Musings of a Software Development Manager

Over a lunch break today I pulled down Fitnesse and started it up. I used it in two sessions at Software Development 2005, but I haven’t gotten a chance to really run through it on my own since then. I’m hoping it’s a simple enough framework to really automate some acceptance tests. The wiki interface [...]

Working through some nasty NullPointer exceptions on a project now. It was a fairly well done project, no unit tests but run as an experimental Scrum project and all of the developers were fairly good about testing the apps by hand. Way too much deployment to Tomcat, but it seemed to meet the requirements and [...]

A problem that crops up over and over again in my world is that a developer or two completes their coding assignments on a project and the project moves into a formal testing cycle. If the developer has done a quality job and done a lot of unit testing the code base is likely to [...]

I don’t know how typical my status meetings are. I knew from attending numerous status meetings at past jobs what I didn’t like, long pointless reporting of status that everyone generally already knows. So here’s how mine go: Scheduled for 30 minutes, but typically run 15 minutes. Monday every week unless there’s a holiday in [...]

Recently ran across a blog entry where Rob Lambert asked if anyone was actually using JSF? My initial experience is I don’t know anyone using it for any real project. Struts is pretty common, I occasionally here about something like Velocity, but never JSF. I remember looking into local training classes when I thought JSF [...]

Working through Chapter 2 of Spring: A Developer’s Notebook tonight, and I’m pleasantly surprised by Spring’s error messages. This is the first one I got after deploying one of the examples: 1234567org.springframework.beans .factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: Error registering bean with name ‘viewResolver’ defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/rentABikeApp-servlet.xml]: Bean class [org.springframework.web.servlet .view.InternalResourceViewResolvers] not found; nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.web [...]

‘J2EE Architect’ is a loaded word, and I should know I’m a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA). I meet up with a lot of architects through the hiring process and reviewing consultant RFPs and quite a few of them scare me. When asked about implementation details I get responses like: I’ve only worked at companies [...]

If anything I’ve gotten fairly addicted to RSS and more importantly podcasts in the last 6 months since a group of friends got me a 4th generation iPod while I was spending December in the Stem Cell Transplant unit of a local hospital. I now probably listen to 2 hours or so a day of [...]

Last I remember there were some 80,000+ open source projects. There’s a whole host of different solutions out there that solve the same problems. The MVC framework space is overflowing with Struts, Webworks, Velocity, JSF, and a host of others. The ORM frameworks include iBatis, Hibernate, JDO, and a bunch of others. There’s a few [...]

So far after using JBoss 4.0 for 6 months or so we’ve seen pretty good hot deploy response. Under 3 it was flakey and so you usually just restarted the server. Today we ran into a weird problem with a war file where a fix that had been added wasn’t getting picked up. After a [...]