Introduction With my sojourn at my current client due to come to an end at Christmas, I’ve started a period of documenting some of the things I’ve learnt. As I’ve “mentioned before(magpiebrain – There are some things you just don’t want to learn)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2004/11/18/lessons , not everything I’ve learnt has been pleasant, but it’s all be [...]
Categories: Java
Introduction As you may remember, I’ve been struggling with a tricky build at my current client. Whilst many of the problems have been around how we’ve used the tools available to us (well, Ant), I realised that Ant itself might just not be up to the job. Once a build becomes non-trivial, you inevitably want [...]
Categories: Java
I’m currently working on a project with a relatively large (~2000 line) Ant build file, with several supplemental files. The first thing that’s struck me, is that something about the nature of Ant itself makes people treat it very differently from the code it’s building. Rules concerning consistency, testing, maintainability and even common sense seem [...]
Categories: Java
“FreeMind”:http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ is a pretty good open source “mind mapping(Wikipedia – Mind mapping)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_mapping tool, which we’ve been using to capture the efforts of various bits of brainstorming, as well as keep track of ever evolving processes. One of the processes we’ve detailed using FreeMind has been our build process – during which I was struck by [...]
Categories: Java
Act 1: In support of the pessimist == Fred: So, I’ve made this thing for you Bob: Cool! What’s that tube for – and why the electrodes? Fred: Don’t worry about that, have a play… Bob: Cool, now – what does this do? Oh, and if I poke a stick there, put my finger there, [...]
Categories: Java
Simple code that works is only considered a bad thing by programmers who either don’t care about maintainability, or like to hide their inadequacies behind complex solutions.
Categories: Java
During a pairing session today, we spotted some duplicated code and a period of refactoring ensued. The code in question related to some simple DB queries – the code for getting a connection, returning results and cleaning up was duplicated, with only the query and the exact part of the result set required being duplicated. [...]
Categories: Java
A largely unenjoyable couple of hours was spent tracking down a nasty little issue surrounding classpaths in cygwin. First a little background. On Windows, if you want to specify a classpath, @java@ expects it to be a series of semi-colon separated paths, like so: set CLASSPATH=c:\lib\some.jar;c:\classes\;.; On Unix, @java@ expects a colon separated list: export [...]
Categories: Java
No posts from me in a while which has mostly been down to playing sys admin at my current client – more on this in a while no doubt. In lieu of anything of greater interest, I thought I’d remind you of two upcoming events for your calendar, if you happen to be in London [...]
Categories: Java
I’m hoping to have another successful GeekNight tonight. It’ll be more development focused I expect – I’ll be working on a UI for JBehave (with a view to creating an IDEA plugin) and no-doubt others will be doing development they’d appreciate help with. If you fancy coming along, pop over to the wiki and “put [...]
Categories: Java