Improving Performance of Spring’s ShallowEtagHeaderFilter by 50%

I led the team developing a new web presence for Mackenzie Financial, an effort which involved performance testing (which is always a good practice). During that testing, I discovered that ShallowEtagHeaderFilter was generating a lot of garbage and a lot of time was being spent in it. That didn’t seem ideal so I dove in … Continue reading Improving Performance of Spring’s ShallowEtagHeaderFilter by 50% →

HTTP Response Caching for Java and Android

HTTP caching is both important, as it reduces bandwidth use and improves performance, and complex, as the rules are far from simple. In my experience, most Java and Android applications either don’t do HTTP caching, or they roll their own and up doing it wrong or in way too complicated a fashion. In other words, … Continue reading HTTP Response Caching for Java and Android →

Best way to use HttpClient in Android

Many Android applications access the Internet resources over HTTP (and my projects are no exception). There are 2 common ways to do that: use Apache HttpClient 4.x (which is included in Android) or use HttpURLConnection (from Java). Google stated in a September 29, 2011 blog post that they prefer you use HttpURLConnection, but many apps … Continue reading Best way to use HttpClient in Android →

My First Android App: CallerID

I’ve been looking for an excuse to write an Android app, and those annoying “unknown number” phone calls presented themselves at the perfect problem to solve. My CallerID application consists of two parts: a service that runs on a server and given a phone number returns the information associated with it, and an Android app … Continue reading My First Android App: CallerID →