gonz0′s Blog

Our statesmen still don’t realize how important time is for IT systems. For the third time in a row, the rules for DST were changed less than a week before they would’ve been implemented.

There’s no way vendors (or maintainers for FLOSS) can keep up with this kind of mambo-jambo. I’m trying hard not to turn this into a political rant, but it seems clear to me that this matter is being handled as almost every other subject by the government. “Just in Time” can be a good concept for compilers, but not for politics.

I pity on those who have to deal with this stuff in a large scale. I’ve received an email last Friday from Microsoft for instance. The subject was (translated from Spanish): “Know how to deal with possible change of time”. Maintainers of tz-data, on their side, haven’t yet released a version fixing this, so my computer’s clock is one hour ahead in time again.

Is it too much to ask, to start thinking about these issues a month before implementing it, instead of just a few hours?

Spring Modules has been marked deprecated. In favor of Spring Extensions, says the page.

Now Spring Extensions doesn’t have Annotations validation, a great feature of the former project. In fact, I couldn’t find these annotations or the necessary Validator Configuration Loader anywhere in Spring 2.5.

So, for the time being, I’m using Validation 0.8a from Spring Modules, ignoring its deprecated status. If you’re using Spring 2.5 and Maven, do remember to exclude Spring from its dependencies. Your POM snippet should look somehow like this:

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.springmodules</groupId>
 <artifactId>spring-modules-validation</artifactId>
 <version>0.8a</version>
 <exclusions>
  <exclusion>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
  </exclusion>
 </exclusions>
</dependency>

Otherwise you’ll end up having both Spring 2.0 and 2.5, which translates in errors such as MethodNotFoundExceptions and the like.
I consider this feature a really cool one. I’m looking forward to seeing it in Spring Extensions, so there’s no need for this kind of dirty solutions anymore.