A climograph can be easily generated with Excel as documented in Creating a Climograph in Excel and Directions for Using Excel to Make a Colorful Climograph.

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In my previous blog post, I briefly discussed Flex's growing circle of friends that gained a powerful friend with the addition of the Spring Framework and the announcement of the Spring BlazeDS Integration project.

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Many of us have discovered the benefits of using Flex for rich client side applications in conjunction with enterprise Java on the server side. The Flex/Java EE combination brings the best of both worlds to the developer seeking rich clients with robust enterprise strength back-ends.

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There are many blog entries, articles, forum threads, and other published items that list traits of a successful software developer. While I generally agree with most of these listed characteristics of a successful software developer, I think one trait may matter most of all.

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Most software developers that I know prefer almost any facet of their job more than attending meetings. A friend of mine quotes his father's line that I agree with: "It takes an awfully good meeting to beat having no meeting at all." In fact, many of the articles and blogs on effective meetings include the tip to only hold a meeting if it is necessary. However, meetings are sometimes necessary and I have found one tip to be particularly useful in increasing the short-term and long-term benefits of a technical meeting.

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ActionScript 3.0 includes many object-oriented features that have an obvious Java-like syntax, but there are some nuances of ActionScript's object-oriented support that are not so Java-like.

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I have recently read and heard about situations in which Flex error handling is misunderstood. In this blog entry, I'll attempt to demonstrate, with a simple example, how Flex error handling works and attempt to drive out some of the sources of confusion.

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The term guilty pleasure is often used to describe music, television, movies, or other entertainment that we might (often somewhat secretly) like even when many around us (especially in our peer group) mock that same specific entertainment.

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Joshua Partogi recently posted Why You Might Not Want to Use Flex on his blog. I found this blog entry particularly interesting because Joshua does not focus on the usual criticisms of Flex (which often are actually of the Flash Player) and because Joshua's experience is almost exactly opposite of mine.

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Throughout my career, I have either directly experienced and/or witnessed developers around me lose significant development time because of little things that might be referred to as software development bloopers. I like the term blooper for these because the class of actions that lead to this time lost are the kinds of things that even highly intelligent and skilled developers can make from time to time.

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The 16 November 2008 edition of the JavaTools Community Newsletter includes a Tools Tip regarding the jinfo command-line tool provided with Sun's JDK. The same tool tip also points out that jps can be used to identify the identifiers of the Java processes.

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RMOUG has posted the RMOUG Training Days 2009 schedule (subject to change) along with online registration.

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Andrew Binstock's recent review of the book Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship got me thinking about what I like and dislike about working with Javadoc.

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One of the questions I was asked following one of my three presentations of Applying Flash to Java: Flex and OpenLaszlo at Colorado Software Summit 2008 was regarding Flex's support for Cascading Style Sh

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I previously blogged on the Apache Commons ToStringBuilder and discussed how it takes away much of the tedium normally associated with implementing toString methods.

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