Xebia Blog

Recently I was asked by a client to introduce performance testing into their development process.
They have 1 week iterations where they integrate the different components of their system and they wanted to performance test the end-result every other week.
Starting out small and simple I downloaded JMeter from apache, fired up their recording proxy, recorded a scenario, changed all the relevant form fields into regex variables and off I went.
It worked great, we had some interesting data with some nice graphs to show performance was okish.
But the happiness didn't last long..

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Filed under: Java
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I use Maven 2 a lot in projects for quite some years now. Here a some random tips from my previous experiences that I'd like to share.

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Filed under: Java
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Today I spend some hours trying to fix a hibernate bug in our application. I changed the configuration just a little and it seemed that Hibernate was unable to handle this. I'd even found a bug report in Hibernate JIRA that described the same situation. I was on the brink of downloading the sources and trying to fix the problem in Hibernate... turns out there was an error in our configuration! This is to say, the model we wanted to configure could be configured in a non straight forward way. Apparently from the JIRA issue there are more people that find it difficult to come up with the correct configuration for this situation. Let me try to help them with a little example.

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Filed under: Hibernate, Java
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I was introduced to OSGi quite by coincidence. I had to give a presentation and a colleague suggested to look into OSGi. And once I started looking into it, I was quite surprised to find the ease with which it provided the solutions to some of the problems that we face in the web application development. There are so many good articles and blogs which provide a great amount of material regarding OSGi. They are mentioned in the reference.

One of the concepts of OSGi that really intrigued me was how it allows bundles to export services that can be consumed by other bundles without knowing anything about the exporting bundle. OSGi takes care of this by introducing Service Registry where the exporting bundle registers the interfaces that it want to expose and any other bundle which wants to use those interface can just look up in the registry to use the implementation. The other concept of OSGi which I also found interesting was how OSGi uses version management to allow different versions of the same java class to be used within the project. So I created this blog to explore these concepts in greater detail. At this point, it would be important to mention that the intended audience for this blog are people who are new to OSGi. Also the example used are very basic and intend to show just the flow of control from one package to another.

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Filed under: OSGi
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Effective teamwork is essential in today’s world, but as you’ll know from the teams you have led or belonged to, you can’t expect a new team to perform exceptionally from the very outset. Team formation takes time, and usually follows some easily recognizable stages, as the team journeys from being a group of strangers to becoming united team with a common goal.

As part of my curriculum of “Leadership Training for Software Professionals” at IIM, Bangalore, I came across some very interesting and highly applicable models explaining various stages of team dynamics. It also laid out what we, as managers, should do/expect at various stages of the team maturity.
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Filed under: Agile, Articles, General, Project Management
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If you are using Eclipse to write your JUnit 4 tests you might have noticed that when you organize the imports, the line


import static org.junit.Assert.*;


at the top of your JUnit 4 classes is replaced by stuff like:


import static org.junit.Assert.assertTrue;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertNotNull;


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Filed under: Java
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Have you ever tried to pronounce a url generated by Wicket? It’s quite a tedious job and often end users want to have understandable url’s (even when that url has no meaning).

It’s is quite easy to get normal url’s in Wicket. In this article I’ll show you several solutions, the first two with plain Wicket and the final solution is with wicketstuff-annotations.

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Filed under: Frameworks, Java, Maven, Wicket
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In over two years of working with Scrum I've found it to be a great focus point for people who want to do projects better, faster and have more fun. The clients I've worked with, introducing Scrum, have all seen a surge in employee satisfaction, customer collaboration and focus on team effort. Xebia is entrenched in Scrum and we host certification, events and training. Together with some gurus like Jeff Sutherland and our colleagues we've trained hundreds of people in the Netherlands in using Scrum. After all this positive responses and experience, here at Xebia we thought there should be more ways of sharing Scrum experiences. So we think it's time for a "Scrum User Group" in The Netherlands.

We've set up the Dutch Scrum group and named it nlscrum. We have already hosted our first meetup last month and it was a great success! We hope our next event will even draw a bigger crowd and more inspiring ideas!
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Filed under: Agile, Scrum
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