I attended the BJUG last Thursday. I have been attending regularly for about a year and a half and even presented there last January. This meeting was perhaps the best yet. Jay Zimmerman and Scott Davis continue to run a top-notch Users Group!
The first talk was given by Howard Lewis Ship on Tapestry, which is a web development framework and is part of the apache project. While the topic fell a little out of the area where I am currently working, it was nonetheless interesting. I am planning to play with grails a bit and it is good to see how other frameworks work so I have something to compare against. Howard is a great speaker and author. We'll come back to Howard in a bit.
The only downer in the meeting was that the pizza was late. Fortunately, Howard took questions late, and our next speaker, Mike Cohn, agreed to break his talk into two pieces. Mike, who is a leading expert on agile development, presented Transitioning to Agile. I am a Scrum convert who has read both of Mike's agile books cover to cover. I was very interested to hear the talk, even though it comes a bit late as we have already transitioned. But it never hurts to review how you got there. Mike calls the technique we used "Don't Take No For an Answer". I liked the sound of that!
Mike made a point that is worth repeating. Dogmatically following "Best Practices" leads to stagnation. Only by understanding when it is appropriate to follow such practices and when deviation is a better path does a group learn to adapt. Mike argued that adaptation is a key tenet for a successful agile development.
The best part of the JUG, and arguably one of the best parts of JUGs in general, was when I got to speak to Mike one on one during the break to discuss a problem I was having with our Scrum development. Our team is tackling a large problem that we don't understand very well. The issue is so complex that a spike would not be sufficient to understand the problem. I explained this to Mike, who immediately replied, "Then Scrum is out the door!" He told me the team should focus on fixing the problem as quickly as possible, but that we should not try to fit the issue into a sprint structure. He did suggest that we keep the daily scrums running as a good starting point for communication and that as soon as possible, we restart our sprint planning and subsequent sprints. This is basically what we had done. This is one of the things I like so much about agile. It is pragmatic and usually, the most obvious path is the right one. Having said that, it was still good to hear from the expert that we are on the right track.
Another thing I like about the JUG is the ability to get together with some very smart folks and discuss software development. Geeky? You bet! Prior to the meeting, a friend, Chris, and I were discussing unit testing and the use of mocks. Chris was telling me that he had an epiphany and now understood when to use mocks in a way he hadn't before. I admitted that I still found the topic a bit of a mystery. In the fashion of all good teachers, rather than just give me the answer, Chris showed me how to have a similar epiphany. I will be blogging about this more later (and btw, I now "get it" as well), but for now, just wanted to highlight yet another reason I look forward to BJUG.
In the past, after the BJUG, I would go for beer with a couple of friends. Word about our get together spread and this month, about 12 of us went for beers. What a great time. Lots of shop talk intermixed with general conversation about other "stuff", including Howard introducing the team to a new game, Zertz. I totally suck at this game, but it is fun.
The plan is for this outing to become a regular ending to the meeting (we are going to look for a place that serves scotch for Demian). Should be a great time! If you live in the Denver/Boulder area, consider joining us.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Is Your Framework Adding Value?
Trust me, this is going somewhere...
Pre-fab or Field-fit?
A friend of mine is a drilling engineer. He has traveled around the globe and has many interesting stories he has shared with me. One involved an experience he had while working in the former Soviet Union around 1993. He and some co-workers toured a factory where pre-fabricated apartments were being built. The idea was that the major components, such as walls, would be built in the factory and trucked to the site where they could be assembled, simplifying the construction process.
Sounds great in theory, but my friend noticed a flaw in the implementation. The walls were made by pouring concrete into large rectangular wooden forms. These forms had internal forms for windows. While the forms were precisely measured and designed to fit, the corners of the internal frames were not braced and as the concrete was poured, they shifted, and what should have been a rectangular shaped window in the middle of the wall wound up being a parallelogram with non-right angles for corners. What should have simplified construction in the field wound up creating more work than starting from scratch, as each section had to be "field fit".
When asked about the problem, the factory workers shrugged and indicated that since it wasn't their problem, they didn't feel any need to change what they were doing. Of course, it didn't matter, since the window glass never fit anyway. When they assembled the buildings, the panes of glass were often overlapped.
The Liquid Foundation
While watching the History Channel, I saw an interesting program about an earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995. It turns out that the Japanese have taken to creating artificial land to help ease the real-estate shortage that they are experiencing. This is done by dredging soil from the ocean floor and depositing in other water-filled areas until it forms artificial land ready-made for the construction of houses, businesses, and highways.
Unfortunately, when the earthquake hit, an unexpected state change, known as soil liquefaction, occurred in this artificial land. As the shocks occurred, the land acted, for all intents and purposes, like a liquid, flowing and oozing all over the place. Anything built on top of this now liquid foundation was destroyed.
Software as Architecture
It is fashionable to compare the creation of software with the creation of buildings. We go so far as to call many members of the software industry "architects". While I am not crazy about this metaphor, it does work at times.
Software organizations often attempt to go the prefab route by building frameworks composed of common utilities that can be "trucked" to different developments. The thought is that the framework provides a pre-fabricated foundation (to stick with the metaphor) on which to build the application.
Sounds great in theory. Hmmm, where have we heard that before? At issue is the quality of said framework. Were the architects of the framework familiar with good API design? Were there any architects or is the framework simply an amalgamation of code fragments gathered from other developments? Is the goal of the framework to provide the basics or does it represent a grand attempt to boil the ocean? And most importantly, does the framework simplify application development or does it complicate the application and leave it with "window frames" that are field-fit and "panes of glass" that overlap?
These are important questions for a development organization to ask when it assesses whether to go the prefabricated framework route. Not only is there a risk of wasting development effort (and slowing time to market) trying to fit an application into an awkward architecture, but after this occurs, the resulting product is now built on a shaky foundation that may liquefy at any time, but of course it will wait to do so until deployed at a large customer site.
I am not saying that frameworks in and of themselves are bad. At issue is how the framework was constructed and whether it truly provides the value its use implies. We can look to the open source communities for examples of frameworks that work. Spring, Hibernate, Commons Logging... solid and designed for easy integration.
I told you I was going somewhere.
Pre-fab or Field-fit?
A friend of mine is a drilling engineer. He has traveled around the globe and has many interesting stories he has shared with me. One involved an experience he had while working in the former Soviet Union around 1993. He and some co-workers toured a factory where pre-fabricated apartments were being built. The idea was that the major components, such as walls, would be built in the factory and trucked to the site where they could be assembled, simplifying the construction process.
Sounds great in theory, but my friend noticed a flaw in the implementation. The walls were made by pouring concrete into large rectangular wooden forms. These forms had internal forms for windows. While the forms were precisely measured and designed to fit, the corners of the internal frames were not braced and as the concrete was poured, they shifted, and what should have been a rectangular shaped window in the middle of the wall wound up being a parallelogram with non-right angles for corners. What should have simplified construction in the field wound up creating more work than starting from scratch, as each section had to be "field fit".
When asked about the problem, the factory workers shrugged and indicated that since it wasn't their problem, they didn't feel any need to change what they were doing. Of course, it didn't matter, since the window glass never fit anyway. When they assembled the buildings, the panes of glass were often overlapped.
The Liquid Foundation
While watching the History Channel, I saw an interesting program about an earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995. It turns out that the Japanese have taken to creating artificial land to help ease the real-estate shortage that they are experiencing. This is done by dredging soil from the ocean floor and depositing in other water-filled areas until it forms artificial land ready-made for the construction of houses, businesses, and highways.
Unfortunately, when the earthquake hit, an unexpected state change, known as soil liquefaction, occurred in this artificial land. As the shocks occurred, the land acted, for all intents and purposes, like a liquid, flowing and oozing all over the place. Anything built on top of this now liquid foundation was destroyed.
Software as Architecture
It is fashionable to compare the creation of software with the creation of buildings. We go so far as to call many members of the software industry "architects". While I am not crazy about this metaphor, it does work at times.
Software organizations often attempt to go the prefab route by building frameworks composed of common utilities that can be "trucked" to different developments. The thought is that the framework provides a pre-fabricated foundation (to stick with the metaphor) on which to build the application.
Sounds great in theory. Hmmm, where have we heard that before? At issue is the quality of said framework. Were the architects of the framework familiar with good API design? Were there any architects or is the framework simply an amalgamation of code fragments gathered from other developments? Is the goal of the framework to provide the basics or does it represent a grand attempt to boil the ocean? And most importantly, does the framework simplify application development or does it complicate the application and leave it with "window frames" that are field-fit and "panes of glass" that overlap?
These are important questions for a development organization to ask when it assesses whether to go the prefabricated framework route. Not only is there a risk of wasting development effort (and slowing time to market) trying to fit an application into an awkward architecture, but after this occurs, the resulting product is now built on a shaky foundation that may liquefy at any time, but of course it will wait to do so until deployed at a large customer site.
I am not saying that frameworks in and of themselves are bad. At issue is how the framework was constructed and whether it truly provides the value its use implies. We can look to the open source communities for examples of frameworks that work. Spring, Hibernate, Commons Logging... solid and designed for easy integration.
I told you I was going somewhere.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
No Fluff Just Stuff, Spring 2007
NFJS, Spring 2007
This is the second year in a row I have attended the Denver leg of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Jay Zimmerman and crew have outdone themselves. The speakers were excellent, the topics were relevant, the venue was nice, and the food was good!
Due to budget issues, my company was not able to spring for the registration fee this year. So I paid for attendance out of my own pocket. It is that good! Kudos to Linda for supporting the financial decision.
I started out the seminar attending Venkat Subramaniam's Annotation Hammer talk. Annotations are near and dear to my heart, as they were the basis for my own talk on Hibernate with Annotations. It turns out Venkat doesn't feel that this is an appropriate use of annotations.
He made the distinction of intrinsic versus extrinsic metadata. According to Venkat, an intrinsic feature, which is one in which the semantics of the metadata are expressed in the code itself, is a good candidate for annotation use. Extrinsic features, in which the metadata expressed by the annotation is not expressed in the code itself, is not a good candidate for annotation use. Venkat believes that persistence semantics, such as in Hibernate, fall into the latter category. He also believes that using annotations with Spring and Hibernate results in vendor lock-in. I can buy into the extrinsic argument to some extent (but still like Hibernate annotations for small apps). I agree that Spring annotations result in vendor specific implementations. I disagree that annotations in Hibernate are vendor specific, since they are based on the JPA. If you don't like Hibernate, you can switch to another JPA provider (such as Ibatis). That's not lock-in where I come from.
Other interesting take aways from the talk include some info on Java 6, which will expand the use and support of annotations In Java 6, annotation processing is built in. For Java 5, the external Annotation Processing Tool is needed for pre-processing. A new annotation in J6, @WebService, provides all the scaffolding to support a web service without the need to write code.
Venkat showed some examples of junit 4.0 annotations. I really couldn't see any reason to use them over the standard junit API. No real value add.
Venkat concluded with a couple of observations: annotations "leak into" your code and can be hard to get rid of later. I don't like XML is not a good reason to favor annotations.
I'm guilty of the last one...
The next talk I attended was Neal Ford's 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. Neal used an interesting tool for his preso, MindManager, which is a mind mapping tool used for brainstorming and, it turns out, for making presentations.
Some key take-aways from this talk (some of them are "duhs", but still):
Version control and continuous integration are fundamental. An automated build machine should not have development tools on it.
Static code analysis should be favored over a compiler as the first step of testing. He mentioned FindBugs and a tool called PMD. PMD has a feature called "copy paste detector" that is useful for finding common code that can be refactored.
Singletons are glorified global variables. Overusing static classes is a sign of a procedural mindset
Persistent state is the enemy of unit testing. Keep your object state valid at all times. As an example, we discussed an Address class, with address, city, state, and zip fields. Neal argued that it made no sense to have setters for each field, since an address without a city makes no sense. Instead, he recommended using a constructor that takes all fields as arguments. I asked about a UI that might need to change the object. He suggested an update method. This is a great idea that I plan to use in my code.
Test driven development, avoiding feature creep, and analyzing dependencies (using a tool called JDepend) were discussed. He also presented an algorithm developed by an associate of his that used code coloring to identify code that provides the maximum business value. It was a bit complicated but looked like it could be useful if applied rigorously.
He touched on Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). This looks very interesting but we didn't get into much depth here, but the gist is that you should write APIs and name components using terminology that fit the domain.
Neal touched on a topic he calls Polyglot Programming, which was also the topic of his keynote talk. Summarizing, he argues that developers should use the most appropriate language for the task at hand and that it is acceptable to mix and match languages in a product. Given that there are 25 different languages that run on the JVM now, this is starting to make a lot of sense (see my discussion later on Java 6 for more on this).
The other critical argument Neal made in his keynote, and one that I whole-heartedly buy into, is that for software development to truly be considered an engineering discipline, the practitioner's of the discipline must embrace and commit to testing as the underpinning of everything the developer does. Neal is a test-driven development zealot. I am quickly becoming a convert. Of course it will take me some time to get good at it, but I have a goal.
The next talk I attended was OSGI: A Well Kept Secret, present by Venkat. OSGI is a component management platform that protects an application from "classpath hell". After hearing what this tool does, the first question the pops up is, "Why isn't this baked into the JVM". It turns out there are plans to do this, but there are two competing standards, JSR 277 and JSR291. And neither of thee standards appear to be learning from the OSGI team! So I'm not holding my breath. Like all Venkat talks, the demos were detailed and really showed the power of the product. I don't currently have need for this product, but it was good to get an introduction to it. Probably worth mentioning that OSGI is baked into apps like Eclipse.
Start of Day 2, first talk I attended was Build Teams, Not Products, presented by Jared Richardson. As a dev lead on a Scrum project, team building is a very important aspect of my job, and, in all honesty, not one of my strengths. So this was a relevant topic. I got some good ideas that I plan to try with my current team...
As the dev lead, it is important for me to share my own impediments so that other team members will be willing to do the same.
Focus on interactions, which will maximize human bandwidth.
Encourage informal code reviews as both a learning tool and a way to kick-start interactions. Verbalizing design decisions helps the whole team.
Randomize the order that the scrum reports in every day.
It was interesting to find that Jared worked at SAS, which rumor has it is the utopia of companies to work for if you are a software engineer. Jared dispelled this rumor a bit saying that, in regard to the work, there are good and bad areas within the company, just like any other company. Figures. He did say the bennies and culture were nice.
I followed this talk with another by Jared, Continuous Integration with Cruise Control. In keeping with my goal of getting better at TDD, I wanted to learn more about this tool so that I could use it more effectively. It was a good talk, with a great demo of the product. Nothing earth shattering but good review of what is available in the tool.
Neal's keynote got me to thinking and i decided it was time to look at Ruby again, so I attended his talk on JRuby. I'm still not sold on it. I really like Neal and respect a lot of his opinions, but he seems to be a bit hypocritical when it comes to Ruby. He spent a lot of time in the keynote discussing the warts in Java. During his Ruby talk, he glossed over similar issues in Ruby. One example is that arrays in Java being zero-based is bad, but when we run into this in a Ruby example, it is glossed over. Hmmm.
Neal stated that in Python, there is only one way to do something, while in Ruby, there are ten ways to do the same thing. He went on to argue this is a strength of Ruby. So put ten programmers in a room with Ruby and they will do the same task ten different ways. The maintenance team is gonna love that!
Neal argues for very clear concise class, method, and variable names, but the fact that the Ruby to string method is called to_s is not pointed out as a problem. Worse yet, there is Perl-like syntax that has crept into the language. How is this a clear, understandable piece of code:
list = ArrayList.new
%w(Red Green Blue).each { |color| list.add(color) }
%w? Give me a break. If I knew nothing else about the language, this would send me running... away!
Another Ruby annoyance is the suffixed if as opposed to the Java prefixed if.I am willing to concede that to some extent, this one is a learning curve, can't teach an old dog new tricks issue. Guilty as charged. But I'm still gonna use Groovy as my dynamic language of choice!
I should note that I really enjoy Neal's talks. He is intelligent, has a great sense of humor, is way smarter than I am, and does get me to look at things from a different angle. I just can't get excited about Ruby/JRuby.
I finished the day attending a talk, Making Architecture Work through Agility, presented by Mark Richards. Mark is an architect with IBM... and it shows. I am not very happy with the term architecture in software development. I really like Martin Fowler's essay Who needs an architect?. Mark's presentation reinforced this opinion. He showed a typical, "boil the ocean", eye-chart caliber architecture document and proceeded to discuss how an architect could get teams to implement the architecture in pieces. But this occurs "after" the architecture is delivered from on high. It is probably a bit better than what happens now, but I would argue that a better approach would be to use an agile process, and start implementing a product immediately, using refactoring to evolve the system over time as new features are identified and operation of the system is better understood. I attended this session hoping to change my mind abotu architecture, but instead, I find my opinion has been reaffirmed.
On the final day, I started by attending the Java 6 talk presented by Venkat. I knew that J6 was out there, but hadn't heard much about it. I hadn't heard anything about it that seemed like a must have or even a nice to have feature.
Java 6 is defined in JSR 270. It is currently available for Windows and Linux, but not for the Mac (a developer release is available). It turns out that both the developer Mac version and the Windows version running under Vista have problems. Linux users, you know who you are, this is your cue to start the heckling...
The most impressive new feature in J6 is its support for more than just Java. There are something like 25 languages that run on the JVM now and J6 provides a mechanism, called the ScriptEngineManager, that allows processing of these languages in Java code. This feature becomes very important with Neal's polyglot programming paradigm. J6 has a tool, jrunscript, that allows interactive testing for different scripting code.
J6 also provides built-in support for web services including a small webserver. Venkat feels that this feature is too little, too late. As a person who doesn't know web services very well, I might be able to take advantage of this feature.
J6 provides some tools to support monitoring and programmer support. JHAT provides some cool monitoring tools, JavaCompilerTool provides programmatic access to compiler, and there is built in annotation support, using -processor option on javac to specify annotation pre-processor.
J6 also provides localized UI support, splashscreen support (your splashscreen can be displayed BEFORE the JVM starts), console support, and integrated JDBC support. Venkat didn't go into these features in detail, but it is good to know they exist.
At lunch, there was a speakers panel. The speakers like to pick on Ted Neward, who seems to eat it up. They seem to have a lot of fun. Ted seems to enjoy taking the opposing side to the rest of the group. In particular, he made a comment that with careful programming, unit testing was not necessary. I was surprised that the rest of the group didn't hang him from the nearest tree. I later heard him mention that compilation WAS a weak from of unit testing. I think he likes the controversy. I hope so, because he seems like an intelligent guy in other respects.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in, here is the funny part, talks by Ted! He had a series on some quasi-basic stuff that I have never gotten around to looking into much. I took this opportunity to fix this.
The first one was on monitoring and debugging. Ted argues, effectively, that monitoring is more important because it proactively prevents errors, alleviating
the need to debug.
He presented some tools that come with Java that allow monitoring to occur. To demonstrate, he used a demo program available from sun called swingset2, which demonstrates many features of swing and is worth a look just for grins.
He started by looking at garbage collection, using the gc command line option, -verbose:gc, followed by a demo of jconsole to see the same information in a graphical format. He also demonstrated JMX hooks into the JDK logging libraries. which are cool. Unfortunately, they are not supported in log4j, which we use at work. The only criticism I had for this session is that towards the end, it got a little windoze-centric.
The last two sessions dealt with Reflection and Class Loaders. Lots of good technical information was imparted. Very information dense. My head hurt afterward. I'm not sure any of it is directly applicable to me right now, but it will be nice to have this background if I ever do run into uses of them.
The last thing I should mention is that I intentionally avoided talks by Scott Davis, but not because he is a bad speaker, which couldn't be further from the truth. Because he runs the Boulder JUG, which I attend regularly, I get to hear him talk on a regular basis. Were this not the case, I would probably attend everyone of his talks. Yup, he is that good! Wanted to put a plug in for him in case you haven't heard Scott talk and have the opportunity! Attend if you can... you won't regret it!
This blog is a short summary of a long weekend, but hopefully gives you a flavor of what the weekend was like. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend attending a NFJS event.
This is the second year in a row I have attended the Denver leg of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Jay Zimmerman and crew have outdone themselves. The speakers were excellent, the topics were relevant, the venue was nice, and the food was good!
Due to budget issues, my company was not able to spring for the registration fee this year. So I paid for attendance out of my own pocket. It is that good! Kudos to Linda for supporting the financial decision.
I started out the seminar attending Venkat Subramaniam's Annotation Hammer talk. Annotations are near and dear to my heart, as they were the basis for my own talk on Hibernate with Annotations. It turns out Venkat doesn't feel that this is an appropriate use of annotations.
He made the distinction of intrinsic versus extrinsic metadata. According to Venkat, an intrinsic feature, which is one in which the semantics of the metadata are expressed in the code itself, is a good candidate for annotation use. Extrinsic features, in which the metadata expressed by the annotation is not expressed in the code itself, is not a good candidate for annotation use. Venkat believes that persistence semantics, such as in Hibernate, fall into the latter category. He also believes that using annotations with Spring and Hibernate results in vendor lock-in. I can buy into the extrinsic argument to some extent (but still like Hibernate annotations for small apps). I agree that Spring annotations result in vendor specific implementations. I disagree that annotations in Hibernate are vendor specific, since they are based on the JPA. If you don't like Hibernate, you can switch to another JPA provider (such as Ibatis). That's not lock-in where I come from.
Other interesting take aways from the talk include some info on Java 6, which will expand the use and support of annotations In Java 6, annotation processing is built in. For Java 5, the external Annotation Processing Tool is needed for pre-processing. A new annotation in J6, @WebService, provides all the scaffolding to support a web service without the need to write code.
Venkat showed some examples of junit 4.0 annotations. I really couldn't see any reason to use them over the standard junit API. No real value add.
Venkat concluded with a couple of observations: annotations "leak into" your code and can be hard to get rid of later. I don't like XML is not a good reason to favor annotations.
I'm guilty of the last one...
The next talk I attended was Neal Ford's 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. Neal used an interesting tool for his preso, MindManager, which is a mind mapping tool used for brainstorming and, it turns out, for making presentations.
Some key take-aways from this talk (some of them are "duhs", but still):
Version control and continuous integration are fundamental. An automated build machine should not have development tools on it.
Static code analysis should be favored over a compiler as the first step of testing. He mentioned FindBugs and a tool called PMD. PMD has a feature called "copy paste detector" that is useful for finding common code that can be refactored.
Singletons are glorified global variables. Overusing static classes is a sign of a procedural mindset
Persistent state is the enemy of unit testing. Keep your object state valid at all times. As an example, we discussed an Address class, with address, city, state, and zip fields. Neal argued that it made no sense to have setters for each field, since an address without a city makes no sense. Instead, he recommended using a constructor that takes all fields as arguments. I asked about a UI that might need to change the object. He suggested an update method. This is a great idea that I plan to use in my code.
Test driven development, avoiding feature creep, and analyzing dependencies (using a tool called JDepend) were discussed. He also presented an algorithm developed by an associate of his that used code coloring to identify code that provides the maximum business value. It was a bit complicated but looked like it could be useful if applied rigorously.
He touched on Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). This looks very interesting but we didn't get into much depth here, but the gist is that you should write APIs and name components using terminology that fit the domain.
Neal touched on a topic he calls Polyglot Programming, which was also the topic of his keynote talk. Summarizing, he argues that developers should use the most appropriate language for the task at hand and that it is acceptable to mix and match languages in a product. Given that there are 25 different languages that run on the JVM now, this is starting to make a lot of sense (see my discussion later on Java 6 for more on this).
The other critical argument Neal made in his keynote, and one that I whole-heartedly buy into, is that for software development to truly be considered an engineering discipline, the practitioner's of the discipline must embrace and commit to testing as the underpinning of everything the developer does. Neal is a test-driven development zealot. I am quickly becoming a convert. Of course it will take me some time to get good at it, but I have a goal.
The next talk I attended was OSGI: A Well Kept Secret, present by Venkat. OSGI is a component management platform that protects an application from "classpath hell". After hearing what this tool does, the first question the pops up is, "Why isn't this baked into the JVM". It turns out there are plans to do this, but there are two competing standards, JSR 277 and JSR291. And neither of thee standards appear to be learning from the OSGI team! So I'm not holding my breath. Like all Venkat talks, the demos were detailed and really showed the power of the product. I don't currently have need for this product, but it was good to get an introduction to it. Probably worth mentioning that OSGI is baked into apps like Eclipse.
Start of Day 2, first talk I attended was Build Teams, Not Products, presented by Jared Richardson. As a dev lead on a Scrum project, team building is a very important aspect of my job, and, in all honesty, not one of my strengths. So this was a relevant topic. I got some good ideas that I plan to try with my current team...
As the dev lead, it is important for me to share my own impediments so that other team members will be willing to do the same.
Focus on interactions, which will maximize human bandwidth.
Encourage informal code reviews as both a learning tool and a way to kick-start interactions. Verbalizing design decisions helps the whole team.
Randomize the order that the scrum reports in every day.
It was interesting to find that Jared worked at SAS, which rumor has it is the utopia of companies to work for if you are a software engineer. Jared dispelled this rumor a bit saying that, in regard to the work, there are good and bad areas within the company, just like any other company. Figures. He did say the bennies and culture were nice.
I followed this talk with another by Jared, Continuous Integration with Cruise Control. In keeping with my goal of getting better at TDD, I wanted to learn more about this tool so that I could use it more effectively. It was a good talk, with a great demo of the product. Nothing earth shattering but good review of what is available in the tool.
Neal's keynote got me to thinking and i decided it was time to look at Ruby again, so I attended his talk on JRuby. I'm still not sold on it. I really like Neal and respect a lot of his opinions, but he seems to be a bit hypocritical when it comes to Ruby. He spent a lot of time in the keynote discussing the warts in Java. During his Ruby talk, he glossed over similar issues in Ruby. One example is that arrays in Java being zero-based is bad, but when we run into this in a Ruby example, it is glossed over. Hmmm.
Neal stated that in Python, there is only one way to do something, while in Ruby, there are ten ways to do the same thing. He went on to argue this is a strength of Ruby. So put ten programmers in a room with Ruby and they will do the same task ten different ways. The maintenance team is gonna love that!
Neal argues for very clear concise class, method, and variable names, but the fact that the Ruby to string method is called to_s is not pointed out as a problem. Worse yet, there is Perl-like syntax that has crept into the language. How is this a clear, understandable piece of code:
list = ArrayList.new
%w(Red Green Blue).each { |color| list.add(color) }
%w? Give me a break. If I knew nothing else about the language, this would send me running... away!
Another Ruby annoyance is the suffixed if as opposed to the Java prefixed if.I am willing to concede that to some extent, this one is a learning curve, can't teach an old dog new tricks issue. Guilty as charged. But I'm still gonna use Groovy as my dynamic language of choice!
I should note that I really enjoy Neal's talks. He is intelligent, has a great sense of humor, is way smarter than I am, and does get me to look at things from a different angle. I just can't get excited about Ruby/JRuby.
I finished the day attending a talk, Making Architecture Work through Agility, presented by Mark Richards. Mark is an architect with IBM... and it shows. I am not very happy with the term architecture in software development. I really like Martin Fowler's essay Who needs an architect?. Mark's presentation reinforced this opinion. He showed a typical, "boil the ocean", eye-chart caliber architecture document and proceeded to discuss how an architect could get teams to implement the architecture in pieces. But this occurs "after" the architecture is delivered from on high. It is probably a bit better than what happens now, but I would argue that a better approach would be to use an agile process, and start implementing a product immediately, using refactoring to evolve the system over time as new features are identified and operation of the system is better understood. I attended this session hoping to change my mind abotu architecture, but instead, I find my opinion has been reaffirmed.
On the final day, I started by attending the Java 6 talk presented by Venkat. I knew that J6 was out there, but hadn't heard much about it. I hadn't heard anything about it that seemed like a must have or even a nice to have feature.
Java 6 is defined in JSR 270. It is currently available for Windows and Linux, but not for the Mac (a developer release is available). It turns out that both the developer Mac version and the Windows version running under Vista have problems. Linux users, you know who you are, this is your cue to start the heckling...
The most impressive new feature in J6 is its support for more than just Java. There are something like 25 languages that run on the JVM now and J6 provides a mechanism, called the ScriptEngineManager, that allows processing of these languages in Java code. This feature becomes very important with Neal's polyglot programming paradigm. J6 has a tool, jrunscript, that allows interactive testing for different scripting code.
J6 also provides built-in support for web services including a small webserver. Venkat feels that this feature is too little, too late. As a person who doesn't know web services very well, I might be able to take advantage of this feature.
J6 provides some tools to support monitoring and programmer support. JHAT provides some cool monitoring tools, JavaCompilerTool provides programmatic access to compiler, and there is built in annotation support, using -processor option on javac to specify annotation pre-processor.
J6 also provides localized UI support, splashscreen support (your splashscreen can be displayed BEFORE the JVM starts), console support, and integrated JDBC support. Venkat didn't go into these features in detail, but it is good to know they exist.
At lunch, there was a speakers panel. The speakers like to pick on Ted Neward, who seems to eat it up. They seem to have a lot of fun. Ted seems to enjoy taking the opposing side to the rest of the group. In particular, he made a comment that with careful programming, unit testing was not necessary. I was surprised that the rest of the group didn't hang him from the nearest tree. I later heard him mention that compilation WAS a weak from of unit testing. I think he likes the controversy. I hope so, because he seems like an intelligent guy in other respects.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in, here is the funny part, talks by Ted! He had a series on some quasi-basic stuff that I have never gotten around to looking into much. I took this opportunity to fix this.
The first one was on monitoring and debugging. Ted argues, effectively, that monitoring is more important because it proactively prevents errors, alleviating
the need to debug.
He presented some tools that come with Java that allow monitoring to occur. To demonstrate, he used a demo program available from sun called swingset2, which demonstrates many features of swing and is worth a look just for grins.
He started by looking at garbage collection, using the gc command line option, -verbose:gc, followed by a demo of jconsole to see the same information in a graphical format. He also demonstrated JMX hooks into the JDK logging libraries. which are cool. Unfortunately, they are not supported in log4j, which we use at work. The only criticism I had for this session is that towards the end, it got a little windoze-centric.
The last two sessions dealt with Reflection and Class Loaders. Lots of good technical information was imparted. Very information dense. My head hurt afterward. I'm not sure any of it is directly applicable to me right now, but it will be nice to have this background if I ever do run into uses of them.
The last thing I should mention is that I intentionally avoided talks by Scott Davis, but not because he is a bad speaker, which couldn't be further from the truth. Because he runs the Boulder JUG, which I attend regularly, I get to hear him talk on a regular basis. Were this not the case, I would probably attend everyone of his talks. Yup, he is that good! Wanted to put a plug in for him in case you haven't heard Scott talk and have the opportunity! Attend if you can... you won't regret it!
This blog is a short summary of a long weekend, but hopefully gives you a flavor of what the weekend was like. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend attending a NFJS event.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A Geek's Groovy Valentine's Day Gift
I have wondered at times, does my wife listen to my ramblings about what I am working on, or has she just gone off to her happy place and is on auto-pilot?
Well, on Valentine's Day, I found out that she is listening at least some of the time. I am pretty excited about Groovy and while I haven't done much with it yet, I am hoping to do so soon. Anway, Linda must have heard something about Groovy, as demonstrated by the following pictures.
Well, on Valentine's Day, I found out that she is listening at least some of the time. I am pretty excited about Groovy and while I haven't done much with it yet, I am hoping to do so soon. Anway, Linda must have heard something about Groovy, as demonstrated by the following pictures.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Presenting at the BJUG, What Else Could Have Gone Wrong...
Well, for starters, I could have had to drive from Monument to Boulder, got stuck in traffic, realized I didn't have the directions to get to the meeting, and barely made it on time for my presentation. That's what happened to the presenter that followed me, David, Geary, who went on to present an excellent talk on the Google Web Toolkit.
David has written an e-book on GWT Shortcuts, that was supposed to be available at Informit., but it is listed as coming soon. He also has a paper book in the works for later this year on GWT.
Anyway, back to my preso. I had signed up to present Hibernate With Annotations to the Boulder Java User's Group. Hibernate is an Object to Relational Mapping library that I am using for my pet/perpetual project to keep statistics for a hockey team. I am using a new feature in Hibernate, using Java 5 annotations to manage my Hibernate ORM. There isn't a lot of info on it currently, so I thought I would share.
So I realized that afternoon that I had forgotten my monitor adapter for my laptop (DVI to VGA). No way to hook up to the projector. D'Oh! So I left work early and picked up a cable at the Flat Irons Apple Store. Then I met some friends at a restaurant for a pre-meeting dinner. The waitress was very slow and we got out a little later that I had hoped, but we still had some time.
So I am driving into Boulder on 36, three friends in my car, just dropped over the top of the hill, and I see an HP in front of me. He is driving about 60 in a 65, so I pass him doing about 66. As soon as I pass him, he drops over and hits the lights. What the hell? Is he really gonna ticket me for 1 over? Turns out, no, my license plates have expired. So he is ticketing me for that and takes his sweet time. Now I am in trouble time-wise. When he finally gives me my ticket, I take off for the meeting. We get into the parking lot 5 minutes before I am on. I get my stuff and start into the building at a fast clip, leaving everyone else in the dust. On my way, I hit a patch of ice and fall. I barely miss a beat, jumping back up and heading in. My friends jokingly tell me to wait up. I found out later that my fall resembled my bowling style.
So I get into the meeting room and begin setting up my laptop. As I do, I look down to discover that my leg is covered in blood! Not knowing what to do, I continue setting up. My friend Demian arrives a minute later and asks if everything is going OK. I say not really and point to my leg. Demian immediately goes and grabs me a bunch of paper towels, wet and dry, which I use to start cleaning up. Fortunately, I am behind a podium, so I'm not freaking out everyone in the room. Anyway, by the time I finished setting up and futzing with getting the projector to work, my leg appears to have stopped bleeding and I am ready to start. Only five minutes late!
My friends told me that I did a great job on the presentation. They said it was not overly apparent that I had been a nervous wreck just before I started. I know that is what friends are for, but based on feedback I got from other folks in the room, I am gonna go out on a limb and say I did OK. Comparing my presentation to David's, it is obvious which one of us is a professional lecturer, but given that I am a newb, I am happy with how it went. I wanted to make sure that I didn't just "read the slides", and think I managed to avoid that particular sin of presentation. One good criticism I received is that I should have incorporated looking at my code into the presentation instead of waiting until the end to walk through it.
I agree that that would have been a better way to do it, particularly after seeing how David did this with great success. I will have to practice quickly getting in and out of PowerPoint if I want to do this successfully.
BTW, you can see my preso, and the code if you are interested, at my web site. My friend Demian, at my request, submitted the site to Digg, a community web site for sharing content. I was hoping that there would be some interest, but it flopped. I got 5 diggs, all from friends. you usually need at least a 100 to get noticed by the masses. The main reason I was hoping to get the exposure is to get more feedback on my solution. Ah well, guess I am on my own.
If you take away the fifteen minutes preceding my preso, I really enjoyed the experience. There is an old adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. From my experience, this is definitely true!
David has written an e-book on GWT Shortcuts, that was supposed to be available at Informit., but it is listed as coming soon. He also has a paper book in the works for later this year on GWT.
Anyway, back to my preso. I had signed up to present Hibernate With Annotations to the Boulder Java User's Group. Hibernate is an Object to Relational Mapping library that I am using for my pet/perpetual project to keep statistics for a hockey team. I am using a new feature in Hibernate, using Java 5 annotations to manage my Hibernate ORM. There isn't a lot of info on it currently, so I thought I would share.
So I realized that afternoon that I had forgotten my monitor adapter for my laptop (DVI to VGA). No way to hook up to the projector. D'Oh! So I left work early and picked up a cable at the Flat Irons Apple Store. Then I met some friends at a restaurant for a pre-meeting dinner. The waitress was very slow and we got out a little later that I had hoped, but we still had some time.
So I am driving into Boulder on 36, three friends in my car, just dropped over the top of the hill, and I see an HP in front of me. He is driving about 60 in a 65, so I pass him doing about 66. As soon as I pass him, he drops over and hits the lights. What the hell? Is he really gonna ticket me for 1 over? Turns out, no, my license plates have expired. So he is ticketing me for that and takes his sweet time. Now I am in trouble time-wise. When he finally gives me my ticket, I take off for the meeting. We get into the parking lot 5 minutes before I am on. I get my stuff and start into the building at a fast clip, leaving everyone else in the dust. On my way, I hit a patch of ice and fall. I barely miss a beat, jumping back up and heading in. My friends jokingly tell me to wait up. I found out later that my fall resembled my bowling style.
So I get into the meeting room and begin setting up my laptop. As I do, I look down to discover that my leg is covered in blood! Not knowing what to do, I continue setting up. My friend Demian arrives a minute later and asks if everything is going OK. I say not really and point to my leg. Demian immediately goes and grabs me a bunch of paper towels, wet and dry, which I use to start cleaning up. Fortunately, I am behind a podium, so I'm not freaking out everyone in the room. Anyway, by the time I finished setting up and futzing with getting the projector to work, my leg appears to have stopped bleeding and I am ready to start. Only five minutes late!
My friends told me that I did a great job on the presentation. They said it was not overly apparent that I had been a nervous wreck just before I started. I know that is what friends are for, but based on feedback I got from other folks in the room, I am gonna go out on a limb and say I did OK. Comparing my presentation to David's, it is obvious which one of us is a professional lecturer, but given that I am a newb, I am happy with how it went. I wanted to make sure that I didn't just "read the slides", and think I managed to avoid that particular sin of presentation. One good criticism I received is that I should have incorporated looking at my code into the presentation instead of waiting until the end to walk through it.
I agree that that would have been a better way to do it, particularly after seeing how David did this with great success. I will have to practice quickly getting in and out of PowerPoint if I want to do this successfully.
BTW, you can see my preso, and the code if you are interested, at my web site. My friend Demian, at my request, submitted the site to Digg, a community web site for sharing content. I was hoping that there would be some interest, but it flopped. I got 5 diggs, all from friends. you usually need at least a 100 to get noticed by the masses. The main reason I was hoping to get the exposure is to get more feedback on my solution. Ah well, guess I am on my own.
If you take away the fifteen minutes preceding my preso, I really enjoyed the experience. There is an old adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. From my experience, this is definitely true!
Friday, January 05, 2007
A Serendipitous Post
My daughter is having problems sending e-mail from Mail.app on her Mac while she is at school. I recently experienced the same problem at my sister-in-laws in Minneapolis. I was set to do some digging on this over the weekend when I found the following post from Scott Davis while reading some blogs...
Port 587
Problem solved. Thanks Scott!
Port 587
Problem solved. Thanks Scott!
Anyone for a Scrum?
In preparation for work on a new project, I have been investigating the Scrum software development process. I have read “Agile Software Development with Scrum” by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beadle and am currently reading the follow on book “Agile Project Management with Scrum” by Ken Schwaber. Next in the queue is “Agile Estimating and Planning” by Mike Cohn. From what I have found on the net, these are essential reading for anyone getting started in Agile. Based on what I have read so far, I tend to agree.
At its heart, Scrum (and really all agile processes) attempts to inject some much-needed realism into project planning and development. The pillars of Scrum are visibility, inspection, and adaptation. Schwaber spent time with industrial process gurus reviewing software development. The consensus is that software development is complex and can only be successfully managed using an empirical process. Scrum provides such a process. This is in contrast to a defined process such as the waterfall model that is embodied in many companies’ development processes (including the one used in my company).
Given that I am reading three books just to get familiar with Scrum, there is no way I can provide the detail in this e-mail needed to fully sell anyone on the idea. Here are a couple of good sites that cover Scrum. The first provides a very good high-level overview and the second gets into details.
CodeProject
Mountain Goat Software
At a high level, here are some reasons why Scrum should be considered for use.
Visibility into project status with Scrum is excellent. At any given time, it is easy to see what has been done and what still needs to be done via the burn down chart and product backlog. These are quantitative tools for examining cost/time/quality throughout the duration of the project. After a couple of Sprints, the burn rate or velocity of the team can be calculated and the end date accurately projected. Need more visibility? Reduce sprints to 2 weeks in duration.
Since Sprints are only 30 days long, if priorities change or problems are encountered, only 30 days are lost. Before each Sprint, the direction of the project can be refined or even drastically changed if needed. Scrum is all about agility and adaptability.
For larger projects, a set of interlocking Scrum teams can be used to develop sub-components. This is an area that will take a little more work to get right, but will be worth the effort. To quote Dr. Venkat Subramaniam (technical author, speaker, and amazing developer), “Any team with more than 10 developers is a setup for failure.”
At a recent JUG in Boulder, author Neal Ford asked the audience, “How many of you are developing using a waterfall process that is being called agile?” A lot of hands went up, including a co-worker’s and mine. Going forward, I have resolved not to be quiet whenever we use the term agile to describe a waterfall process. They are not agile. That’s OK, particularly if you buy into waterfall as a successful software development process, but it isn’t agile. Until we stop using the word to mean something it doesn’t, we won’t get any closer to truly finding out if agile can help us. If you don’t have enough first hand evidence already, Schwaber recommends “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions” for discussions about why waterfall doesn’t work.
Schwaber makes the observation that technology plateaus are gone and that new projects + new technology = unpredictability. Scrum provides a tool to manage these challenges.
What’s next? I recommend getting Certified Scrum-Master training for all management and senior developers and Scrum product owner training for the product marketing team. Then implement what you have learned in creating great products!
At its heart, Scrum (and really all agile processes) attempts to inject some much-needed realism into project planning and development. The pillars of Scrum are visibility, inspection, and adaptation. Schwaber spent time with industrial process gurus reviewing software development. The consensus is that software development is complex and can only be successfully managed using an empirical process. Scrum provides such a process. This is in contrast to a defined process such as the waterfall model that is embodied in many companies’ development processes (including the one used in my company).
Given that I am reading three books just to get familiar with Scrum, there is no way I can provide the detail in this e-mail needed to fully sell anyone on the idea. Here are a couple of good sites that cover Scrum. The first provides a very good high-level overview and the second gets into details.
CodeProject
Mountain Goat Software
At a high level, here are some reasons why Scrum should be considered for use.
Visibility into project status with Scrum is excellent. At any given time, it is easy to see what has been done and what still needs to be done via the burn down chart and product backlog. These are quantitative tools for examining cost/time/quality throughout the duration of the project. After a couple of Sprints, the burn rate or velocity of the team can be calculated and the end date accurately projected. Need more visibility? Reduce sprints to 2 weeks in duration.
Since Sprints are only 30 days long, if priorities change or problems are encountered, only 30 days are lost. Before each Sprint, the direction of the project can be refined or even drastically changed if needed. Scrum is all about agility and adaptability.
For larger projects, a set of interlocking Scrum teams can be used to develop sub-components. This is an area that will take a little more work to get right, but will be worth the effort. To quote Dr. Venkat Subramaniam (technical author, speaker, and amazing developer), “Any team with more than 10 developers is a setup for failure.”
At a recent JUG in Boulder, author Neal Ford asked the audience, “How many of you are developing using a waterfall process that is being called agile?” A lot of hands went up, including a co-worker’s and mine. Going forward, I have resolved not to be quiet whenever we use the term agile to describe a waterfall process. They are not agile. That’s OK, particularly if you buy into waterfall as a successful software development process, but it isn’t agile. Until we stop using the word to mean something it doesn’t, we won’t get any closer to truly finding out if agile can help us. If you don’t have enough first hand evidence already, Schwaber recommends “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions” for discussions about why waterfall doesn’t work.
Schwaber makes the observation that technology plateaus are gone and that new projects + new technology = unpredictability. Scrum provides a tool to manage these challenges.
What’s next? I recommend getting Certified Scrum-Master training for all management and senior developers and Scrum product owner training for the product marketing team. Then implement what you have learned in creating great products!
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
The Passionate Worst...
A follow up to my last blog on Chad Fowler’s book. I’m not going to summarize the entire book, which I highly recommend, but rather comment on a couple more points that really hit home. Fowler is discussing strategies a developer can use to protect their job. The “Be the worst programmer in the room” and “Love it or leave it” strategies are right on target.
In “Be the worst programmer”, Chad creates an analogy between being the worst musician in a band and being the “worst” programmer on a team. In both cases, he argues that people tend to perform at the level of those surrounding them. If those surrounding you surpass your abilities, it is often the case that you rise to the challenge and the quantity and quality of your work will surpass what you might normally have produced. He also argues that the opposite is true. If you find yourself on a team composed of lesser caliber people, your performance may take a hit because you are not challenged.
I have always enjoyed working with talented people. What I liked about this strategy is that it put into words what I think I have always instinctively been drawn too. While I have never felt like “the worst” (too much hubris?), I have always thrived on learning from those around me and have often felt like I had to step it up when surrounded by experienced developers. When I am the most experienced person in a team (which is where I find myself at the present time), I try to motivate the folks I am working with to stretch their talents as well. I hope I am successful, but if the truth were known, I think I prefer being “the worst”.
When I interview potential developers, I think the key trait I look for is passion (particularly for software development, but really passion in any area is a plus). This fits right into Fowler’s “Love it or leave it” strategy. A quote from the book, “What I found were a whole lot of people who were picking up a paycheck and a few incredibly passionate craftspeople,” summarizes my experience interviewing applicants. The blank stares I get when I ask “What technology or technological book in the past six months got you excited?” truly amazes me. One deer in the headlights applicant, in an attempt to hide the fact that she had nothing, answered that she had just read the user manuals for a commercial database she was using at her current job! As Chad says, “You can fake it for awhile, but a lack of passion will catch up with you and your work.”
I have been fortunate in the past two years to have been surrounded by developers who were both passionate and better than I am. I truly believe I am a better developer because of it.
In “Be the worst programmer”, Chad creates an analogy between being the worst musician in a band and being the “worst” programmer on a team. In both cases, he argues that people tend to perform at the level of those surrounding them. If those surrounding you surpass your abilities, it is often the case that you rise to the challenge and the quantity and quality of your work will surpass what you might normally have produced. He also argues that the opposite is true. If you find yourself on a team composed of lesser caliber people, your performance may take a hit because you are not challenged.
I have always enjoyed working with talented people. What I liked about this strategy is that it put into words what I think I have always instinctively been drawn too. While I have never felt like “the worst” (too much hubris?), I have always thrived on learning from those around me and have often felt like I had to step it up when surrounded by experienced developers. When I am the most experienced person in a team (which is where I find myself at the present time), I try to motivate the folks I am working with to stretch their talents as well. I hope I am successful, but if the truth were known, I think I prefer being “the worst”.
When I interview potential developers, I think the key trait I look for is passion (particularly for software development, but really passion in any area is a plus). This fits right into Fowler’s “Love it or leave it” strategy. A quote from the book, “What I found were a whole lot of people who were picking up a paycheck and a few incredibly passionate craftspeople,” summarizes my experience interviewing applicants. The blank stares I get when I ask “What technology or technological book in the past six months got you excited?” truly amazes me. One deer in the headlights applicant, in an attempt to hide the fact that she had nothing, answered that she had just read the user manuals for a commercial database she was using at her current job! As Chad says, “You can fake it for awhile, but a lack of passion will catch up with you and your work.”
I have been fortunate in the past two years to have been surrounded by developers who were both passionate and better than I am. I truly believe I am a better developer because of it.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Generalization and Specialization
I have been reading "My Job Went to India... (and all I got was this lousy book)" by Chad Fowler. I'm still in the middle of it, but a couple of sections really resonated and I wanted to jot some thoughts down while they were fresh in my mind. It is probably worth mentioning for those not familiar with the book that it is not really a criticism of India or of outsourcing in general, but rather, a pragmatic discussion of how to survive in the midst of the current trend to outsource technical work. Fowler presents his thoughts on what a person can do to keep their job domestic when so many positions are leaving the country.
A couple of his ideas are contradictory, yet complimentary. He argues that a developer should decide to be a generalist or a specialist. He compares the specialist to an assembly line worker on a mass production line. The generalist, on the other hand, is the proverbial "Jack of All Trades, Master of None". I like that Fowler tries to dispel the negative connotation surrounding this label. In Fowler's opinion, either path can lead to better protection of your job.
The generalist is able to pick up the odds and ends and minutiae left behind in the wake of layoffs or outsourcing. He argues that it is important for the generalist to understand to some level the product at both a business and technical level. At the product level, understand the customer needs and business case for the product. At the technical level, not only should you understand the code used to realize the product, but also the architecture, test strategy, and deployment process. The generalist should also be careful not to fixate on specific technologies, e.g., code versus database, Java versus C#, etc.
A specialist can make his or her self safe in a different way. This is accomplished by understanding an area of technology to a depth that qualifies this person as a guru. By doing so, the developer becomes the indispensable resource of last resort, turned to when the really hard technical issue crops up that the rest of the team can't resolve. Fowler is quick to point out that this is a difficult state to attain. One example he uses is an interview question, "How would you write a program, in pure Java, that would crash the JVM?" He argues that unless you understand the internal workings of the JVM (which would include the threading model, memory management, and instruction generation), you aren't a Java specialist.
As an aside, I don't consider myself to be a Java specialist, but my first thought was to exhaust memory, but I am sure there are faster ways to crash the JVM.
While he didn't come right out and say it, I got the feeling that Fowler sees generalization versus specialization as an either/or proposition and that he maybe leans a bit towards favoring generalization. While I concur that generalization is a better survival strategy, I think there is room in the generalist’s repertoire for some degree of specialization. In my mind, a melding of the two ideas is very compelling.
I consider myself to be a generalist. I am a degreed electrical engineer. I have experience with digital electronics. I spent the first four years of my career coding in assembly for an embedded real-time system. I also wrote real-time firmware in C and C++. I have written graphical applications for Windows and the original MacOS. I am currently developing middleware apps in Java. I also have experience with scripting languages such as PERL, TCL, and Bash. I wrote some SQL and am currently learning the Hibernate ORM utility. Next up is Groovy. The list of things to learn is very long and is growing faster than there is time in the day.
I don't mention this to toot my own horn, but to support my hypothesis that I am a generalist. But I am also a specialist, albeit what I will term an opportunistic, short term specialist. Invariably, during certain stages of a project, I wind up learning something to a detail that meets Fowler's definition of a specialist. The area of the specialty varies from project to project and because of this variability, the half-life of my "specialist" qualification is short in duration (on the order of 1-2 years). For example, in the mid-90's, while working in the test and measurement industry, I became an expert on the IEEE 488.2 and SCPI command sets for instrument command and control. I knew the vagaries of the standards and what requirements needed the most work in the code. Ten years later, the details escape me, but at the time, when a question was raised about these protocols, folks came to me. The same has occurred in other industries, including understanding drug interaction for IV compounding, VME and VXI bus protocols, ISDN signaling (LAPD and Q.921), and currently, I am immersing myself in the agile methodology, SCRUM. In the spirit of "use it or lose it", when I move on to other projects, the details get fuzzy, but I always try to adopt at least one topic to focus on and embrace in a detailed sense.
The side-benefit of this strategy is that even when the details fade, much of what I learn can still be applied in a general fashion. Which supports my initial statement that I am a generalist. In summary, as a generalist, sometime specialist, I can attest to Fowler's thesis that developers who adopt these strategies maximize their chances of staying gainfully employed. It has worked for me.
A couple of his ideas are contradictory, yet complimentary. He argues that a developer should decide to be a generalist or a specialist. He compares the specialist to an assembly line worker on a mass production line. The generalist, on the other hand, is the proverbial "Jack of All Trades, Master of None". I like that Fowler tries to dispel the negative connotation surrounding this label. In Fowler's opinion, either path can lead to better protection of your job.
The generalist is able to pick up the odds and ends and minutiae left behind in the wake of layoffs or outsourcing. He argues that it is important for the generalist to understand to some level the product at both a business and technical level. At the product level, understand the customer needs and business case for the product. At the technical level, not only should you understand the code used to realize the product, but also the architecture, test strategy, and deployment process. The generalist should also be careful not to fixate on specific technologies, e.g., code versus database, Java versus C#, etc.
A specialist can make his or her self safe in a different way. This is accomplished by understanding an area of technology to a depth that qualifies this person as a guru. By doing so, the developer becomes the indispensable resource of last resort, turned to when the really hard technical issue crops up that the rest of the team can't resolve. Fowler is quick to point out that this is a difficult state to attain. One example he uses is an interview question, "How would you write a program, in pure Java, that would crash the JVM?" He argues that unless you understand the internal workings of the JVM (which would include the threading model, memory management, and instruction generation), you aren't a Java specialist.
As an aside, I don't consider myself to be a Java specialist, but my first thought was to exhaust memory, but I am sure there are faster ways to crash the JVM.
While he didn't come right out and say it, I got the feeling that Fowler sees generalization versus specialization as an either/or proposition and that he maybe leans a bit towards favoring generalization. While I concur that generalization is a better survival strategy, I think there is room in the generalist’s repertoire for some degree of specialization. In my mind, a melding of the two ideas is very compelling.
I consider myself to be a generalist. I am a degreed electrical engineer. I have experience with digital electronics. I spent the first four years of my career coding in assembly for an embedded real-time system. I also wrote real-time firmware in C and C++. I have written graphical applications for Windows and the original MacOS. I am currently developing middleware apps in Java. I also have experience with scripting languages such as PERL, TCL, and Bash. I wrote some SQL and am currently learning the Hibernate ORM utility. Next up is Groovy. The list of things to learn is very long and is growing faster than there is time in the day.
I don't mention this to toot my own horn, but to support my hypothesis that I am a generalist. But I am also a specialist, albeit what I will term an opportunistic, short term specialist. Invariably, during certain stages of a project, I wind up learning something to a detail that meets Fowler's definition of a specialist. The area of the specialty varies from project to project and because of this variability, the half-life of my "specialist" qualification is short in duration (on the order of 1-2 years). For example, in the mid-90's, while working in the test and measurement industry, I became an expert on the IEEE 488.2 and SCPI command sets for instrument command and control. I knew the vagaries of the standards and what requirements needed the most work in the code. Ten years later, the details escape me, but at the time, when a question was raised about these protocols, folks came to me. The same has occurred in other industries, including understanding drug interaction for IV compounding, VME and VXI bus protocols, ISDN signaling (LAPD and Q.921), and currently, I am immersing myself in the agile methodology, SCRUM. In the spirit of "use it or lose it", when I move on to other projects, the details get fuzzy, but I always try to adopt at least one topic to focus on and embrace in a detailed sense.
The side-benefit of this strategy is that even when the details fade, much of what I learn can still be applied in a general fashion. Which supports my initial statement that I am a generalist. In summary, as a generalist, sometime specialist, I can attest to Fowler's thesis that developers who adopt these strategies maximize their chances of staying gainfully employed. It has worked for me.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
The Open Source Community... Loony or Enlightened?
I attended the Lightweight Java seminar with a colleague last week. The seminar was hosted by Virtuas. Virtuas is a services company specializing in open source software. Their stated mission is to assist their clients in becoming self-sufficient users of open-source software. More on this is a minute, but first a quick overview of the seminar itself, which was composed of four talks.
The first talk covered the Java Persistence Architecture, or JPA, which is part of EJB3. A simple description of JPA is annotation support for persistent objects. The JPA is defined in JSR 220 and represents an attempt to simplify J2EE. Since I'm not an "enterprisey" guy, I can't discuss how well it addresses this need. I do have some experience with JPA, as it is implemented in Hibernate. I will be giving a talk of my own on JPA use with Hibernate in January at the Boulder JUG. I will be focusing on the use of annotations in Hibernate without the use of XML configuration, so definately an anti-enterprise spin. I will post the preso after the JUG. At this talk, the speaker had a great example of persistence using a snake object that eats rabbit objects. Call me twisted, but I liked it!
The second talk covered Spring 2.0. Spring, in keeping with the "lightweight" theme of the seminar, provides a lightweight container environment that simplifies the use of other open source components including Hibernate, AOP, web services, LDAP, ACEGI security, an MVC controller, and more. Of course, "simple" is relative. In the case of Spring, this means that while you write less code, you substitute large XML configuration files. Anymore, every time I am told "less code through configuration", I feel like I am at a timeshare sales presentation. Caveat emptor! Even with the configuration overhead, I do think that Spring brings a lot to the table. It is definitely on the list of things to get up to speed on.
The third talk covered AJAX and JSF along with the DOJO library (word of advice, 4.0 is buggy, us 3.1 for now). These are tools that make some great web interfaces. Added to the list.
Finally, a talk on the AppFuse 2.0 framework. This framework ties all of the other pieces together when developing web apps. Since I don't do much web development at this point, some of the talk was lost on me. Probably the biggest take from the talk is that Maven is getting bigger and is now on the LOTTD (yeah, it's a long list).
Prior to the seminar, we weren't sure what to expect. We halfway expected to be subjected to a non-stop flood of markitecture. On top of that, the weather was really crappy. We really debated attending. Fortunately, we decided to go. It was definitely worth braving the weather. When we first arrived, we found that we were getting an amazing "goodie bag", which included three great technical books (on Java, Spring, and Eclipse) and a nice day-planner. The goodies were courtesy of SourceBeat. Want to impress a geek? Give them tech books! And it just got better from there. After a very short (less than 10 minutes) introduction of the company, they jumped right into the presos. Not only no markitecture, Virtuas took the soft sell to the extreme... almost a no sell? The great goodies, excellent talks, and lack of sales pressure all contributed to the inspiration of this blogs title. Can a company, which depends upon revenue from consulting on products that are free, be successful when using a marketing tool such as this seminar? I hope so.
As a way to say thanks, I started thinking about what I could do to help them. I'm not really in a position right now where I need their help, but I will keep them in mind for future issues. In the meantime, I am hoping that by blogging about them, I can help is some small way to get the word out about this enlightened (as opposed to loony) company.
The first talk covered the Java Persistence Architecture, or JPA, which is part of EJB3. A simple description of JPA is annotation support for persistent objects. The JPA is defined in JSR 220 and represents an attempt to simplify J2EE. Since I'm not an "enterprisey" guy, I can't discuss how well it addresses this need. I do have some experience with JPA, as it is implemented in Hibernate. I will be giving a talk of my own on JPA use with Hibernate in January at the Boulder JUG. I will be focusing on the use of annotations in Hibernate without the use of XML configuration, so definately an anti-enterprise spin. I will post the preso after the JUG. At this talk, the speaker had a great example of persistence using a snake object that eats rabbit objects. Call me twisted, but I liked it!
The second talk covered Spring 2.0. Spring, in keeping with the "lightweight" theme of the seminar, provides a lightweight container environment that simplifies the use of other open source components including Hibernate, AOP, web services, LDAP, ACEGI security, an MVC controller, and more. Of course, "simple" is relative. In the case of Spring, this means that while you write less code, you substitute large XML configuration files. Anymore, every time I am told "less code through configuration", I feel like I am at a timeshare sales presentation. Caveat emptor! Even with the configuration overhead, I do think that Spring brings a lot to the table. It is definitely on the list of things to get up to speed on.
The third talk covered AJAX and JSF along with the DOJO library (word of advice, 4.0 is buggy, us 3.1 for now). These are tools that make some great web interfaces. Added to the list.
Finally, a talk on the AppFuse 2.0 framework. This framework ties all of the other pieces together when developing web apps. Since I don't do much web development at this point, some of the talk was lost on me. Probably the biggest take from the talk is that Maven is getting bigger and is now on the LOTTD (yeah, it's a long list).
Prior to the seminar, we weren't sure what to expect. We halfway expected to be subjected to a non-stop flood of markitecture. On top of that, the weather was really crappy. We really debated attending. Fortunately, we decided to go. It was definitely worth braving the weather. When we first arrived, we found that we were getting an amazing "goodie bag", which included three great technical books (on Java, Spring, and Eclipse) and a nice day-planner. The goodies were courtesy of SourceBeat. Want to impress a geek? Give them tech books! And it just got better from there. After a very short (less than 10 minutes) introduction of the company, they jumped right into the presos. Not only no markitecture, Virtuas took the soft sell to the extreme... almost a no sell? The great goodies, excellent talks, and lack of sales pressure all contributed to the inspiration of this blogs title. Can a company, which depends upon revenue from consulting on products that are free, be successful when using a marketing tool such as this seminar? I hope so.
As a way to say thanks, I started thinking about what I could do to help them. I'm not really in a position right now where I need their help, but I will keep them in mind for future issues. In the meantime, I am hoping that by blogging about them, I can help is some small way to get the word out about this enlightened (as opposed to loony) company.
Monday, May 15, 2006
NFJS - Spring ACEGI
Presented by Stuart Halloway, Relevance, LLC
ACEGI is a generalized authentication and authorization system for Java, with specific hooks built-in for the Spring Framework. Since my experience with such systems is light, my ability to cover what was presented will be correspondingly basic.
The name ACEGI is not an acronym. It is derived by using the first 5 odd letters of the alphabet. Like most Spring-based services, ACEGI relies heavily on XML-configuration files. It is built using the Inversion of Control pattern and with dependency injection, it is possible to modify behaviors of the security system. One key example pointed out by Stuart in the talk was that JAAS security library, which (if I remember correctly) is part of the Java standard, can be used as the authentication server instead of the default service provided by the ACEGI distro.
The key components of an ACEGI based system include:
The last two components are only used in special cases. A simple use case would be:
Because of the use of AOP, it is possible to add security to objects that were not even designed with security in mind!
Internally, the Authentication object and the Access Decision Manager use a collection of web filters that are responsible for the ultimate processing of the security requests. These filters are configured in an XML file (another example of IOC and DI use). Several examples of how these filters are used were presented in the class. This turns out to be one of the more difficult concepts in using ACEGI. It turns out that these configuration files must be carefully constructed and the order of the filters must follow explicit rules in order for the system to work correctly. Stuart is a big fan of this system and even he had harsh criticism to levy about this issue.
As mentioned earlier, a lot of the details are being elided here, mostly because of my ignorance of security. Based upon the examples shown in class however, I believe that it would be very straightforward to set up a secure system (typically web-based, but that isn’t required) using the ACEGI Security system.
ACEGI is a generalized authentication and authorization system for Java, with specific hooks built-in for the Spring Framework. Since my experience with such systems is light, my ability to cover what was presented will be correspondingly basic.
The name ACEGI is not an acronym. It is derived by using the first 5 odd letters of the alphabet. Like most Spring-based services, ACEGI relies heavily on XML-configuration files. It is built using the Inversion of Control pattern and with dependency injection, it is possible to modify behaviors of the security system. One key example pointed out by Stuart in the talk was that JAAS security library, which (if I remember correctly) is part of the Java standard, can be used as the authentication server instead of the default service provided by the ACEGI distro.
The key components of an ACEGI based system include:
- Authentication
- Authentication Manager
- Access Decision Manager
- Secure Object Interceptor
- Run As Manager
- After Invocation Manager
The last two components are only used in special cases. A simple use case would be:
- User submits principle (user) and credential (password) to Authentication object
- The Authentication Manager populates the Authentication class with Authorities (permissions) based upon the provided Principal and Credential
- User invokes the desired method, which is intercepted by the Secure Object Interceptor (shades of AOP at work!)
- The SOI queries the Access Decision Manager regarding whether the request can proceed
- The ADM passes this query on to the Authentication object, which accepts or rejects the request based upon the stored security data
- Assuming the request was allowed, the SOI then invokes the actual method requested by the user
Because of the use of AOP, it is possible to add security to objects that were not even designed with security in mind!
Internally, the Authentication object and the Access Decision Manager use a collection of web filters that are responsible for the ultimate processing of the security requests. These filters are configured in an XML file (another example of IOC and DI use). Several examples of how these filters are used were presented in the class. This turns out to be one of the more difficult concepts in using ACEGI. It turns out that these configuration files must be carefully constructed and the order of the filters must follow explicit rules in order for the system to work correctly. Stuart is a big fan of this system and even he had harsh criticism to levy about this issue.
As mentioned earlier, a lot of the details are being elided here, mostly because of my ignorance of security. Based upon the examples shown in class however, I believe that it would be very straightforward to set up a secure system (typically web-based, but that isn’t required) using the ACEGI Security system.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
NFJS - Spring AOP
Presented by Stuart Halloway, Relevance, LLC
This seminar provided a deeper dive in to AOP with Spring. As mentioned earlier, Spring uses Dependency Injection and the IOC pattern to minimize dependencies. But sometimes, there are dependencies that are too broad to be removed using DI. In many of these instances, AOP can solve the problem. The simple (yet powerful) example Stuart provided was that of three inheritance trees:
Assume that each of the classes has an attribute name and we need to validate the name when it is set. Placing a name validation method in each of the four concrete classes would result in repeating the code four times. But since we understand OO concepts, we move the method into the base classes to reduce repetition. Now we only have to repeat the code three times!?! Not a great improvement. But with AOP (in Spring), we write the name validation method one time and using a Spring configuration file, attach the method to every class that needs it. This, in a nutshell, is what AOP is all about. Note that this mechanism is so powerful, we could add the name validation method to a class even if we don’t have the source code for it.
The name validation requirement in the previous example is referred to in AOP as a “cross cutting concern”. In non-AOP systems, cross cutting concerns often result in a lot of code duplication. When this code is isolated in one place with AOP, it is referred to as “advice”. The point where advice is applied in the code is called a “joinpoint”. A collection of all joinpoints for a given piece of advice is called a “pointcut”. The combination of a pointcut with its advice is called an “aspect”. Lots of new terminology, but it didn’t take long for it to make sense.
Stuart presented several examples that illustrated how aspects could be applied to a class, including method intercept, before method, after method, and throw only. The Spring framework implements AOP natively and is relatively easy to use. For higher efficiency implementations, Spring also supports AspectJ. It was mentioned that it is straightforward to start with Spring AOP and migrate to AspectJ.
It should be pointed out that the primary mechanism for implementing aspects is to modify the byte code of the class being aspected. It was interesting that Stuart offered the same advice on concerns about this that Dr. Venkat Subramaniam did at a JUG meeting a couple of months ago, which was, “Get over it!” Stuart followed this with an observation that wound up being a “Got it!” moment for me. He compared people who complain that they can’t directly see aspects in the code and therefore worry about what is being executed to similar criticisms in the past about OO and how you couldn’t see what code was being executed because of inheritance hierarchies. Not only do I remember these criticisms, I was guilty of making them early on (he admitted shamefully). So I am happy to say that I have “gotten over it” and am really looking forward to investigating AOP. I’ll probably start with the Spring version, but hope to try AspectJ soon as well.
This seminar provided a deeper dive in to AOP with Spring. As mentioned earlier, Spring uses Dependency Injection and the IOC pattern to minimize dependencies. But sometimes, there are dependencies that are too broad to be removed using DI. In many of these instances, AOP can solve the problem. The simple (yet powerful) example Stuart provided was that of three inheritance trees:
SuperBeing SoftwareProject
^ ^ ^
| | |
| -------- |
| | |
SuperHero SuperVillain OpenSourceProject Server
Assume that each of the classes has an attribute name and we need to validate the name when it is set. Placing a name validation method in each of the four concrete classes would result in repeating the code four times. But since we understand OO concepts, we move the method into the base classes to reduce repetition. Now we only have to repeat the code three times!?! Not a great improvement. But with AOP (in Spring), we write the name validation method one time and using a Spring configuration file, attach the method to every class that needs it. This, in a nutshell, is what AOP is all about. Note that this mechanism is so powerful, we could add the name validation method to a class even if we don’t have the source code for it.
The name validation requirement in the previous example is referred to in AOP as a “cross cutting concern”. In non-AOP systems, cross cutting concerns often result in a lot of code duplication. When this code is isolated in one place with AOP, it is referred to as “advice”. The point where advice is applied in the code is called a “joinpoint”. A collection of all joinpoints for a given piece of advice is called a “pointcut”. The combination of a pointcut with its advice is called an “aspect”. Lots of new terminology, but it didn’t take long for it to make sense.
Stuart presented several examples that illustrated how aspects could be applied to a class, including method intercept, before method, after method, and throw only. The Spring framework implements AOP natively and is relatively easy to use. For higher efficiency implementations, Spring also supports AspectJ. It was mentioned that it is straightforward to start with Spring AOP and migrate to AspectJ.
It should be pointed out that the primary mechanism for implementing aspects is to modify the byte code of the class being aspected. It was interesting that Stuart offered the same advice on concerns about this that Dr. Venkat Subramaniam did at a JUG meeting a couple of months ago, which was, “Get over it!” Stuart followed this with an observation that wound up being a “Got it!” moment for me. He compared people who complain that they can’t directly see aspects in the code and therefore worry about what is being executed to similar criticisms in the past about OO and how you couldn’t see what code was being executed because of inheritance hierarchies. Not only do I remember these criticisms, I was guilty of making them early on (he admitted shamefully). So I am happy to say that I have “gotten over it” and am really looking forward to investigating AOP. I’ll probably start with the Spring version, but hope to try AspectJ soon as well.
NFJS - Introduction to Spring
Presented by Stuart Halloway, Relevance, LLC
Stuart is a consultant out of North Carolina. As you will see, I attended many sessions presented by him. He is very dynamic, very knowledgeable, and has a great sense of humor. He also covered lots of Spring topics, which helped as well.
According to Stuart, Spring is Australian for no EJB. As an aside, he said that “having a pulse is Australian for no EJB 1.x or 2.x”. Kind of puts where he is at in perspective.
Spring is a framework that attempts to solve problems typically solved using J2EE, but in a more lightweight fashion. Based on what I heard over the weekend, I tend to agree. At its core, Spring is based on three core concepts. Configuration, Dependency Injection, and Aspect Oriented Programming.
Spring’s answer to configuration may be the most controversial of its features. The basics of a Spring application require minimal code, but the cost of this is large configuration files written in XML. I lost track of the number of times over the weekend a disparaging remark was made about XML. I do wonder why as much as the experts seem to dislike XML, it is still so prevalent. Anyway, if you are going to use Spring, you are going to use XML.
Dependency Injection is the mechanism that allows the details to be encoded in an XML configuration file. DI is based upon the Inversion of Control pattern. The idea is that an object doesn’t “reach out” to get other objects it needs (typically by calling new). Instead, the dependencies are “pushed to” the object from external sources. The means of this injection can be via constructor arguments or via bean-like setters. If the object is designed to depend only upon interfaces, DI can be used to modify object behavior by injecting specialized objects which implement these interfaces. And in Spring, the XML configuration files allow the injected objects to be changed without changing the code.
J2EE also uses an IOC pattern, but realizes it via context or JNDI lookups, which according to Stuart is more cumbersome. Also, evidently Spring minimizes the number of dependencies upon itself, while such dependencies are prolific in J2EE. Never having worked with J2EE, I am parroting what I heard at the seminar. I did find the explanation of Spring much easier to comprehend compared to some J2EE classes I took last year.
The final core component of Spring is Aspect Oriented Programming. If I took nothing else out the symposium, I learned that AOP rocks! I had some exposure to AOP prior to NFJS, but the message was really brought home in Stuart’s talks. I took an entire seminar on Spring and AOP, so I will cover the details in an upcoming blog. Again, the biggest downside to AOP in Spring is the massive XML burden it brings along.
During this talk, Stuart also presented examples of support services provided by Spring. He showed an example using a JDBC that showed how simple it was to connect to a database from a Spring container. He followed that up with a Hibernate example. I am really interested in Hibernate and it is dead easy to use in Spring, but for now, I plan to learn stand-alone Hibernate so that I really understand it well. After that, I will probably explore using it in Spring.
The last topic Stuart covered was Spring’s answer to security, called ACEGI. Again, I took an entire seminar on the topic, and so will reserve the details for a later blog.
Stuart is a consultant out of North Carolina. As you will see, I attended many sessions presented by him. He is very dynamic, very knowledgeable, and has a great sense of humor. He also covered lots of Spring topics, which helped as well.
According to Stuart, Spring is Australian for no EJB. As an aside, he said that “having a pulse is Australian for no EJB 1.x or 2.x”. Kind of puts where he is at in perspective.
Spring is a framework that attempts to solve problems typically solved using J2EE, but in a more lightweight fashion. Based on what I heard over the weekend, I tend to agree. At its core, Spring is based on three core concepts. Configuration, Dependency Injection, and Aspect Oriented Programming.
Spring’s answer to configuration may be the most controversial of its features. The basics of a Spring application require minimal code, but the cost of this is large configuration files written in XML. I lost track of the number of times over the weekend a disparaging remark was made about XML. I do wonder why as much as the experts seem to dislike XML, it is still so prevalent. Anyway, if you are going to use Spring, you are going to use XML.
Dependency Injection is the mechanism that allows the details to be encoded in an XML configuration file. DI is based upon the Inversion of Control pattern. The idea is that an object doesn’t “reach out” to get other objects it needs (typically by calling new). Instead, the dependencies are “pushed to” the object from external sources. The means of this injection can be via constructor arguments or via bean-like setters. If the object is designed to depend only upon interfaces, DI can be used to modify object behavior by injecting specialized objects which implement these interfaces. And in Spring, the XML configuration files allow the injected objects to be changed without changing the code.
J2EE also uses an IOC pattern, but realizes it via context or JNDI lookups, which according to Stuart is more cumbersome. Also, evidently Spring minimizes the number of dependencies upon itself, while such dependencies are prolific in J2EE. Never having worked with J2EE, I am parroting what I heard at the seminar. I did find the explanation of Spring much easier to comprehend compared to some J2EE classes I took last year.
The final core component of Spring is Aspect Oriented Programming. If I took nothing else out the symposium, I learned that AOP rocks! I had some exposure to AOP prior to NFJS, but the message was really brought home in Stuart’s talks. I took an entire seminar on Spring and AOP, so I will cover the details in an upcoming blog. Again, the biggest downside to AOP in Spring is the massive XML burden it brings along.
During this talk, Stuart also presented examples of support services provided by Spring. He showed an example using a JDBC that showed how simple it was to connect to a database from a Spring container. He followed that up with a Hibernate example. I am really interested in Hibernate and it is dead easy to use in Spring, but for now, I plan to learn stand-alone Hibernate so that I really understand it well. After that, I will probably explore using it in Spring.
The last topic Stuart covered was Spring’s answer to security, called ACEGI. Again, I took an entire seminar on the topic, and so will reserve the details for a later blog.
NFJS - Intro
One of my goals for the year was to improve my technical skills, particularly related to Java surround technology. One of the first things I did to realize this goal was to start attending meetings of the Boulder Java User’s Group and Denver Java User’s Group. Both JUGs attract excellent speakers who cover interesting and relevant topics. If you live in the Denver area, I highly recommend attending.
While I will probably blog more on these meetings at a later date, the point today is that through these meetings, I learned of the 2006 Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, a.k.a, the No Fluff Just Stuff Tour. The symposium was held near Avaya and after looking at the seminars available, I decided I wanted to attend. The first option, obviously, was to pay for it myself. While I was willing to do so, I decided to first see if Avaya would foot the bill. The company ended up sending me along with two co-workers. SCORE!!!
It was well worth the time. I learned a lot of great stuff.
Future blogs will summarize the seminars I attended. Along the way, I will also share some of the most interesting ideas and soundbites that I took away from them.
Until then, here are some general soundbites I took away from the speakers and attendees…
While I will probably blog more on these meetings at a later date, the point today is that through these meetings, I learned of the 2006 Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, a.k.a, the No Fluff Just Stuff Tour. The symposium was held near Avaya and after looking at the seminars available, I decided I wanted to attend. The first option, obviously, was to pay for it myself. While I was willing to do so, I decided to first see if Avaya would foot the bill. The company ended up sending me along with two co-workers. SCORE!!!
It was well worth the time. I learned a lot of great stuff.
Future blogs will summarize the seminars I attended. Along the way, I will also share some of the most interesting ideas and soundbites that I took away from them.
Until then, here are some general soundbites I took away from the speakers and attendees…
- Java is not just a language, it is a framework.
- Who needs architects?
- Right to left scheduling. <= One of my favorites!
- And a bonus quote from a speaker (I wish I could remember who) at a local JUG:
- Any project with more than 10 team members is bound to fail!
Monday, May 08, 2006
Why am I blogging...
Short answer, cuz all the cool kids are doing it!
Longer answer. I've really enjoyed reading other peoples blogs. In particular, a friend of mine writes on some interesting things. A local technical author has also peaked my interest. And while Joel On Software isn't really a blog, Joel uses it as a forum to share ideas, which I hope to do as well.
My focus will be on some kind of geeky things, but I reserve the right to stray into unfamiliar territory when the mood strikes. I probably won't be the most consistent blogger in the world, but since I won't be the most scintillating either, you won't be missing much.
First up... The No Fluff Just Stuff seminar.
Longer answer. I've really enjoyed reading other peoples blogs. In particular, a friend of mine writes on some interesting things. A local technical author has also peaked my interest. And while Joel On Software isn't really a blog, Joel uses it as a forum to share ideas, which I hope to do as well.
My focus will be on some kind of geeky things, but I reserve the right to stray into unfamiliar territory when the mood strikes. I probably won't be the most consistent blogger in the world, but since I won't be the most scintillating either, you won't be missing much.
First up... The No Fluff Just Stuff seminar.
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