Xebia Blog

While attending QCon San Francisco, I had the particular pleasure of attending a whole track that was devoted to the area of functional programming, a topic that I have a profound interest in. After having followed the track, I'm even more convinced than before that functional programming is not confined the the academic world. I think that it will have a profound impact on our mental perspective and the way we think about programming and problem solving in the next coming years. In this blog, I will summarize the sessions I followed, provide you with a couple of thought provoking ideas that I picked up, and hopefully makes you think about your programming style.

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Filed under: Functional Programming, qcon
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At Xebia India we were having training on Flex, and this gave me an opportunity to look deeper and around this new eye catching technology. During this learning period I came across a free online tool provided by Adobe Flex to create CSS for your flex application. It is not a full fledged application covering all the components present in flex, but with the minimal stuff on board it gives you enough knowledge to extend the CSS for all other components. Some of the impressive parts of this tool are
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Filed under: Flex
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Today JavaWorld published my article series "Automated code reviews with Checkstyle" in 2 parts.

Part 1:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 1

Part 2:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 2

This article series attempts to bridge the gap of code review with applying automated Checkstyle checks in a complete and proactive way. First goal is to make the task of custom Checkstyle rules creation so simple so that any enterprise IT team could create new custom rules suiting to their project (IT standards) needs.

Second goal is to apply these rules in PROCTIVE fashion. Instead of waiting the build to fail or waiting for rule violation reports and working on them in a reactive way, the idea is to apply these checks proactively with Checkstyle Eclipse plugin or applying them at SVN level itself. Irrespective of which IDE you are using, if your code contains some of the high severity violations, you will not be able to commit the code in SVN. You will see the same kind errors and location on SVN console as you see with Eclipse plugin. This is achieved using SVN pre-commit hooks.

Filed under: Articles, Eclipse, Frameworks, Java
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Last year I came back from QCon San Francisco filled with new ideas. DSLs were clearly going to rule the world so I'd better start using them any chance I got. No surprise then that I was back for more this year, hoping to find out about the hottest new bleeding edge trends. Unfortunately the first two days were slightly disappointing. I did visit some interesting cloud computing introduction talks and Kent Beck's talks were pretty funny, but nothing really blew me away.

Luckily the last day was more like it. Here are some impressions of what's hot and what's not:

- Relational databases are very uncool (or "unkuu" as Kent Beck's son would apparently put it)
- Alternative storage solutions like CouchDb, AtomServer, and Neo4J are very hot.
- Google's BigTable and MapReduce are very influential and lots of innovative new projects are based on them.
- Everything should have a RESTful API.

There were a lot of interesting sessions on friday but the best two were definitely:

- Unshackle your Domain, a DDD session that talked about some very interesting domain modeling techniques. See Erik's blog for more info on that session.
- AtomServer - The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution. These guys not only discussed a very interesting RESTful data storage solution, they were also very entertaining and their new dating site http://www.AnyoneWillDo.com/ will undoubtedly be very successful.

All in all it was very much worth it coming to San Francisco this year and hopefully I'll be back for more inspiration next year.

Filed under: Domain Driven Design, General, qcon
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The talk "Unshackle Your Domain" given by Greg Young was the highlight of QCon for me. An architectural approach that is relatively easy to understand, incredibly scalable, and supports a rich domain model. (more...)

Filed under: Architecture, Domain Driven Design
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After two days of QCon you get the feeling that no one is talking about Java anymore. C#, Erlang, F#, Groovy, Ruby, and Scala seem to have taken over. The only new Java stuff being talked about are libraries, application servers, or just IDE improvements. No one is talking about the Java language.
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Filed under: Java
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Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending and interacting with Sanjiv Augustine in his workshop on “Transitioning to Agile project management”. Sanjiv is a well known thought leader in the field of Agile and Scrum. He is an author of the book called “Managing Agile Projects”. I felt he was very practical and Agile in the way he conducted the session. Although the workshop was designed to help project managers make a smooth transition from traditional methodologies (typically waterfall) to Agile project management, I felt there was a lot in it for everybody.

To do justice with the title of the session, he did address different roles, responsibilities, phases and associated processes of Agile software development using Scrum. He compared Scrum and Waterfall with a focus on planning, execution, monitoring and adapting phases of software development from project management point of view.

However I am trying to present the session from traditional vs Agile perspective. The blog has been divided in the following three sections.

• A case for transition to Agile(Scrum and XP).
• Benefits of practicing Agile.
• Things that have changed.

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Filed under: Agile
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One of the best sessions of the first day of QCon for me was the talk "Teamwork is an individual skill" by Christopher Avery. The talk focused on skills and habits that we can learn to become effective team members. This is becoming more and more important since most of us are in the position that people we have no direct influence over determine whether we are successful or not. A software development team is a good example of this.

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Filed under: Agile
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The QCon San Francisco 2008 conference was opened with an interesting keynote by Rebecca Parsons and Martin Fowler. In their talks they addressed the often strained relationship between traditional architects and agile development and how to improve this relationship to the benefit of both the agile development team and architects. These benefits include cross-project and cross-department knowledge exchange, sharing of the architects many years of experience with the developers, and only working on the architecture that is actually needed. (more...)

Filed under: Agile, Architecture
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Recently I had an interesting discussion with a colleague about blogs and about what keeps people from posting a lot of them.
Especially in our fields where-in we learn something new every now and then and know that people will benefit from sharing our learning, what really pushes us away from blogging?
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Filed under: Java
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