Inexpensive Development E-Mail Server

A common issue using the company e-mail server for development is SPAM which, sooner or later, will reach the customer or a third party. To avoid the problem I did use a very good dummy e-mail server the Dumbster. In May, last year, I had to send HTML formatted mails from my application and test the result on the most common E-Mail clients.

The Dumbster wasn't enough anymore, but I didn't want to install/configure a true e-mail server and maintain it. My new choice is Apache James because it is quite simple to setup and use. It supports MSOutlook and Thunderbird (and many other which I didn't really check).

Inexpensive Development Platform for J2EE

Once the server is ready (see my previous article) I need a similar inexpensive development environment. Inexpensive it's OK but uncomfortable would be bad. I have two different choices: the first is to create a small development corner on my office workstation. The second would be to buy a a net-book and use it as dedicated appliance.

The first option has the advantage of a powerful hardware and a large screen. The net-book is small and may be used everywhere. I decided to investigate both environments because the first is suitable for developing a new project or a major release and the second seems to be suitable for support and small changes.

Ubuntu Server as Inexpensive Platform for J2EE

Due to the very small budget of the project I had to find a good but inexpensive platform. The development server is an old single core single CPU Pentium 4 pizza-box with 200 GB hard disk. The productive environment will be much better, but OS and middle-ware should work out-of-the-box and require a very little maintenance.

Developing with the Android Emulator: the Beginning

The documentation on Android Developers is very well done, but there is a lot of informations. Often the informations I need are spread over many different pages.

A quick setup for the development environment is easy to find. There is a lot of good sources about how to setup the virtual device, how to create a new project using the IDE and so on. What I missed is a collection of practical advices.

How To: GIT repository on Solaris 10

Last year I did replace my SVN software repository with GIT.

Last moth I began to use GIT also at the office because I will be able to roll back the experimentations sometimes I do in my projects. The history of the Eclipse IDE isn't enough to archive the goal. GIT creates locally a full featured repository with tags and branches. Any time I may switch to a different branch, so I may work, at the same time, on the mainstream and on the experimental features.