Spring JMS

Using Spring JMS to send and receive messages to Queues is not difficult nowadays. I followed this tutorial in order to communicate to IBM MQ Series with no problem. It is simple, straightforward, and you can set up your applications in a very short amount of time.

Groovy Scripting

I've recently had a chance to use Groovy in my workplace. The script checks all connections to test server, including database connections and web services. It tries to log in using web services to all test servers and gives results.
This link provides a very good overview for Groovy starters, but the web service part is quite old, because now groovyws is much easier to use instead of groovysoap.

Timezone and Daylight Savings

Recently I've had problems with Timezones becaus this year, Daylight Saving Time is extended for 1 week in NSW. The trouble is, there is no world time zone authority, and this has caused some dramas in the applications that I am looking after. The good news is that Sun has released a Java patch to fix Java's timezone database. For more information, see: http://java.sun.com/javase/timezones/DST_faq.html