Posted by Jeroen van Wilgenburg mid-morning: December 24th, 2008
Last week I installed WebLogic and the AquaLogic Service Bus on a Mac. There is no Mac-download on the download page, but by using the HP-UX version everything works fine, you just have to add some command line parameters.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: December 23rd, 2008
Working abroad has been a wish of mine for some time now. Xebia offers me the opportunity to live and work in India. Through this blog series I will keep you informed of the progress and challenges of this project.
When moving to India it is almost inevitable to become an employer. One of my colleagues predicted that this would be one of the most enjoyable advantages of living in India and I have to say that so far he has been right. In our case we employ a cook, a cleaning lady and a driver. We are very satisfied with their services.
Posted by Kris Geusebroek around lunchtime: December 22nd, 2008
University
Monday 8th of December 2008 was the start of a week full of information. After attending the complete conference (including the University sessions) last year I felt it would be a good thing to do the same this year.
The university sessions give me a change to get more in-depth knowledge on some of the subjects. For this first day I had chosen the sessions on Scala and Java Power Tools.
Scala
The session about Scala has got me really interested in this (for me) new language. The combination of Object Oriented and Functional programming, the tight integration with Java (in the end its all Java bytecode) and the conciseness makes it worth my while to have a closer look. As Ted Neward mentioned in his talk: ‘Today start with Scala to experiment and prototype, so next year you’ll have the advantage of Scala knowledge to be able to use it in production systems.’
Posted by Saket Vishal in the early morning: December 22nd, 2008
PHP is becoming better day by day. As I proceed in my path of catching up with recent developments in PHP, I see more and more of adaption in PHP from JEE(Java Enterprise Edition) world. To begin with, I stumbled upon the unit testing framework PHPUnit. The amount of familiarity with the J2EE world is simply amazing.
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Posted by Martin van Vliet in the early morning: December 19th, 2008
One of the most important concepts in Scrum is the Definition of Done. With it,the Scrum team and stakeholders determine what exactly is needed to finish a user story. Typically it includes one or more of code complete, developer tested, documented and acceptance tested.
In my current project, the system we are building has been accepted by the client and is in production. At the same time, however, new development on the software is taking place. The bugs and user stories resulting from the first and second activity end up on the same product backlog and are worked on by the same Scrum team. For the user stories, we include coding, development testing and documentation in the Definition of Done. This has worked well for us and allowed us to create the system in the first place.
However, the bugs are a different story. These are defects in the already existing software that were found by either an external testing team or in production. At first, we were using the same Definition of Done for the bugs as for the user stories. When delivering software fixes for these bugs, our customer would regularly ask us a series of
questions we had no answers for:
- which versions/applications are impacted by this bug?
- which versions need to be patched?
- does this affect the interface between applications A and B?
- is there a workaround for it? Has it been documented?
We realized the Definition of Done for the bugs needs to be different from the ones used for regular user stories. By including the questions above, we create transparency about what we need to consider when solving bugs and are able to better meet the customer’s expectations.
What do you think? Is it a good idea to use different DoDs for user stories in one backlog?
Posted by Jeroen van Wilgenburg around lunchtime: December 16th, 2008
Last friday I spent quite some time to figure out how to initialize my Spring beans when unit-testing some Stripes ActionBeans. There wasn’t any Spring context at all and you really need that for integration testing.
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Posted by Marco Mulder mid-morning: December 16th, 2008
When working with Maven 2 and FitNesse, it is desirable to use the Maven classpath in FitNesse. The FitNesse Maven plugin can do this for running tests in a build, but not for using FitNesse interactively.
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Posted by Vincent Partington just before lunchtime: December 13th, 2008
VMWare Server 2.0 was released about two months ago. Virtualization is hot and has a lot of different uses. I use it to run the Linux-based middleware products (Apache, IBM WebSphere Server, IBM WebSphere Portal, etc.) for which we are building an automated deployment product on my . But more about that later…
Anyway, I’ve been running betas and release candidates of VMWare Server 2.0 for six months now and while the functionality is great, initially the performance was very bad on my Thinkpad T61p running Windows Vista. Last week I finally got it to work with proper performance. A perfect time to let other people know how. 
Posted by Jeroen van Wilgenburg mid-morning: December 11th, 2008
Lately I ran into an annoying problem with Hibernate. I tried to do pagination on a query result which was doing an SQL-JOIN under the hood. The query before paging returned about 100 results. When I turned on paging (with 20 results per page) all the pages had less than 20 results!
The reason for this is that with a JOIN there can be duplicate results and those results are filtered out after pagination is done. In this blog I will explain how to solve those problems and it also a cleaner way to build your Criteria queries.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels terribly early in the morning: December 11th, 2008
This second part on Spicefactory will delve into the details of writing a Grails plug-in for this framework. Be prepared to read a lot of code!