There are times where I wish I could budget money to have people beaten. Today is one of those days. I was asked to (quickly, cause it was a rush) whip up something that would look up a counter, allocate some identifiers, and do some simple inserts into a database. It was supposed to get invoked a couple dozen times over the course of a day. Easy, right? I even gave some examples on how to use it and put together a bit of documentation. Bonus for them. Get a quick TY email, and hear nothing more for a couple months.

Digging through my mailbox I see something hit the fan last night. Turns out that the requirement was for something that was closer to 10-20 concurrent calls, not 10-20 calls over a 24 hour period. Well that is an entire different kettle of fish! I was shocked the classes I sent them worked as well as it did. I also foresee some knucklehead submitting my code to the dailywtf… I asked them about usage! I should have never made it generic enough for them to do that. I see the beauty of hard coding now...

Also digging into something new. When I’ve needed a timer, I’ve always favored a cron job or coding up a daemon that would trigger an event. Got the request to do all of it inside the EJB without any external helpers. Well, OK… Turns out the EJB frameworks have that. Go figure. I’ll be spending some quality time with the javax.ejb.TimedObject this week. Anyone else have experience with it? It looks fairly strait forward from my reading so far.