Musings of a Software Development Manager

When we started Faces 1.0 it was very important for us to work with tools, that’s where a lot of our focus was. But now, we really want to focus on ease of development without tools.
- Roger Kitain
- Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
- Talk at Javapolis on Dynamic Applications With Faces and AJAX
A more enlightened [...]

Banks don’t like being dependent on any one particular thing. They like to have a lot of options. Typically, we’ll roll out WebLogic, but we’ll also have JBoss on the side. Who uses Weblogic? IBM Websphere? Anybody use Websphere by choice? No hands at t’all, (Laughter from the audience) I [...]

I’m not sure anyone else will find this of much use, but the following is a list of tools, frameworks and libraries we use currently:
Java Frameworks

JSF 1.0
MyFaces
AJAX Anywhere
Spring
Hibernate
iBATIS
JUnit
EasyMock
Log4J
JODA Time
Struts (Though just for one 3rd party app and some older applications)

Tools

RAD 6.0 (We’re a Websphere shop these days)
IntelliJ IDEA ( Was the editor of choice before [...]

Turns out IBM recently snuck out a way to integrate ruby with Websphere Process Server using SCA (Service Component Architecture). It’s incredibly enterprisey and a bit surprising to see out of IBM. And the whole thing is made possible via JRuby.

As a Websphere shop we acquired licenses to IBM’s nascent ESB product, Websphere Process Server about a year ago. Since that time only one developer at the company, our architect, has been able to successfully develop anything with it.
The partial secret to getting it up and running successfully was revealed to me [...]

Being a customer of Big Blue can be pretty painful sometimes. We recently learned that IBM has conveniently decided to radically restructure their licensing agreements around Websphere. Their plan to make sure they get all possible revenue is to charge per core on a processor and per processor type.
According to our contract they [...]

Nice to see someone at IBM has finally taken a look at how you might test their wonderful SCA modules.
Turns out you have to go through many steps in Websphere Integration Developer (WID) and it appears to rely on Cactus which tends to be a real pain. Getting the whole thing setup involves several [...]

One of our developers came across a strange fix to an error message we kept getting in Websphere Portal Search 5.1.0.3. The error message was along the lines:
1Didn’t find SeedList in HTML, not a SeedList URL
You might try adding a little known property to portal search:
1HTTP_NON_APPL_MAX_BODY_SIZE_MB = 4
The parameter is supposed to set the [...]

I finally got around to updating the Crucible beta today. Crucible is a code review tool from Cenqua. Everything went fine until I started it up whereupon one of the update sql scripts failed. I went ahead and found a post on the exact same problem in their forums and uploaded the [...]

Just held the review today for the end of Sprint #6 on an intranet portal project. We’re pretty much down to Sprint #7 and then we can finally release it on the employees. Along the way we’ve learned the following things:

Websphere Portal 5.1.0.3 and especially it’s content management features (WCM) are fairly primitive [...]