I’m a big fan of Jenkins – it’s a great free open source continuous integration server boasting a tonne of features out-the-box and even more through the use of downloadable plugins.
Category Archives: java
Gson performance analysis
I’m currently looking at the performance issues of an internal Java webapp being developing at the University. It’s a large piece of software (over 374 Java files) which has ‘naturally’ evolved over the years meaning that many requirements have changed since it was originally conceived leaving the software with a fair amount of feature bloat. Continue reading
LinkedData hackday event
I’ve just finished attending a DevCSI+Research Revealed linked data hackday event. This 2 day event hosted by ILRT, was a chance for like-minded individuals interested in Linked Data to meet up, chat, listen to presentations, lightening talks and get a chance to do some hacking together.
We had around 40 attendees from a range of backgrounds; including local freelance developers, software houses, public and private sector companies, members of HE institutions & PhD students.
Over the two days there was a wealth of new ideas, techniques and tools presented, including…
For the hacking part of the event, I teamed up with Libby Miller, Damian Steer and Sam Adams to look at characterising large datasets. In my view this is an underrated aspect of Linked Data which can help increase adoption – how to gain an understanding and feel for the data lying behind an Endpoint when all you can do is fire off unfriendly SPARQL/REST queries. We were investigating techniques for feature extraction/statistical analysis of RDF graphs, and looking at tools to provide visualisations of the datasets. Initially we experienced a few frustrating hours as we came to realise that although we know little of graph theory, it was clear that even to experts this is a non-trivial set of problems.
We struggled on and by the end of day 2, Damian and I successfully implemented a graph reduction algorithm which could be used to identify isolated sub-graphs from within a network of triples.
Spurred on by this work, after the event I coded up a RDF Class-Property diagram viewer using Grails and the Dracula Graph Library, based on Chris Gutteridge‘ SPARQL Vampire Diagram generator.
Android app out now
I’ve just released my first Android mobile phone application 🙂
“This app shows you nearby petrol stations and lets you share fuel prices for petrol stations that you know of, and to see the prices entered by others.
Browse the map to find stations, and click any station flag to view and update prices.
For more information, check out the WhatGas web site:
http://www.whatgas.com”
Download from the Android Market today, or visit my website for more information.