Posted by Maarten Winkels terribly early in the morning: December 5th, 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.
The next step in the process is packing your bags and… GO!
Posted by Maarten Winkels at around evening time: November 3rd, 2008
Today InfoQ has posted my article Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex.
The article describes how the combination of Flex and Grails leads to a highly productive platform for writing JEE applications. It discusses the problems one faces when integrating Flex as client technology and Grails as server technology and details solutions for each of these problems.
The article can be used as a tutorial for writing simple client-server applications with Grails and Flex.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early afternoon: October 21st, 2008
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.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early afternoon: September 11th, 2008
By Eelco Rustenburg and Maarten Winkels
Picture this: You enter a room and seated at a conference table you find two grumpy looking men, arms crossed, that tell you: “We want fixed price, fixed date, fixed functionality!” Now imagine you are the manager of a Software Development Company championing Agile, what would you do? It is easy to spot the conflict: Agile dictates to embrace change and to do away with stringent planning. How could you approach this difference? It takes a special person to fit a square peg in a round hole.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: August 27th, 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.
The last days I’ve run into a lot of problems that to me are very much related to India. I try not to let them spoil my day, although I hope I can finish this story, because my battery is running low and after it goes there is not much else to do in my dark apartment…
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Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: August 25th, 2008
Producing valuable, working software is an art. Practicing this art involves intuition (insight), talent and craftsmanship, like practicing any other art. The main principles of this craftsmanship, shared by many other craftsmen, are “know your tools and materials” and “less is more”.
The recent blog by Lars inspired me to write about my perception of craftsmanship in software development.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels at around evening time: August 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.
Last week I have spend a lot of time looking for a suitable apartment to rent. It has been quite an experience. I was very lucky to have the help of my Indian colleagues. The most important thing I’ve learned this week is the importance of judging people. I’m not sure if I’d be able to perform this art on my own just yet, but I’m learning.
After searching for a full week, I’m happy to say that I have found a very nice apartment in a very good area of South Delhi. I’ll try to move in next week.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels terribly early in the morning: August 8th, 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.
“I love it when a plan comes together!” This famous quote expresses what I feel about this project right now. It’s been more than a year now, since I started thinking about moving to India. I’ve slowly brought everybody up to speed and started to make preparations. Now things are coming to a completion. At the moment I’m in India to make the final arrangements.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels mid-afternoon: July 18th, 2008
Spring is a great framework for dependency injection and it comes with a lot of support classes and utilities for all kind of things. Hibernate is a persistence service with a lot of useful features, that is relatively easy to use. Configuring both frameworks is not always easy. Configuring them together is sometimes hard and it is easy to make mistakes.
This blog addresses a problem in a configuration that is fairly common: use Spring for transaction management on top of a JTA provider and use Hibernate for persistence. Transaction demarcation is easy and declarative with Spring. The problem is that Hibernate sometimes needs to detect the current transaction and this needs to be configured. This leads to hard to detect bugs in applications that rely on auto flushing.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: July 14th, 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.
The next step to moving to India is getting an Employment Visa. On all of our previous trips we used business visa, which are valid since while we’re working in India with our colleagues there, we’re not actually employed there. In this case, since I’m going to be employed in India, I need an employment visa. Getting one from the Indian Embassy in The Hague takes some time and effort.
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