I’ve said it before on this blog - it doesn’t matter how good your process is if your team doesn’t have the Right Stuff. But if your process is compromised, then so are your people. The right process and the right people are each, on their own, necessary but insufficient conditions for developing good software. And while you can find good people, a good process needs to be built from the ground up, starting with infrastructure.
Continue reading ‘The Right Development Infrastructure’
Author Archive for Brendan Lawlor
It’s hard to believe it, but despite the fact that the FSF has been around for more than 20 years, their recently filed suit against Cisco is the very first time that they will test their ability to uphold their copyright under GPL and LGPL in a court of law.
The Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard Stallman, is the copyright holder for a number of software modules including GCC and the Gnu C Library. These modules are at the centre of a long-standing disagreement between the FSF and Cisco. After 5 years of working with Cisco to ‘help’ them towards compliance, Stallman and Co. have finally spat the dummy and called in the lawyers.
Continue reading ‘GPL Round 1: FSF vs Cisco’
Here in DSI, we use a lot of great Open Source Software libraries and tools. Choosing the right ones, and aligning them with our development approaches, helps to boost our productivity and quality. The same realisation has spurred just about every other software development company on the planet, and as a result OSS has really brewed up a storm. But now that the initial euphoria has passed, it’s time to stop and take stock of the situation. There’s another storm brewing, and it’s going to do a lot of damage to those who don’t see it coming.
Maven is great, isn’t it? You just install it, download your favourite OSS project, type in mvn install and your jar file comes out the other end. Magic. It gets you thinking: Building should always be this easy, right? Your company should be using Maven to manage all its builds. Push-button builds could be just one download away. Right?
Think again.
Sigh - a Process Architect’s work is never done (in some cases it’s never even started). The same unyielding forces that bring about change in development technologies are also at play in the processes we use to develop. It has been four years since DSI started to change the way we develop software. While the principles that underpinned those changes have not changed much, if at all, some of the tools we use to support those principles are in need of updating or replacing.
Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be blogging in more detail about the latest set of changes we’re making. Right now, I can give an outline of where we’re going. Some changes are predictable and conform to industry trends. Others are more original and might even set a trend themselves:
- Switching to Maven2 as a build management tool.
- Introducing the concept of Continuous Performance Management into our CI process.
- Moving to Task-Centric development using Mylyn.
- Making the company dashboard richer by integrating our Atlassian tools more deeply
Continue reading ‘Changes to our Process I: Continuous Performance Mangement’
There might be a downturn in the construction industry in these parts right now, but there is one company of plumbers that is still working flat out. SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, has always plumbed the nastier parts of APIs and Frameworks where nobody likes to go, in order to make them more hygenic to use. They are still doing this and more besides, and two of their number came to IT@Cork’s 3rd annual Java Conference to keep us up to date with their activities. Ben Hale and Jonas Partner from SpringSource gave interesting presentations on OSGi and Spring Integration respectively. I’ll try to give a summary of Ben’s presentation in this post. I’ll catch up with Jonas and the other speakers in later posts.
Continue reading ‘IT@Cork Java Conference Part I: OSGi and Spring’
IT@Cork have upped the stakes.
Over the past few years the half-day Java conferences have proved to be very successful, attracting people from all over Munster and beyond. This year the event has switched to a full-day format, based on feedback from previous years. The line-up looks as exciting and relevent as ever and I look forward to my yearly fix of Java news, trends and in-depth technical content.
For those who have not already registered, check out the IT@Cork site here for details on speakers. The event takes place next Tuesday the 9th of September in the Radisson SAS in Little Island.
Just a quick post to say that from a DSI blogging point of view I’m going to be very quiet for the next 8 months.
John and Eamonn here have allowed me to take an extended leave, and so from 29th of December until the 20th of August I’ll be travelling with my wife and daughters to China, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. It’ll be the first time in 20 years or so that I will not be developing any software for such an extended period of time (it’ll be interesting to see what the psychological effects of that will be!)
Continue reading ‘Hello World (Goodbye Laptop)’
This post is a follow-on from a previous one where I describe how old problems that hampered rich client development on the desktop will come back to haunt RIA development.
What are the sources of inter-component coupling in a typical Event-Driven, Component-Based system?
- Shared Event Names
- Shared Event Data
- Parent-Child Relationships
If two components communicate by means of events, it gives the impression of loose coupling. It’s true that if all events in a system are vanilla-flavour, then this is, effectively, decoupling. If the only interface that a listener needs to implement were something called SomethingHappenedListener, which demands only that a method called somethingHappened be provided, then that would be a defacto decoupling. Every component would be able to talk to every other one, with no real strings attached.
Continue reading ‘Zero Coupling between UI Components’
Technorati Tags: RIA
After years spent chasing the latest waves in web technologies, the software development industry has come curiously full circle. Today’s web client technologies are homeing in around the ideal of the Rich Internet Application. The architecture being employed in the pursuit of this ideal is familar: Component-Based and Event-Driven. This is the same approach that underpinned desktop rich client frameworks like AWT, Swing and SWT.
In the case of at least one RIA implementation, GWT, this return to a familiar architecture is touted as a great advantage - a good reason to switch. I subscribe to the Component/Event approach, but with one major caveat. While writing desktop clients might seem relatively straightforward compared to dealing with JSPs, servlets and http session management, the passage of time has blurred our memory of some of the truely terrible code that we have all found ourselves dealing with thanks to some of the limitations of exactly those rich client architectures that we are now once more looking at. Unfortuntely, despite that same passage of time, these architectures have not been improved upon - we’ve all been too busy writing web applications.
Continue reading ‘Future Problems in RIA Architecture’
Technorati Tags: Rich Internet Application, architecture, Swing, GWT