Coming Up for Air
23
Apr 2018

Resurrecting Turbo Vision

If you wrote software on a DOS system in the 80s or 90s, you probably used one of the Borland products, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C, with that beautiful, beautiful blue, mouse-enabled text-based user interface (TUI, if you will). Those IDEs were powered by a library called Turbo Vision (TV), which Borland documented and published for others to use. I loved it. While we all live in a GUI world and there are lots of libraries for building GUIS, I have for years now been dying to be able to use TV again, if for no other reason than hard core nostalgia. The problem being that I have used C in about 2 decades, and, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m too excited about writing even toy apps in the language. Dead end, right? N...
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11
Apr 2018

Jerkey: A Kotlin DSL for Jersey

I’m currently working on a DSLs-in-Kotlin presentation for my local JUG, so I need a good domain in which to work. HTML is a great sample domain, but it’s been done to death. After a bit of head scratching, I’ve come up with what is, I think, a somewhat novel domain: REST application building. Sure, there are libraries like Ktor, but suffers from some very serious NIH. I’m totally kidding, but the dearth of discussions regarding REST applications and DSL construction was good enough for me, so let’s see what we h...
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29
Mar 2018

String.format()... You May Be Doing It Wrong

If you’ve been working with Java for very long, you’ve probably had occasion to use String.format() . And, if you’re like me, you may very well have been doing it "wrong". Let’s take a look at what was, for me, common usage, and how, maybe, you should b...
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1
Feb 2018

Roku and Hotel Wifi

I was recently on a business trip and, as is my custom, I took along my Roku box so that I would have something to watch in the hotel room in the evenings. Unfortunately, the hotel wifi required that you sign in on each device in order to access the internet, but this Roku is old enough that it didn’t offer way to do that. I found some options in The Tubes, but I didn’t care for them for various reasons, but, fortunately, I found an easy — and free — way to do wha...
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19
Jan 2018

Firefox, Wine, and Linux

Wise or not, I recently made the move to Linux on my work machine. For the most part, it works wonderfully. For reasons that aren’t too terribly relevant here, I found myself needing (or wanting) to run the Windows version of Firefox. While I could run it successfully, it wouldn’t connect to the internet. After a whole lot of digging, I finally found the answer, which I thought I should document here with the hope that it will be easier for others to find (including me when I go through this again in a fe...
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27
Sep 2017

String.split(), Java 8 style

Today I found myself with a common problem: I had a delimited string of an unknown number of parts that that I needed split apart and process. Prior to Java 8, implementing that might looked something...
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24
Sep 2017

Chesterton's Fence and the Software Developer

Recently at work, we found an odd scenario with a REST (-ish ;) endpoint from another team: If the request provided a list of, say, 11 IDs in the query string, the system would only return information on the first 10 of them, silently dropping anything over that seemingly odd limit. The initial reaction was of, course, "Well, let’s just increase the limit." To be honest, I had the same reaction, but then I remembered one of my favorite quotes, known as Chester...
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25
Apr 2017

Getting JavaFX ListViews to Honor Container Width

I recently struggled trying to text in a JavaFX ListView to wrap inside the container like I asked it to, rather than extend (and disappear) past the boundaries of the container. After some discussion on Twitter and a bit of Googling, I found an answer that I thought I’d share here to, perhaps, save someone...
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15
Apr 2017

Compiling for Java 8 and Java 9

In a project I’m working on for my book, I need to share classes between two applications. One, an Android project, requires Java 8. The other, a desktop JavaFX application, needs to run under Java 9, complete with module support. The problem with this is that the Maven tooling isn’t quite ready for Java 9, so it’s not as simple as I would like. I have, however, found a solution that see...
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About

My name is Jason Lee. I am a software developer living in the middle of Oklahoma. I’ve been a professional developer since 1997, using a variety of languages, including Java, Kotlin, C/C++, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Delphi, C#, and even a bit of COBOL and JCL. I currently work for IBM on the WildFly/EAP team, where, among other things, I maintain integrations for some MicroProfile specs, OpenTelemetry, Micrometer, Jakarta Faces, and Bean Validation. (Full resume here. LinkedIn profile)

I am the president of the https://okcjug.org[Oklahoma City Java User Group], and an occasional speaker at the JUG and a variety of technical conferences.

On the personal side, I’m active in my church, and enjoy bass guitar, running, fishing, and a variety of martial arts. I’m also married to a beautiful woman and have two boys, who, thankfully, look like their mother.

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