April « 2006 « Musings of a Software Development Manager

UDDI is Dead?

In a meeting today with a lot of IBM Websphere product architects they didn’t quite come to the conclusion that UDDI was dead, but they did say that at this point UDDI is an important spec, but it’s just not meeting the needs of people trying to roll out SOA architectures.

IBM’s thoughts around this [...]

Test Driven Development Doesn’t Mean Test First?

In a post to the errata for Agile Web Development With Rails, the commenter notices that the the book barely touches on traditional TDD where you actually write the test first:

#2327: The author enters several assertions before ever trying to run the test. As this section is on TDD, it might be better to [...]

Testing Rails Helper Classes

I’m making my way through Agile Web Development with Rails TDD style after an earlier sillier attempt at waiting until the testing chapter about 150 pages into the book. I really like the skeletons for unit tests and functional tests. Then I wanted to test the following helper method in the ApplicationHelper class:

def fmt_dollars(amount) [...]

IBM to Support Java 1.5 in 2006

OK, it’s the end of 2006, but at least our development shop can return to Java 1.5 when IBM releases a new version of RAD in the second half of 2006. There exact words from the press release are:

IBM intends to ship a new version of Rational Application Developer in the second half of [...]

Making a Decision on Confluence

Our organization has been through three wikis now. It started with JSPWiki and moved to PHPNuke and now Confluence. I don’t think our story is all that unusual, but it may be illuminating.

The point of course is developers always need a way to share information on workarounds, configuration, or just some defacto practices like [...]

Chess For Tigers

Listening to a really good podcast by Kathy Sierra on Passionate Users she explained many of her themes on how to make users have more “I rule” experiences. One minor thing she might have gotten wrong is that chess is fun but not funny. As a former high school chess champion I can point to [...]

Practices of an Agile Developer is Out

I got excited today to learn that Practices of an Agile Developer is already shipping. I was given the rare treat of reviewing an earlier draft of the book, and I think it’s a great addition to the Agile canon.

Andy Hunt and Venkat Subramaniam cover about 45 agile practices from Invest In Your Team [...]

Whiteboard Plus Couches

In a short talk at SD West 2006 Alistair Cockburn described a lot of different office layouts including this technical discussion area:

It would be really nice to setup something like this. Haven’t really had anything like it though since the dotcom days. And back at least a few times people fell asleep on [...]

Null Object Pattern For Avoiding Null Checks

I’ve had it on my todo list for a while to go ahead and look into the Null Object pattern. I vaguely recalled that it allowed you to return a null object and not have to actually test for things like:

if (employee != null && employee.isCurrent()) { employee.promoteOneLevel(); }

I see this all through [...]

Rake in Rails Switching InnoDB to MyISAM

About 11:00pm on April 7th I ran

1rake

to run all my tests. I had a nasty problem where I went from all of my tests running on the depot sample application in the Agile Web Development Rails book to spitting out tons of errors. It didn’t make any logical sense. The error I saw [...]

Musings of a Software Development Manager