CLOSED-LOOP

Myco: My first iOS App is in the iTunes Store

2013-05-17T22:20:00.001+02:00

My colleague Stefan created Myco / Pilzkenner for Windows Phone.
The App won the "Best Windows Phone Apps" award in the Microsoft Switzerland App Award 2013.

We partnered up and I ported the app to iOS. Myco is now available in the iTunes Store.

There are three editions of Myco:

For more information please visit the Myco product page.

If you like the app, please consider submitting a review to the iTunes Store.

PS: In the Free edition 1.0.1 there is a bug that crashes the App when searching in the mushroom library while an iAd banner is displayed. I fixed the bug and submitted version 1.0.2 to the iTunes Store, but it will take some days until it will be available.

Tidbit: How programmers spend their time

2013-05-10T22:46:00.001+02:00

From the great talk of Douglas Crockford about Quality:

This is so true in my experience... that is why I don't get why people are argueing over and over again that typing is one of the most important skills of a programmer (the latest is example from Miguel de Icaza and Scott Hanselman).

Quotes of the Week: Bugs

2013-04-28T22:27:00.001+02:00

Software teams have to move away from the idea that bugs are a useful way to measure quality.

- Impact! Newsletter February 2013

Software does not have enough self awareness to be afraid of bugs. That's why it works as well as it does.

- Douglas Crockford, Quality

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

- Edsger Dijkstra

Bugs are like over-parented kids. They get a lot of attention. They might be born in the relative quiet of a developer's IDE, but the moment they are exposed to the rest of the world, they live their lives amidst a great deal of fanfare.

- How Google Tests Software

Maybe there’s no such thing as a bug. Maybe there are just things that work well and things that don’t work well.

- Tobias Mayer, The Bug Myth

Unfortunately, in the celebration of testing artifacts (such as counting the number of bugs) we forget about the software. All testing artifacts have value to the extent that they impact the source code and therefore the product.

- How Google Tests Software

Comprehensive statistics of past bugs are no more useful for software quality than financial accounts of a chophouse are useful for a steak sandwich.

- Gojko Adzic, Bug statistics are a waste of time

Tidbit: Readings from the Book of Geek

2013-04-24T22:41:00.001+02:00

Highly recommended: the first 5 minutes of Dan North reading from the Book of Geek. Its funny and poignant:

In the beginning the software was without form, and void.
The Architects said "Let there be light" and they separated the light from the darkness.
And they called the light Architecture and the darkness Hacking.

And Maven brought forth a Plague of Apache Commons, and there was a flood of all the Libraries of the Internet as a judgement upon the people.

Hard Things Made Easy (Part 1.2) - Dan North

Tidbit: Cake Mix Analogies

2013-04-14T01:18:00.001+02:00

It's funny how cake mix analogies pop up in interesting speeches lately.

Dan Ariely speaks about the IKEA effect that gives meaning to our work, which was essential for the success of cake mixes:

Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?

In her hilarious talk Christin Gorman shows how cake mixes are stupid and make us not enjoy our work any more, like many generic frameworks we use as programmers:

Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity.

SOA vs. DRY

2013-02-28T18:37:00.001+01:00

In his presentation "Designing For Rapid Release" (slides) Sam Newman points out an ugly fact that we often try to ignore: SOA and DRY are to a large extent opposed forces.

Of course this is not a new break-through discovery and I guess it is also nothing new for most battle-proven enterprise developers. But I also have the experience that in most SOA projects this topic is treated like the crazy uncle in the attic: You don't talk about it and you certainly don't plan for it.

The result is usually a schizophrenic feeling: The architecture postulates nice decoupling, but in reality we end up with the feeling that we are not doing it right: either we are using shared logic in several services which negates idea of decoupling or we have a lot of code duplication.

In the presentation Sam illustrated this conflict with two services that share a common domain model:

In the above picture, since service A and service B are both using a common model from a shared library, they get tightly coupled. On the other hand managing the development and releases of the shared library all of a sudden gets much more complicated under the premise that service A and service B should be decoupled.

He further brings the incompatibility of SOA and DRY to the point with the following quote:

Ending up with tightly bound services because of code-reuse is significantly worse than to copy & paste that code.

I like that Sam makes the conflict between SOA and DRY explicit. Not ignoring this fact is the first step to objectively balance the tradeoffs and to honestly plan how to deal with the drawbacks of either approach.

Quotes of the Week: Developer Testing

2013-02-15T22:35:00.001+01:00

Nothing makes a system more flexible than a comprehensive suite of tests! Far above good architecture and good design!

- Robert C. Martin,
Oredev 2008 Keynote

We have as many testers as we have developers. And testers spend all their time testing, and developers spend half their time testing. We're more of a testing, a quality software organization than we're a software organization

- Bill Gates, Trustworthy Computing

TDD is a discipline for programmers like double-entry bookkeeping is for accountants or sterile procedure is for surgeons..

- Uncle Bob, The Pragmatics of TDD

Tests should be made a first-class citizen and treated like any other feature.

- How Google Tests Software

TDD, BDD and other high-ceremony techniques are not recommended for startups! Code is not important in the beginning!

- Obie Fernandez, The Dark Side Beckons

I see TDD as a valuable and important development technique, but there are contexts in which it shines and others in which it is a hindrance.

- Dan North, The Art of Misdirection

Insisting on unit tests won't make those unit tests valuable.

- How Google Tests Software

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence.

- Kent Beck, Stackoverflow

If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake, I don’t test for it.

- David Heinemeier Hansson, Testing like the TSA

Testing is overrated!

- Luke Franci, Rail Spikes

A survey of all the studies on TDD has shown that the better the study done, the weaker the signals to its benefit.

- The Leprechauns of Software Engineering

Thinking you can improve quality by doing more testing is like thinking you can loose weight by weighing you more. […] If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

- Steve McConnell, Code Complete

You cannot inspect quality into a product. The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected.

- W. Edwards Deming, Out Of The Crisis

Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

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The boundaries are blurring

2012-12-26T19:17:00.001+01:00

It's interesting to watch how the recent trend to mobile and browser applications is changing the traditional understanding of client-server separation and how the traditional territories of some technologies are blurring.

Two recent examples in the field of persistence technologies illustrate this blurring of boundaries quite well:

Rack::CoreData
With the Rack::CoreData library you define a client-server interface (REST API) and server backend with a OSX/iOS CoreData Model.
While CoreData has its root in the enterprise space, today it is primarily a client-side technology. I guess that in its current form it was never intended for anything else than persistence on client side and the only reason for it's transition to the server side is its wide usage due to the success of iOS.

JBoss Errai
JBoss Errai represents the opposite trend compared to Rack::CoreData: It takes JPA into the browser! JPA is traditionally a server-side (or at least server-interfacing) technology. I am pretty sure that it was not intended as a browser technology. But with the rise of HTML5 and browser-side persistence there is the pressure to take that programming model to the web client.

It seems that the triumph of mobile apps and rich internet applications has quite a disruptive effect on the traditional server-side technologies and frameworks.
I am wondering where this will lead? Both of the above examples do not feel quite right in my opinion… but hey, maybe we will get JPA support in HTML6 or Oracle will include direct CoreData support in the future ...

Presentation: vert.x - asynchrones event-driven web-applications on the JVM

2012-12-14T22:56:00.001+01:00

This week I was invented again to speak at the SBB Developer Day 2012.

My presentation was about vert.x:

vert.x - asynchronous event-driven web applications on the JVM from jbandi

I enjoyed the event very much, and I hope to be invited again next time.

Tidbit: Hibernate bashing deluxe

2012-09-13T22:33:00.001+02:00

This short speech from JavaZone 2011 is just ingenious! It really made me laugh out lout again and again.
I can fully recommend to watch the video (it's only 9 min), you will be amused, even if you don't know much about hibernate...

Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity. from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Favorite quotes:

Frameworks like Hibernate leave you with pretty much exactly the same amount of work you had to do anyway, only now you are not enjoying it at all.

I present to you: Hibernate - the naked emperor's hairy butt-cheeks!

If Hibernate was a part of your team, you wouldn't even let him anywhere near your database.

We used to write algorithms, now we are writing annotations. Are we meant to be happy about that?

QuickTip: Programmatic MBean access under JBoss

2012-09-10T18:34:00.001+02:00

I have been struggeling a bit with the programmatic access of MBeans under JBoss. This is my current conclusion.
With JBoss 5 there are two methods for accessing MBeans:

By JNDI-lookup of the RMIAdaptor. With this method you need the JBoss client libraries (the jars in your $JBOSS_HOME/client) on the classpath since the RMIAdaptor is a type that is provided by JBoss.
By pure JMX. You don't need the JBoss client libraries your class path here.

The following snipped shows both methods:

With JBoss 7 the way to access MBeans changed quite a bit: The tricky thing here is, that you need the JBoss client libraries (the jars in $JBOSS_HOME/bin/client) on your classpath even though you don't explicitly import types provided by JBoss.

If the client libraries are missing, you get the following exception: java.net.MalformedURLException: Unsupported protocol: remoting-jmx

As far as I could figure, this is the only way to access MBeans under JBoss 7.

/ch/open Workshop-Days 2012

2012-09-04T00:01:00.001+02:00

Simon and I are holding a workshop about object relational mapping with JPA2 next Thursday at the /ch/open Workshop-Days 2012.

This year is the first time since we are doing this course that the workshop is not fully booked… probably JPA is getting an uninteresting legacy technology?

So if you don't know what to do next Thursday, you can still get a seat in our workshop … however if I am honest I would suggest to have a look at the parallel course "Java EE testing revised with Arquillian" … it looks very promising. I would definitely attend that course, if I had a choice.

Tidbits: Lines of Code

2012-07-31T13:36:00.001+02:00

According to the discussion in JavaScript Jabber episode 20:

the code base for the Cloud9 IDE ~~fronted~~ (correction by @javruben) consists of about 300'000 lines of JavaScript.
The GMail frontend consist of about 400'000 lines of JavaScript.

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Impressive speech about the future effects of social networks

2012-07-10T16:33:00.000+02:00

[in German]

This impressive speech nails down what social networks are all about and how the internet has a revolutionizing effect on modern society:

This is what I call a very impressive talk: 3 min and every word fitting a very concise and scientific analysis.

Bookreview: MVC4 in Action

2012-07-05T22:06:00.001+02:00

Another quote made it on the cover of a manning title: ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action

I think this is a good book for developers that want to learn ASP.NET MVC. And I think today every .NET Web Developer should learn MVC. Learning MVC will help you understand basic web concepts and even when you are developing WebForms applications you can profit a lot from that.
I like the book, because it looks a bit further than just ASP.NET MVC as it comes out of the box. With chapters about full system testing, AutoMapper, MvcContrib and NHibernate it deals with advanced topics that are neglected in most other books about MVC. The authors give a somewhat more opinionated overview how modern web applications should be created. This makes the book stand out among typical MVC books.
What I miss in the book is primarily the integration of MVC with the EntityFramework. The book only focuses on NHibernate. This was the right thing to do with the first version of MVC, however today the EntityFramework has made a lot of progress, and in my opinion it should be considered the default choice for ASP.NET MVC.
If you are already familiar with ASP.NET MVC or have even read a previous version of the book, don't expect to learn too much about the new features of MVC 4. Only the last two chapters of the book deal with specifics of the fourth release of the framework (probably the book was initially planned for MVC 3, but the fast release cycle of the MVC team made the authors skip directly to MVC 4).
Nevertheless, for developers that want to learn MVC, I think this book should be a must-read.

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Quotes of the Week: Agile Backfire

2012-07-02T00:22:00.001+02:00

The single most important thing on a project is picking the right people. If you have good people then it doesn't matter if you are using Scrum or not, it will turn out well anyway.

- Jimmy Nilsson, NDC 2012

We were used to getting shit done … then they told us about Agile.

- Hadi Hariri, NDC 2012

There are no agile projects. Nor were there ever any waterfall projects. What we had were just a bunch of guys trying to get a bunch of stuff done.

- Uncle Bob, NDC 2012

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of programming.

- The Manifesto of Programming, Motherfucker

These statements make even less sense. They are just babble, and they’re not about your trade in any conceivable way.

- About the Manifesto for Plumbing Craftsmanship

I don't read agile books. They are a waste of time!

Agile books out there are just people telling stories about stuff. Stories are great -- love to hear them. But I can't trust the authors of most of these books to tell honest stories and learn honest lessons from them. Instead they have a theme.

The problem is, real life doesn't have a theme.

- Agile Ruined my Life

I used to be an agile consultant, but I am alright now.

- Dan North, NDC 2012

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Gojko's 5 BDD myths

2012-06-26T22:28:00.000+02:00

Primarily for my own reference I am listing the 5 myths that Gojko Adzic is busting in his presentation: Busting BDD Myths

Go watch it, it's brilliant ... and while you are at it watch also his even more provoking presentation Reinventing Software Quality.

Myth #1: Instoolation
Belief that process problems can be solved by installing a tool

Myth #2: Businessting
Belief that business users should write acceptance tests

Myth #3: Acceptegration
Belief that tests are either unit of acceptance-integration

Myth #4: Rolation
<insert role> should do BDD in isolation (eg testers do everything)

Myth #5: Longression
Belief that the long term value of BDD is in regression testing

And as completion the five ways to misuse FIT by James Shore:

Misuse #1: Use Fit for Test Automation
Misuse #2: Customer? What Customer?
Misuse #3: Write Integration Tests
Misuse #4: Spin Your Propeller
Misuse #5: Specify Everything

A conclusion from all this myth-busting is probably that BDD is a concept that is rarely understood and still very much in flux:

BDD starts out as "tests are specs" now it's "full stack methodology" wondering where it will stop!

-@refractalize

There's a cargo cult of Cucumbering going on and people need a reminder for when it's a good fit.

-@dhh

If we wait another year, then practicing BDD will be identical to what XP was in 1999

- Quote from a discussion in Yahoo Groups

Rethinking Automated Testing

2012-04-15T23:32:00.001+02:00

While you’ve been worrying about your BDD adverbs the iFart dev just made $40,000.

- Iain Hunter

Can you give 140 char synopsis of "opportunity cost of TDD?"

Is #TDD always a "Best Practice"? Is there even any such thing? When shouldn't you use it? What could you do instead?

- Conversation on Twitter

Testing implementation is terrible terrible terrible.

- Matt Rogish

The pendulum is swinging back and forth in the TDD and developer-testing world...
I blogged over two years ago about Testing Backlash and then again one year ago Are you too agile for TDD/BDD?

It seems the time has come for the pendulum to swing by once again. In an almost mystical conjunction a lot of alpha geeks are voicing current "new" insights about automated testing and TDD.

Maybe this is the developer community climbing the ladder to another stage of competence or to another stage of grief (the viewpoint is probably depending of the pains in your current project)… but maybe it is just that alpha-geeks like any other intelligent beings are getting bored after a while and turn to new topics.

Anyways, here is a list of the recent tide of "let's rethink automated testing":

Michael Feathers: Taking Automated Tests Off The Pedestal
DHH: Testing like the TSA
Scott Bellware: The Inflection Point - How Long can you Safely Avoid Automated Testing
Alberto Gutierrez: The evil unit test.
Dan North: The Art of Misdirection: The opportunity cost of TDD (or in the NDC Magazine)

Just for completion I am reenumerating older reflections on the topic:

The Dark Side Beckons? by Obie Fernandez
Test-Driven Development and Embracing Failure by Steve Freeman
Problems with TDD an Essay by Andrew Dalke. Heavily discussed on his blog and on Hacker News.
Ayende's posts: Even tests has got to justify themselves and re: Are you smart enough to do without TDD
And finally Luce Francis brilliant presentation: Testing is Overrated (matching blog post, slides)

Update:
Tudor shows in When testing does not cut it that testing is not always the best alternative to ensure certain properties of a software system.

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Thoughts about Dependency Injection

2012-02-21T17:49:00.000+01:00

I just discovered, that a quote of me made it to the cover of Dependency Injection in .NET:

Looking at the book in its final form, I am surprised at how well that quote fits my current thoughts.

I like the style of the author. This stackoverflow answer is just a nice example of his style: dependency injection can be dangerous for your career.

A quote from my original review of the manuscript:

This is one of the best programming books I have read in the last three years. I like about everything in this book. The technical insights. The way it focuses on concepts and not on tools or technologies. [...] It is definitely suited for programmers that want to learn good design and development techniques. It is not a reference book for a technical framework.

However I have a problem with the hype of dependency injection in general. It definitely goes into the direction of accidental complexity. I mean 584 pages, is a bit heavy for a promise to get better internal quality ... given I do everything else right. Especially compared to other, much wider topics that can have a much broader impact on your development:

From this perspective "All you need to know ... and more!" fits quite well: You will learn a lot reading the book, but it is sad that the current state of software development is that loaded with accidental complexity so that you have to be concerned with that much non-essential overhead ...

I also recommend reading a real critique of the current state of dependency injection: "Dependency Injection" Considered Harmful

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The future smells like JavaScript

2012-02-02T21:48:00.000+01:00

Of course I am only repeating what others are preaching about the recent rise of JavaScript.

But I think the movement is significant and can't be overstated. And recent developments are really even making it more and more interesting.

Nobody can deny hat JavaScript is the de facto programming language of Html5. Every other language trying to bolt itself onto Html5 looks like pure friction so far. And Html5 is looking upon a prospering future.

Today we are used to some established JavaScript frameworks that make working with JavaScript more fun and productive. jQuery seems to emerge as the clear leader by popularity here.

More recently tons of javascript application frameworks (so called MVC frameworks) are emerging, that facilitate programming complex applications inside the browser and taking most of the traditional presentation-logic away from the server.

On the other hand we have the node.js ecosystem that takes JavaScript to the server and allows us to use the same language, concepts, libraries and tools for the full application development stack.
And that ecosystem is thriving! JavaScript is the most popular langage on GitHub ... and have a look at the impressive node modules list.

Now this is all well and alpha-geeky, but there are showing up the first "real-world" success stories: Voxer, Walmart, LinkedIn ...

Of course there are the critics.

Surprisingly Microsoft recently positioned itself to become one of the most influencing conveyor of the JavaScript hype. It seems that they are investing heavily into JavaScript on different frontiers:

Microsoft was pushing node.js onto the the Windows environment.
Now they are pushing it into their Azure cloud platform. And evolving a 3rd party ecosystem around that.

But probably the biggest step for the future of JavaScript is the new strategy of Microsoft for Windows 8 desktop and tablet applications (Metro style apps). While there are several options for developing Metro style apps, JavaScript seems to become a major pillar.
This move opens up yet another area for JavaScript and JavaScript developers, completely adjacent to the web.
Developing for the desktop (or tablet) will most likely always be pretty different than for the web. For Metro style apps there will be a lot of new concepts, libraries and tools that are different to the ones that are used in web development (just have a look at WinRT, WinJS ...).
But the desktop- and the web-stack will move closer together and JavaScript with HTML5 and CSS will be the common denominator. Which I think is a very interesting evolution.
For instance look at this example of a drum sequencer (a traditional client application) that is using JavaScript and jQuery for its UI.
The prospect of reusing code and knowhow between desktop-ui- and web-ui-programming seems tempting ... even if a lot of .NET developers and other gurus are not so thrilled by the prospect of omnipresent JavaScript.

Of course another interesting thing will be to see how Metro style apps will change the architecture of future desktop applications. I think some concepts from web development will get adopted into desktop development. A stricter enforcement of separation between UI- and backend-components within a single application will most probably be a result (i.e. there seems to be no notion of traditional data-access in WinRT).

PS: This is my first cross-post between my blog and planetgeek.ch. Thanks @danielmarbach for inviting me.

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Vacation Books and Screencasts

2012-01-27T23:52:00.000+01:00

I am looking forward to spend another vacation mostly under water.

For the travel and the time above the water I am filling my Kindle and my iPad with the following material:

Thanks to bertolami, mbaumeler and j_graber for the recommendations.

Presentation: Can JavaScript be elegant?

2012-01-02T16:50:00.001+01:00

Last month I was invited again to speak at the SBB Developer Day 2011. Here is the presentation I held about JavaScript:

Kann JavaScript elegant sein?

View more presentations from jbandi

I enjoyed the event very much, and I hope to be invited again next time.

Opinions: Scala

2011-12-02T18:17:00.001+01:00

Can you spot the difference:

Scala is a serious option for organizations developing on a JVM platform.

- Martin Fowler

The friction and complexity that comes with using Scala instead of Java isn't offset by enough productivity benefit or reduction of maintenance burden for it to make sense as our default language.

- Yammer moving from Scala to Java

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Model, model thou art my riddle!

2011-11-23T14:09:00.001+01:00

Can you spot the difference:

In a Model View Controller application, you only ever want to see SQL code in the model.

- Rails Receipes

The domain model should be independent of persistence implementation details.

- Domain Driven Design and Development In Practice

Probably we should accept that models come in different flavors...

... or maybe the grand master was right:

Using C means that people [...] don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.

- Linus Torwalds

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Watch out: The world is changing!

2011-11-18T07:50:00.001+01:00

Lately I seem more susceptible to realize how fast the world is changing. Probably I am getting old...

At a recent lecture, Martin Herdina (CEO, Wikitude) showed how the mobile phone changes our lives (and he displayed slides you don't usually see in lectures…)

Once again I realized that the iPhone was only launched in 2007. I think it is amazing how our use of technology can change in only 4 years ...

Another striking example underlying the perception of technical change in relation to other areas of our lives:

What crosses your mind when you see the following picture?

Old-school, clumsy, clunky, retro …

...at least that are impressions that pop up in my head…

Now, what crosses your mind when you see the following picture:

Cool, highlight, milestone in movie history, top-10-movies of all times, re-defining science fiction movies …

...again that are my personal associations.

But you remember that the Nokia 7110 phone in the above picture was actually designed after being inspired by the Matrix movie:

I think it is remarkable how time is not having the same effect on movies as on technology. The Matrix definitely aged better than the Nokia phone.

In context: Great video about living in exponential times.

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