Using descriptive names is a good programming practice. Today I came across an example that does quite the opposite. In Maven 2 you can define a proxy when you are working behind a proxy server, and there is this active flag that sets this proxy to active or inactive.... or at least that is what you expect right?
Filed under: Java, Maven
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This is the literal translation of an old dutch saying "Vakmanschap is Meesterschap"; being a master in your profession. In my opinion the lacking of this is one of the biggest problems in software development these days and main reason why projects fail; it isn't a process that caused it, nor the technique that was used: It's actually people that mess up projects! Did the technique or process pick itself or did someone pick the technique or process?
Currently there is also a debate going on whether or not to include Craftsmanship over Execution as fifth value on the Agile Manifesto.
But let's take a step back and try to figure out why we are lacking craftsmanship?
Filed under: Agile, General
4 Comments
Refactoring is part of a software developers work. General rule of thumb I always used is if you see code that smells (for instance duplication) you should refactor. But does this rule always apply? Are there any situations when you should not refactor? And if so, how do you recognize those situations?
Filed under: Java
7 Comments
A new version of Xebia's open source maven-dashboard-plugin has been released. This version fixed some bugs. A quick guide on how to use the dashboard in your project please read this blogpost.
Keep an eye on this blog or checkout the roadmap in Jira for upcoming releases.
Filed under: Java, Maven, Quality Assurance
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After my first real encounter with Groovy I got really excited about it and decided to spend some of my personal training days to get more experience with Groovy. As study material I read the Programming Groovy book. While reading I really wanted to get my hands dirty, so as a study case I decided to solve one of my longest and biggest frustrations as a developer and that is working behind a proxy server. The idea I had is to create a groovy program that will allow to turn the proxy settings on or off for applications like (Maven, Subversion, Internet Explorer, Firefox and so on) by running a single command: groovy com/xebia/proxy/SwitchProxy on/off. Here is a short summary of some of the techniques I used while creating this program.
Filed under: Groovy, Java, Testing
2 Comments
When we upgraded Wordpress to the newest version, we accidentally enabled mandatory registration for comments. We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused. As of now, registration is again no longer needed to post comments.
Lars
Filed under: Java
2 Comments
For my current assignment I need to write a script that basically does the following: open war file, download and add files from internet, remove files, change xml and property files, re-package war file.
In pure Java, this would be quite some work to implement. Of course there are several libraries available that will make unzipping, downloading etc a bit easier. But still it would be too much effort for such trivial tasks.
Since it is in fact a script I want to create, why not use a scripting language like Groovy. After two days of coding I must say am very happy with the progress I made given the fact that it is actually my first real Groovy programming experience.
Here are some experiences and code I created so far:
(more...)
Filed under: Groovy, IntelliJ, Java
6 Comments
One of the most powerful features of Maven is it's reporting mechanism, also known as maven site. There are a lot of reports available which can give you an indication of the quality of your code. However if you overload yourself by adding too many reports or let the reports produce too much information everyone ignores them and the reports become useless.
In this blog I'll share which reports we chose in my current assignment and how you can customize certain Maven Reports to produce the information you want.
Filed under: Java
3 Comments
For the Wicket webapplication I am currently working on, we build in JAMon for real time performance monitoring. As usual we intercept all calls to objects like Repositories and Services to monitor their performance. Because we use Spring we can easily intercept these Spring managed objects using Spring AOP. Besides these statistics we are also interested how long a certain page request takes. Since the Wicket components are not Spring managed we can not use Spring AOP. In this blog I´ll explain how you can put in JAMon monitoring for these page requests.
Filed under: Java
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In most organizations you often have the restriction that software needs to be implemented in one language (in our case Java). I think this is often based on certain assumptions like: "It saves money because the employees do not have to learn more than one language." or "We have invested a lot of money in these expensive commercial Application Servers and are afraid to loose our investments."
Although these arguments are valid at some point, I think standardizing on language is outdated.
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Filed under: Java
8 Comments