Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Agile Practise
You've probably seen "Agile Mythbusting" in one form or another but it can't be overrated ;-)
From the unsung hero department
David Nusinow, the current Xorg Debian maintainer, has put a tremendous amount of work in packaging the beast which is known as Xorg. He did the transition from XFree86 to Xorg and manages the transition to modular Xorg 7 now. There are currently some disturbances in the force but I fully agree with this post from Daniel Stone. Thank you David and the XSF, your hard work is greatly appreciated.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Baffled
Was baffled today when Tobias Geiger - a colleague at ComBOTS - casually cited from "Absolute Giganten". The movie seems to be even more popular than I thought ;-)
BTW Happy Birthday, Tobias - Da geht einiges.
BTW Happy Birthday, Tobias - Da geht einiges.
Monday, April 17, 2006
The J2EE backlash continues ...
Now that RoR provided the valve to let the steam out of the Java web application pot we are seeing similar phenomena in the Java Enterprise pot.
WS-* is an easy target in this respect. I hardly know a (Java) developer who mastered the WS arena. Not because providing web services wouldn't be useful but because it's just so complex, confusing and certainly _not_ fun.
In my experience there's one magical turning point for enterprise architecture: the deadline. I've seen more than one project throwing corporate strategy overboard when faced with the decision: delay the deadline or use working code now but without the full might of the corporate architecture. And I'm not talking about flushing the entire design of an application. It was more along the line: company policy: "you've got to use J2EE application server xyz"; state at the deadline: "we've got a working version on this servlet container but deployment on J2EE container xyz shows a couple of obscure anomalies."; solution: "take the working version in production now, we'll abide the company policy later."; of course it was never deployed on the company J2EE container.
Right now the backlash is developer-driven but before too long it'll be customer-driven.
WS-* is an easy target in this respect. I hardly know a (Java) developer who mastered the WS arena. Not because providing web services wouldn't be useful but because it's just so complex, confusing and certainly _not_ fun.
In my experience there's one magical turning point for enterprise architecture: the deadline. I've seen more than one project throwing corporate strategy overboard when faced with the decision: delay the deadline or use working code now but without the full might of the corporate architecture. And I'm not talking about flushing the entire design of an application. It was more along the line: company policy: "you've got to use J2EE application server xyz"; state at the deadline: "we've got a working version on this servlet container but deployment on J2EE container xyz shows a couple of obscure anomalies."; solution: "take the working version in production now, we'll abide the company policy later."; of course it was never deployed on the company J2EE container.
Right now the backlash is developer-driven but before too long it'll be customer-driven.
C# and Java comparison
This article is a bit dated (Aug 2000) and it particularly shows in the description of now current Java features (I'm pretty sure it's the same for the C# side). Nevertheless it's a nice and swift head start into C# for someone coming from a Java background like me ;-)
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The logging saga
If you thought logging in Java is an easily solved and uncontroversial problem think again after reading these links. Attila Szegedi hunts down a memory leak with commons-logging. Ceki Gülcü of log4j fame gives a comprehensive analysis of the commons-logging problems. Simon Kitching of commons-logging and commons-beanutils fame replies to the critics. One possibility implemented for 1.1 is e.g. to allow the disabling of the ThreadContextClassLoader (TCCL). Already confused ? Remember it next time a Java developer just brushes over the "trivial" logging part of your app.
Cleaning out my closet
Long time since the last post so I'll put out some links to the more interesting stuff which I read lately in the following entries.
Just a short summary status:
Work at ComBOTS is picking up pace. Debian-wise packaging aegis 4.22 is on my agenda. I'm in the process of injecting new hardware in my vdr: adding a third harddisk and a second DVB-S card and replacing the defunct power supply. Commons Resources was demoted to the sandbox but I hope that I get around soonish to work on the open issues: it's just too useful to let it linger in current in-between state. I started following the django mailing lists: lots of momentum and activity. That's all I can think of for now ;-)
Just a short summary status:
Work at ComBOTS is picking up pace. Debian-wise packaging aegis 4.22 is on my agenda. I'm in the process of injecting new hardware in my vdr: adding a third harddisk and a second DVB-S card and replacing the defunct power supply. Commons Resources was demoted to the sandbox but I hope that I get around soonish to work on the open issues: it's just too useful to let it linger in current in-between state. I started following the django mailing lists: lots of momentum and activity. That's all I can think of for now ;-)
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