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Every few years I get a new machine, and every time I lose an afternoon to the same ritual: find the download page, pick the right installer, click Next a dozen times, fix the PATH, and discover two days later that I forgot Maven. I have been fighting this for a long time. Years ago I wrote about a portable Java 8 SDK on Windows and a more or less portable WebLogic 12c, which were really the same wish in disguise: I wanted my tools to be something I could carry, repeat, and throw away.

I have kept this blog on WordPress since July 2008, and for a long time that was fine. Over the years, though, it became harder and harder to stay motivated. By 2026 I had a pile of things worth writing about, mostly around AI, and I was spending more time fighting the tool than writing the posts. That is why I’m looking for an alternative. I haven’t left WordPress yet, so this is not a victory lap, just an explanation of how it wore me down.

We blame AI for writing slop specs. But the worst spec slop I’ve seen in my career was written by humans.

Long before LLMs, I was reading requirements like this:

“The system shall allow the user to be able to add an item to the set of items.”

This article appeared first at techtavern.wordpress.com.

(or, “Oracle SOA Suite” from “Quick Start installation”, as stated in the overworded documentation from Oracle)

(or version 12.2.1.4 of WebLogic)

Yes, it is possible to create a more or less portable installation the WebLogic 12c. This installation will work afterwards without administration privileges. And may run with other JVMs (even non “certified” ones as Adopt Open JDK). The installation might be moved to other directories or computers where one does not own administration privileges.

This article appeared first at techtavern.wordpress.com.

This article explains how to copy your current DBeaver connection from one computer to another.

Instead of installing all drivers again and instead of creating your connections from scratch, it is actually very simple to copy the DBeaver configuration from one computer to another.

First, discover where the configuration is stored on the source computer. You can check this easily the the Preferences: Menu -> Preferences -> Worspace. Check the path shown at “Show full workspace path:”.

This article appeared first at techtavern.wordpress.com.

AppEngine and its companion Datastore have been of great value for our application. Nevertheless, time has come to move to another cloud, which also means to face the annoying fact that all our data is stored within a closed, isolated, black box within Googles infrastructure and accessible only through Googles proprietary AppEngine API.

This article explains how we managed to download all data from Datastore and prepared it for another cloud.

While developing a JavaFX application distributed with Webstart, I had to choose a Gradle plugin in order to package the application. Unfortunately, Gradle does not support Webstart out of the box. After experiencing several available plugins, I decided for the gradle-jnlp-plugin from Tobias Schulte, hosted at Github.

His gradle-jnlp-plugin creates a webstart distribution for a JavaSE application as required by the webstart specification. It creates the jnlp file and compresses/signs the jar files. The directory created by the plugin may then be uploaded to your static web server or embedded into your war file.

This collection of articles describe the gradle-jnlp-plugin from Tobias Schulte, hosted at Github.

• Using the gradle-jnlp-plugin – part 1
• Using the gradle-jnlp-plugin – part 2

The plugin produces a webstart distribution for a JavaSE application as required by the webstart specification. It creates the jnlp file and compresses/signs the jar files. The directory created by the plugin may then be uploaded to your static web server or embedded into your war file.

This collection of articles describe the gradle-jnlp-plugin from Tobias Schulte, hosted at Github.

• Using the gradle-jnlp-plugin – part 1
• Using the gradle-jnlp-plugin – part 2

The plugin produces a webstart distribution for a JavaSE application as required by the webstart specification. It creates the jnlp file and compresses/signs the jar files. The directory created by the plugin may then be uploaded to your static web server or embedded into your war file.

This article explain how to prevent Datanucleus Enhancer failure when developing for Google AppEngine on Netbeans 8.

This article originally appeared on https://techtavern.wordpress.com

The cause

The Google AppEngine plugin for Netbeans from Gaelyk does not work with Google AppEngine Java SDK 40 and later.

The workaroud

While developing, use AppEngine Java SDK 37 (latest available version thar worked for me on Netbeans). You may download it from Maven Repository (see this link), as it is no longer available at Google Appengine site. When building the release version, compile against the latest AppEngine Java SDK.