)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:710)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:593)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:289)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:414)
Caused by: org.springframework.aop.framework.AopConfigException: Cannot proxy target class because CGLIB2 is not available. Add CGLIB to the class path or specify proxy interfaces.
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.DefaultAopProxyFactory.createAopProxy(DefaultAopProxyFactory.java:67)
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyCreatorSupport.createAopProxy(ProxyCreatorSupport.java:104)
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactory.getProxy(ProxyFactory.java:112)
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.autoproxy.AbstractAutoProxyCreator.createProxy(AbstractAutoProxyCreator.java:476)
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.autoproxy.AbstractAutoProxyCreator.wrapIfNecessary(AbstractAutoProxyCreator.java:362)
    at org.springframework.aop.framework.autoproxy.AbstractAutoProxyCreator.postProcessAfterInitialization(AbstractAutoProxyCreator.java:322)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyBeanPostProcessorsAfterInitialization(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:407)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1461)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:519)
    ... 35 more

Migrating from subversion to git mainly consists in creating a temporary local git repository from the remote svn repository and then pushing such temporary git repository to a new remote git one.

It is warmly suggested to perform the migration on a case-sensitive file system, otherwise the migration process might end up in a not correctly transformed git repository, as reported from the following discussions.

Most of the Free Software and OpenSource consists of both new written source code and reused 3rd parties “binary” code. When we write a new software, we usually make it depend on lots of 3rd parties libraries (such dependent libraries are also called dependencies).

In order to give an idea about how complex and deep the dependencies graph could be, let’s suppose our new software has a direct dependency on the 3rd party library rampart-core-1.3 (on the left in the figure above). Such library itself depends on other 3rd party libraries. This second level of 3rd party libraries, with respect of our new software, includes libraries called transitive dependency. Now, imagine that our new software has lots of direct dependencies and figure out how many 3rd part dependencies it consist of.

Thanks to some Ready To Use Java Static Code Analyzers, we know how to discover some bugs in the source code, but what about bugs and vulnerabilities in 3rd parties dependencies?

A static code analyzer is a software which inspects a given source code, or compiled code, in order to discover problems of various kind, ranging from bugs to duplicate code, from performance to readability.

FindBugs, PMD and Checkstyle are three static code analyzers extremely easy to use.

by Andrew Collins - CC-0

Exploratory Refactoring consists in a series of small changes to source code which are made by the programmer in order to better reflect his/her comprehension of explored code.

As exploration is a way to discover places by walking throughout them and by drawing a map, likewise Exploratory Refactoring is a way to discover what a piece of code does by reading it and by rewriting little part of it.

Exploratory Refactoring is a technique a developer, who works on a legacy codebase, might use to understand the codebase logic before actually starting with the actual refactoring.

by European Schoolnet - CC BY-SA 3.0

On 15 January 2016 ICT associations together with the AgID presented 2015 data about digital skills.

The rest of this post is available in Italian only.

Become a translator!

Last week a colleague of mine sat at my console to teach me how to solve a problem he had had using a (not so intuitive) client interface. He was amused by the character’s look in my IDE and he found funny I have chosen DejaVu Sans Mono font to write programs.

I think every programmer should have thought about which font to use, about once in his(her) professional life, both to be more productive and to reduce reading errors, and to relief eyes straining too.