Xebee Goes Live
Posted by Anurag Shrivastava mid-morning: November 30th, 2009
It started when Saket walked in to my room about a year ago with a proposal to setup a blog where all people from Xebia India can blog. I asked Saket to find right tools to build such blog and find contributors who will publish contents regularly. I thought that setting up a blog was easy but keeping it up-to-date was hard. Blogging is about publishing content rapidly, so less than a regular flow of content would mean losing readers.
Even in the small organisation like us things move at a slower pace so the idea of having a blog disappeared like many other great ideas our team comes up with every week, because implementing an idea is hard. Recently Narinder, Vikas and Sandeep showed renewed interest in setting up a blog site for Xebia India. So quickly a word press theme was developed and a technical infrastructure is created to host the blog site. (more...)
Software Product Business is not about Software Development
Posted by Anurag Shrivastava in the early morning: November 29th, 2009
Recently, a leading IT weekly, in the Netherlands, Computable, reported that the software product industry is an important source of innovation in Europe. The same article reported that the European software product industry in under pressure from American product vendors. Each decade brings new challenges for various Industry sectors, for example in 70’s the invasion of Japanese car makers in the western markets and the push of Korean and Taiwanese consumer electronic products in 90’s. A great deal of innovation in software business is driven by small and mid-size companies, who either know what customer wants or found a way to rapidly discover what customer wants.
Guaranteed Delivery in Spring Integration
Posted by Wilfred Springer just before lunchtime: November 27th, 2009
This is not a rant against ESB. I am not saying that ESBs never have a purpose, nor suggest that it's all just a scam. If - after having read this post - you got the impression that I suspect a conspiracy behind ESB, then I want to tell you up front that this is certainly not what I intended to say.
Testing the testers: code samples from a TDD framework comparison
Posted by Andrew Phillips around lunchtime: November 26th, 2009
Some while back I was preparing a presentation on mocking and testing frameworks for Java. As part of the aim was to demonstrate some real, running code, I ended up spending quite some time copying, pasting, extending and correcting various examples gleaned from readmes, Javadoc, Wiki pages and blog posts. Since then, this codebase has been extended with various new features I've come across, and I've often referred to it for experiments, as a helpful reference, and suchlike.
I imagine this kind of "live" reference could also be useful to others, so I thought I'd share it. (more...)
Tips for ScrumMasters: How to act on retrospective outcomes
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: November 25th, 2009
In my previous blog, I talked about when to estimate user stories so that a Product Owner can do release planning based on velocity and relative estimates. This time, I will discuss another topic that I see many Scrum teams struggle with: how to implement improvements based on what is discussed in retrospectives.
Many Scrum teams have a hard time to continuously improve themselves. In retrospectives, problems and possible improvements are discussed. Then nothing happens. In later retrospectives, the same problems are discussed without noticeable changes. Retrospectives like this are a waste of time. Even worse, missing out on the opportunity to continuously improve is a big waste in itself. The velocity of such teams and the quality of their deliverables will almost certainly get better if they find ways to act on improvements that are identified in retrospectives.
(more...)
Scala Labs at the Dutch Java Users Group J-Fall meeting
Posted by Sjors Grijpink at around evening time: November 25th, 2009
Scala Labs at the J-Fall conference was the first in a series of public events in which we want to show the power and fun of Scala to a broad audience of developers.
Before I tell you about our experience at the JFall, I would like to explain how Scala Labs got started. This relatively new upcoming language on the Java Virtual Machine has been drawing more and more attention and many of our developers have started playing with over the last couple of months. In August some of us decided to organize an internal technology day, so all of our developers could get a better understanding of this new language and discover its merits. Because everyone was very enthousiastic about the entire day we figured that it would be a nice to organize something similar outside of Xebia as well. The exercises from that day became the basis of the Scala Labs exercises that we used at the JFall.
(more...)
QCon San Francisco 2009
Posted by Martin van Vliet late at night: November 24th, 2009
For a few years now, November has been the month of QCon San Francisco for me. So far it has proven an excellent conference with lots of thought-provoking presentations and conversations. This year was no exception. Read on for my personal high- and lowlights.
(more...)
IBM WebSphere scripting with wsadmin: containment paths, configuration IDs and object names
Posted by Vincent Partington in the early evening: November 23rd, 2009
In my previous blog on the deployment capabilities of the major application servers, I asked, as a joke, whether anybody knew the difference between containment paths, configuration IDs and object names in WebSphere's scripting interface wsadmin. I didn't get (nor expect 
) an answer. But instead of keeping you in the dark, this blog will explain the difference between these three and how you can translate between them.
Configuration ID
Configuration IDs are the most common id you will encounter when working with wsadmin. They uniquely specify an element in the configuration of WebSphere Application Server and are needed to modify the configuration with one of the commands in the AdminConfig object.
Maven appassembler Plugin: Dealing with Long Classpaths on Windows
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the early afternoon: November 22nd, 2009
When it comes to generating command-line scripts for Java applications, Maven "appassembler" plugin comes handy. Its "assemble" goal does all the maven magic, i.e. searching the dependencies used for creating the Java application, adding them into the classpath of resultant script and finally copying all relevant jars to a single place. It was all working very nicely until I stumbled across the problem of long classpaths in the Windows OS.
Irrespective of whether you use DOS prompt or cygwin, Windows limits the length of environment variables. Though there are various options to overcome this problem using Java 6 wildcard classpath, mapping the path to some drive etc, they all look like workarounds to me as problem can recur again anytime.
(more...)
My days at Devoxx: 2009 Conference Review
Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-morning: November 21st, 2009
I've just come back from Devoxx 09 in Antwerp, Belgium, a conference that will probably become known as the one in which closures sneaked back in to Java 7.
Whilst I didn't feel any particular urge to return for the day 3, there was more than enough interesting material, both technical and abstract, in the first two days for me to chew on. Here some thoughts and comments on my personal "slice" of Devoxx.
(more...)
Archives
Xebia Sites
Categories
- Java (282)
- Agile (109)
- General (50)
- Testing (42)
- Performance (42)
- Hibernate (36)
- Scrum (33)
- Podcast (31)
- Architecture (31)
- Spring (28)
- SOA (24)
- Maven (22)
- Project Management (22)
- Middleware (23)
- Deployment (14)
- Flex (17)
- JPA (17)
- Eclipse (15)
- Xebia Labs (15)
- Quality Assurance (14)