VT Alumni Blog Aggregator

Google collections and enhanced JavaBeans

David GageotDavid Gageot — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:52:13 -0800

I’m a big fan of Google Collections. Functions and Predicates became my best friends to make Java’s syntax a bit functional-like. I like writing things like: List<Contact> contacts = ... List<String> toStrings = Lists.transform(contacts, Functions.toStringFunction()); and with the help of static imports: List<String> toStrings = transform(contacts, toStringFunction()); If you use out-of-the-box Functions and Predicates, it’s a lot of fun. Now, [...]

That's it - no more Mac

Thierry Janaudy — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:54:00 -0700

Today, my Mac failed to back up via Time Machine. I thought the issue was with my external hard-drive... but it was not. My Mac does not recognize firewire or usb external devices anymore...
I have had enough, 2 batteries, one screen, no usb/firewire, a new screen that flickers...

I have backed up my 16 gig photos (since 2000) via Wifi.. to my old PC running Vista... this task took 3 h over wifi!

That and the fact that one need to upgrade to a 64bits Mac to have Java 6... no way.

Next laptop: a cheap one, running Ubuntu, plus Picassa.. and that's it - NO ITUNES. I'll wait for a music service from Google, OS-independent.

That's Apple, you've lost me as a customer.

MySpace Qizmt, a .NET MapReduce Framework

Xavier Warzee — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:25:23 -0700

If you want to sort terabytes of data under Windows, try the .NET MapReduce framework from MySpace Qizmt!
Check the following interview of Mikhael Berlyant, Executive Director of Information and Discovery and Daniel Rule, Data Mining Manager at MySpace to learn more about the framework that they built.

Intégration Continue sans serveur

David GageotDavid Gageot — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:36:19 -0700

lquestion que nous posons chez Tech4Quant. Des années à prêcher pour que chaque équipe ait un serveur d’IC. Nous avions installé et utilisé Hudson dès le début du projet. Et voilà que depuis plusieurs mois, Hudson installé on ne sait plus où, échoue à chaque commit et personne ne s’en émeut. Comment en arriver là ? Le [...]

Scala - Nice intro

Thierry Janaudy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:34:00 -0700

Scala for Java Refugees

UMLet UML diagramming tool

Dave Nicolette — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:21:26 -0700

I found a UML diagramming tool that I think is well suited to agile modeling. It's called UMLet, and it runs either standalone or as an Eclipse plugin. The product home page is here: http://www.umlet.com.

The reason I say it's suitable for agile modeling is that it works well, but it isn't slick and it doesn't have ten thousand options for making the diagrams look pretty. When a diagramming tool is too slick, it can be tempting to spend a lot of time fooling with it just because it's fun, and to go into more detail in the diagrams than is appropriate for the agile style of development.

If you like making pretty pictures, or you think our job is to produce highly-polished diagrams rather than working software, or you're a stickler for using the specific icons defined for a particular version of the UML, or if you enjoy playing with diagramming tools to the exclusion of pulling work items through to the "done" state, then you might not appreciate UMLet. If you'd like a simple tool to produce high-level UML diagrams easily, then you might like this tool.

Here are some of the reasons I like UMLet:

It's Open Source software.
It runs on all mainstream platforms: Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux.
It runs standalone or as an Eclipse plugin.
It's simple enough to use that it doesn't require a user's manual or a training course.
It supports all the usual suspects - class diagrams, sequence diagrams, use case diagrams, etc. - and is good enough for high-level diagramming without falling in love with its own reflection. It's just crude enough that you won't be tempted to play with it all day long. One might say it's perfect in its imperfection.
It's easy to clip out a diagram and save it as a graphics file, to drop onto your project wiki or into a presentation or document.
It saves the data in XML, so if you have to rescue your diagrams at some future time when UMLet is no longer supported or goes commercial, you at least have some reasonable basis for doing so.
It's easy to check the diagrams into and out of your version control system along with the production code and test suite. Easy to script all that, too.

Here's a crude class diagram I put together in a few minutes' time using UMLet. I'm sure it isn't academically correct, and that's okay with me.

The only problem I've seen with UMLet is that it throws NullPointerExceptions out of the AWT dispatch thread quite frequently. It doesn't seem to do any harm, though.

I'm using UMLet on Ubuntu Linux. Here's how I installed it.

Read It Later plugin for Firefox

Dave Nicolette — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:20:59 -0700

When looking for information online, I often come across interesting articles or blogs that I want to read later. I had been bookmarking them in a folder created for the purpose. When I remembered to look there, the items may or may not still have been relevant and timely. In any case, I had to clean out that folder manually, since they weren't really bookmarks I needed to keep for repeated reference. I recall a day when there were over a hundred items in that folder, and I didn't even remember why I had tagged most of them.

One of the things I came across while looking for other information was a Firefox plugin called Read It Later. Its purpose is to manage a special folder in your bookmarks file where you can stick URLs of sites you'd like to read later. This is for items you'd like to read on a one-time basis; it's not a substitute for RSS feeds. It can also save the pages locally for offline reading. It's easy to move items to your permanent bookmarks or delete them when you've read them. The plugin doesn't actually do all that much work, but it's a time-saver and it's very well-behaved code.

Here's a screenshot of a Firefox window with the Read It Later homepage displayed, and showing the elements the plugin adds to the toolbar.

To add an item to the read it later folder, click on the checkmark near the right-hand side of the toolbar. On the right, the drop-down list of saved sites is open in the screenshot. Simple and useful. I've had no problems with it so far. The Read It Later homepage is here: http://readitlaterlist.com/.

Is this a process smell?

Dave Nicolette — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:31:44 -0700

I was just scrolling back through old blog posts, trying to decide which ones to keep when I revamp the site, and I came across a post from last February on the subject of tools that provide continuous feedback. I noticed a comment from Lee Winder that I had overlooked until now. He writes,

...we have a system which alerts designers when a new build is ready on the CI machine.

If we have fast turn-around, they could be getting alerts every 10/15 minutes, which is certainly to much if they only update once or twice a day.

Since the alerts are e-mails, I've recommended they filter them into a CI folder, only checking the alerts when they need a new build to see when the last one was generated.

I wish I had seen this earlier. It seems to me the statement, "they could be getting alerts every 10/15 minutes, which is certainly to much if they only update once or twice a day," suggests a process smell. It may or may not be a real problem, but it sounds questionable in the context of agile-style workflow. It may be worth finding out why (1) the team is only updating (checking in?) once or twice a day, and (2) why they think that is satisfactory.

It isn't necessarily a problem. "Smell" doesn't automatically mean "bad;" it just means, "Find out where the smell is coming from, in case it's a problem." It might only be that you neighbor's cooking smells funny. OTOH, it may be that your curtains are on fire. It doesn't hurt to find out for sure.

If this team is updating only once or twice a day, then by implication they're only running their own build once or twice a day. Lee's company does video game development in C++, and the practical limit to the number of updates per day this team can make may be different than for typical business application development in languages like Java and C#. Game development involves several distinct types of programming, and the practical maximum builds per day may be different for this team than for other teams working on the same game. Even so, it might be good to understand exactly why they are limited to just one or two builds per day, just in case the curtains are on fire. Couldn't hurt.

The notifications aren't from this team's own build; they are consuming a build from another team. That team is updating at least every 10 to 15 minutes; not bad. A simpler solution might be to remove this team from the distribution list for that build's automatic notification. There's no need to have the email server churning when the notifications aren't useful. Team members have to go in and delete all the useless emails at some point, too. Maybe it's low enough impact that it doesn't matter, in context. It sounds a bit wasteful, anyway.

An information radiator is sometimes helpful in cases when one team needs the latest stable build from another team. I've seen cases when a large monitor is set up in each team room showing the build status for all the parts of the project that are in flight at the moment. This team would be able to tell at a glance whether they needed to pull a new build. I don't know which tools they're using at Lee's place, but I've seen this done using Big Visible Cruise in conjunction with Cruise Control. It may be possible with other CI servers, as well. Just a thought.

Agiles2009 Conference

Dave Nicolette — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:05:16 -0700

Ágiles 2009 took place on October 6-9 in Florianopolis, Brazil. It was the second in a series of agile development conferences bringing leading-edge software development and project management practices to Latin America. The first was held last year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was organized by a small group of highly motivated and dedicated people, primarily a group that had met during their university years in Buenos Aires and who are driving agile and lean adoption forward in Argentina, but also including professionals from several other Latin American countries who share a passion for agile development. The first conference was a great success. The second was at least as informative and enriching, if not moreso.

Of course, these are not the only agile- and/or lean-focused events in Latin America, but they are the largest and they seek to bring in international participants. With strong support from the Agile Alliance and from key commercial sponsors, the Ágiles conferences bring together agile and lean practitioners and researchers from across the continent as well as from North America and Europe and help tie together the various local and national agile/lean adoption movements in Latin America.

In addition to Latin American thought leaders in agile and lean adoption, the conference included several well-known figures in the general agile movement, including Diana Larsen, Brian Marick, Joshua Kerievsky, Naresh Jain, David Hussman, and others. There were too many excellent sessions to describe in a blog post, and the quality of those presented by Latin American speakers was on par with that of the better-known speakers. Look to this region for the next generation of leaders in moving the industry forward with effective management and software development methods.

Several participants took some great photos of the event. You can find links to their photo albums on the Latin American Agile Community site: http://sites.google.com/site/comunidadagiles/agiles-2009> I didn't take any great photos, but I took a few mediocre ones. Here's a shot of me with some of the Argentines I met last year, as we began to gather in the lobby prior to the opening keynote:

Left to right: Alejandra Alfonso, Adrián Eidelman, Emilio Gutter, Juan Gabardini, and me.

This one is from Joke Vandemaele's presentation on Power Workshops, a technique she has been using successfully to launch complex agile projects at a company in Belgium. The visuals on the wall are the ones from an actual project that she used as an example.

Brian Marick made himself available for pairing during the conference. He invited anyone who wanted to sit with him to work on an application for his wife's veterinary practice. Here he has grabbed a spot in the lobby and is pairing with one of the conference participants as others look on.

After the final session on Thursday, a rock band made up of people from OnCast Technologies, a Florianopolis-based agile consultancy, put on a concert in the lobby and invited others to join in and jam.

The conference proper was two days long, and was preceded by two days of training courses. These included a TDD & Refactoring course taught by Naresh, a CSM course taught by Alan Cyment, a Certified Product Owner course taught by Alexandre Magno, and a course on retrospectives taught by Diana.

My small contribution was a presentation of my session on Agile Metrics. The presentation continues to be popular. This one was standing room only and went overtime, as usual. Although it seems a rather mundane topic, it is clearly one that is on the minds of many project managers and program managers as they learn different ways of planning and tracking projects.

Florianopolis is quite a nice city. In my spare time I walked around and saw as much of the place as I could. I especially enjoyed the natural scenery around the bay.

The weather was cloudy the whole week. The clouds and mist on the mountaintops in the distance made for an ever-changing scene.

Some parts of the city reminded me of certain European cities. This is the old central market plaza, for instance:

All in all, a great conference with great people, and a fantastic place to visit.

With last year's conference in Argentina and this year's in Brazil, we've all had a chance to try the churrasquerias in both countries. Both are world-famous for their beef. The burning question on the minds of the conference organizers, since most of them come from those two countries, was: Who has the best beef, Argentina or Brazil? To me, the question reminded me of Belgians and Germans debating about who has the best beer. It's basically a moot question, since Ireland has the best beer. (In my humble opinion, anyway.) Sorry to disappoint our gracious conference hosts, but I have to say Venezuela has the best beef. Ágiles2010 will be in Lima, Perú, so the true test must wait for a future year. Fortunately, the future of agile and lean will be a long one.

In the head of Gojko Adzic about Agile Acceptance Testing :-)

Xavier Warzee — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:44:02 -0700

I met Gojko during the last CITCON'09 conference in Paris and after few beers at the Falstaff, we discuss future main trends in the agile world. The "communication gap" quickly emerged as one of the main challenge software teams is facing when working with business teams. Here is the transcript of the discussion we had last monday about this important topic:
A Interview With Gojko Adzic about Agile Acceptance Testing

Revue du web .NET du 20 octobre

Matthieu Guyonnet-Duluc — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:51:49 -0700

Voici notre première revue du web sur l’actualité du monde .NET. Elle ne se veut pas exhaustive, nous essayons de mettre en avant des choses intéressantes, peu connues parfois mais toujours pertinentes. L’objectif est d’offrir une vue synthétique des nouvelles du développement sur notre plateforme préférée.

Vous trouverez 7 petites rubriques : les deux premières sont des extraits de sites qu’on ne présente plus maintenant (Twitter et Stackoverflow). Ensuite des actualités du monde Microsoft et de la communauté Alt.NET. Nous mettrons aussi en avant un projet ou une application .NET et jetterons un coup œil ailleurs (Java, Ruby, PHP) . Enfin on retiendra un évènement pour la semaine à venir.

N’hésitez pas à réagir dans la section “commentaires” !

Les tweets de la semaine

http://twitter.com/SharedProphet/statuses/4925873898
Une introduction à la nouvelle invention du père de Linq : Rx, Reactive framework

http://twitter.com/EdgarSanchez/statuses/4905530109
ServiceStack : un stack alternatif à WCF pour faire de l’appel distant depuis Linux, Windows et une version pour MonoTouch

http://twitter.com/oising/statuses/4867514391
On a tous de belles machines en 64bit et on est tous un peu ennuyés par ce message du débogueur de Visual Studio : "Change to 64-bit applications are not allowed" voici une solution.

La question stackoverflow.com

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c

« hidden features of c# » c'est la question la plus "active". Il y a sans doute des choses que vous connaissez déjà dans cette liste, d'autres dont vous ne vous servirez peut-être jamais mais la parcourir de temps à autre, avec son café du matin, c'est toujours instructif.

Actualités Microsoft

Le site de MSDN a connu un lifting de son interface, ici le portail consacré à C# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx et le site de référence de l’API a aussi une nouvelle version légère.

Un site peu connu avec pleins de projets petits ou grands : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd125421.aspx

Dans un mois c'est la PDC 09 dont les grands moments seront sans doute : le lancement commercial de Azure, .NET Framework 4 et VS 2010. http://microsoftpdc.com /

Le support de MS pour jQuery continue encore plus avec la version 6 de la Preview des contrôles ASP.NET Ajax qui s’exposent aussi comme plugins jQuery : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/15/announcing-microsoft-ajax-library-preview-6-and-the-microsoft-ajax-minifier.aspx

Actualités Alt.Net

Ce n'est pas de l'actualité chaude mais Karl Seguin (http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/ ), développeur canadien et membre de la communauté codebetter.com a publié un e-book de près de 80 pages sur les bonnes pratiques de développement : « Foundations of Programming ». Le sommaire est alléchant et une application accompagne le texte : http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2009/05/25/revisiting-codebetter-canvas.aspx

Ailleurs

Jetbrains, l'éditeur connu dans le monde .NET pour Resharper (le plugin pour Visual Studio) vient de rendre disponible une version gratuite de son produit phare IntelliJIDEA (un IDE Java) ainsi que le code source de la plateforme. La version dite communauté ne contient pas beaucoup de fonctionnalités au-delà de la programmation JAVA SE mais comme Eclipse un écosystème de plugin va sans doute apparaître.

Avec Eclipse, Netbeans et maintenant IntelliJIDEA, le monde des IDE Java semble plus dynamique que celui de .NET. MonoDevelop et SharpDevelop n'ont pas vu leur adoption croître beaucoup. Et les tentatives infructueuses comme celle de Together .NET de Borland ne sont pas là pour nous rendre optimistes.

On peut juste espérer que Visual Studio 2010 simplifie vraiment l’intégration de plugins.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_comparison_matrix.html?utm_source=IDEA_BLOG&utm_media=Anouncement&utm_campaign=IDEA9_CE

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/

Un projet

http://www.sparkviewengine.com

Spark View Engine est un moteur de vue pour le Framework ASP.NET MVC (et Castle MonoRail) créé par Louis Dejardin (qui depuis a été embauché par Microsoft) pour un projet interne à son ancien employeur. Il simplifie la construction des pages en évitant les spaghettis de tags que représentent pour certains le moteur de vue par défaut de ASP.NET MVC.

Un des cas les plus courants courants les boucles.

 1: <viewdata Posts="IList[[MyApp.Models.Post]"/>
 2: <for each="var post in Posts">
 3: <p>${post.Title}</p>
 4: </for>

ou encore plus simple :

 1: <var classes="new [] {'even','odd'}">
 2: <tr each="var user in users" class="${classes[userIndex%2]}">
 3: <td>${userIndex}) ${user.Name}</td>
 4: <td>${user.UserType}</td>
 5: </tr>
 6: </var>

L’intellisense est un peu dur à mettre en place mais avec Fluent HTML du projet MVC Contrib on arrive à une productivité agréable :

 1: <content name="MainContent">
 2: <viewdata model="IList[[Story]]"/>
 3: !{this.Html.Grid(Model).Columns(column =>
 4: {
 5: column.For(x => x.Id).Named("ID");
 6: column.For(x => x.Title);
 7: column.For(x => x.DateSubmitted).Format("{0:d}");
 8: column.For(x => Html.ActionLink<StoryController>(c => c.Single(x.Ref), "View Details"))
.DoNotEncode();
 9: })}
 10: 
 11: </content>
 12: 
 13:

Qui a dit « IntelliSense pour XAML ! » ?

ASP.NET MVC devient un des domaines où la communauté est des plus actives.

La semaine prochaine

La conférence Monospace sur 4 jours avec bien sûr la vedette du moment MonoTouch, l’environnement de développement .NET pour l’iPhone : http://monospace.us/

Sun, Netbook, Java, JEE 6

Thierry Janaudy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:22:00 -0700

Java for Netbooks, New features in JEE 6.0

OCaml on the VM

Thierry Janaudy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:35:00 -0700

The goal of the OCaml-Java project is to allow seamless integration of Objective Caml and Java

Java RMI vs. RV

Thierry Janaudy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:58:00 -0700

Well, the winner is Java RMI.
I performed a test to compare a RV C++ program (3 servers sending market data, processing it, republishing it) to a similar Java program using RMI for communication instead of RV.
RMI is 15 times faster than RV, achieving 200 micros between the market depth update and the price republished!

SOA, S+S, and Cloud Computing

Xavier Warzee — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:22:11 -0700

Je vous invite à consulter la dernière édition du journal The Architecture Journal consacré à l'approche "Service" aujourd'hui avec des articles abordant "S+S", le "Cloud computing", le "Model Driven", l'EDA, et les limites de l'approche SOA à l'ère des solutions SaaS.
Architecture Journal, issue 21
Version PDF zippée ici ;-)