Robby van Damme

Katrijn is born

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:35:54 GMT

We are happy to announce that our second daughter Katrijn was born Monday night!

She and her mother are in good shape. Big sister Liesbeth is also already getting acquainted with her little sis.

I'll have my hands full with all my women ;-)

Javapolis: Project Tango/Metro

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:46:08 GMT

What: an interoperability stack for Java - .NET3.0/3.5

What's in it:

Web services with reliabiltiy (guaranteed delivery/order of delivery)
Transacted services
Security (meaning more than SSL)

It's built for Sun's GlassFish appserver, but runs in Tomcat too.

Microsoft already released .NET 3.5 with the latest version of the spec. Sun is expecting to release somewhere in June.

Good work, but little chance I'll be using it soon...

More info on:

https://metro.dev.java.net/

Javapolis: unitils

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:41:44 GMT

A presentation with a few answers to real world problems: nice!

I'm not going to copy the documentation of unitils (http://www.unitils.org/) here, but do would like to point out one recommendation:

If you want to have efficient datadriven tests, then you should disable your foreign keys and not null constraints...

Not a stupid idea - I'm going to try this out.

Javapolis : Scrum at Flanders Tourism/BMW

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:38:51 GMT

These 2 talks explained practical experiences with a project using Scrum.

Tip for (at least one of) the speakers: don't read your text from a piece of paper.

Having had some Scrum experiences myself, I'll stick to the things that were worthwhile writing down here:

Achievement is not the same as activity (personally I prefer "doing your best is not the same as having success", but I guess that's a matter of personal flavor
Sprint backlog with 4 cols: todo, in progress, funct test, done (we didn't use the functional test stage)
use a burndown graph to maeasure progress
determine your velocity to estimate/ follow progress
organize sprint retrospective meeting (no more than 90 min)
do the scrum meeting standing (some people aren't gonna like this one ;-)
Play planning poker to estimate, using the technique of story points and only fibonacci numbers (are a perhaps a variation?)
If you can't estimate (SPIKE requirements): organize a poc to be able to estimate afterwards
try to automate functional tests (Selenium framework for web apps - I'm definitily going to try this)
non-dedicated resources decreases efficiency (I've this happening too often...)
scrum master does the fire fighting, especially in the first sprints (well, what should I say - if it's only a few sprints, that's GOOD)
Putthe team together (I agree, this really works)
SCRUM does not solve your problems, it only makes them visible (but you must be willing to see)
Scrum doesn't mean you don't document, it means documenting in a smart way
Empower the team and take a distance (beware: the team must be ready for this)

Javapolis : Dependency management

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:25:33 GMT

This guy knew what he was talking about.

Why the hell do something about dependency mgmt?

be able to replace components with minimal effort
better quality (dependencies result in bugs)
enable faster change of the product

Tools can help:

textual/graphical analysis tools don't really help (not usable)
what does work: DSM (Dependency structure matrix).
The DSM tool in IntelliJ IDEA looked impressive : scales well, looks good

How to organize DM:

-> Define the rules and make sure everybody sticks with them !

What can you do about them once you know you have them:

move code
extract interfaces/superclasses
copy (may be ugly)
pull members up
introduce parameters
replace constructors with factory methods
Service locator design pattern
Use inversion of control
Dependency injection

I have my concerns about these last 2: you still have the dependencies, but instead of having them at compile time (in code) you have them at runtime (eg in xml when using Spring)

Javapolis - SOA JBossESB

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:17:58 GMT

Not a bad talk. this is what I took away from it:

SOA is technology agnostic
SOA is about loose coupling, not about distributed RPC
SOA infrastructure should support/encourage SOA principles
The ESB glues other technology together, allowing an incremental approach to SOA. Don't try to do a big bang!

It was a first view of JBossESB for me.

Apparently it's a combination of several tools (not uncommon with ESB's): Brools, JBoosWS, JBossTS, JBossMessaging en JBPM

It's nice that it can run in the JBoss appserver, but also in other appservers.

All in all, my impression (not based on detailed research) was that the product is not very mature yet. Illustrating this:

failover/clustering technology is still under construction
whole modules are scheduled to be rewritten/drastically improved next year.

Compared to another ESB that I know a bit better (Sonic ESB), this product seems to be not of the same standard (yet)

Javapolis: Evolving agile

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:35:50 GMT

Presentation by Scott Ambler

I've been interested in/using agile techniques for several years now, so it was fun to hear somebody with an open view commenting on the current state of things. This is what I took away:

Agile seems to be getting mainstream.
Co-location improves chances of a succesfull project, and offshoring decreases those chances. This probably doesn't mean you shouldn't offshore, but that there's work to be done.
Agile allows to change what determines 'success': it doesn't have to be "on time - on budget', but could be eg best quality - best ROI - etc. You should ask your stakeholders this question before you start
Agile doesn't really say anything about the lifecycle outside the development part, but you have to do these things! (setting up the project, deploying, migrating, running production, etc). We should think about this!
Scaling Test driven dev: only does the details, but not the global picture. What about modeling, business tests, usability tests, integration...?
What about agile documentation?
How to handle the data in agile? How to apply the agile techniques to the database ! www.agiledata.org. He really has a point here: developers should know what a db can do and use those features when applicable!
lean development governance - www.ibm.com/developerworks. Enable motivation of people by making things simple. There's many more on the site - boy, this guy knows what he's talking about....
"the site might give you some ammo to steer things in the right direction' I want to have that document and forward it to my boss ;-)

Javapolis: location based services

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:40:53 GMT

This one took a bad start : It took 20 minutes before the first speaker finished to get past the blabla explaining what his company is doing.

The second part about 'location technologies' was a quite interesting. Some stuff to remember:

If you want to get a location inside a building, GPS doesn't cut it. You can use info from the mobile phone network to get a location based on the network cells.
JSR-179 : can be implemented for both mechanisms
Microsoft has a slightly deviating mechanism in Windows Mobile
OMA: location deterministic services standars
OGC provides API's to use GIS geospatial web services (over XML/HTTP) - map rendering, geocoding, routing, POI searching for usage by developers
AutoDesk has an open platform that implements these api's
JRS-293: not finished yet, will provide a standard API

Pricing of the Autodesk services/Navteq data: free for dev/demo purposes!

Javapolis: GWT

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:30:33 GMT

From the 'beginners' talk on GWT (Google web toolkit) I remembered following:

GWT compiles Java into javascript
It features built in API's to access the DOM, the browser history, etc
Speed was clearly a design priority
Support for internationalization/CSS
Support for most mainstream browsers: IE, Safari, Opera, Mozilla

The demos were a bit unclear. I guess I'll have to play with it a little to figure out if it's any good.

Javapolis: SOAPUI

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:30:08 GMT

The presentation on SOAPUI was a showcase of the main features of SOAPUI 2.0 Pro:

Inspect/invoke features (the table view looks handy to see data in a response in a tabular format)
Functional test scripts, incl data definition, asserts (technical and content)
Coverage overview to provide reports about how well your tests cover the SOAP contract
Mock services: allow you to quickly generate stubs for the real services
Refactoring support: to be able to update your test whenever the service contract is updated
Scripting support with Groovy
Load testing: basically by running the functional tests with a simulated amount of users
The test tools can be integrated with maven/ant or via the command line into a continuous integration environment.

All in all not a bad presentation: many of these features could be very helpfull when building web services (even when built on another platform e.g. .Net)

Javapolis 12/12

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:01:55 GMT

After several attendances of Microsoft's TechEd fair, this year it's time for something different: Javapolis. As I've been involved in a Java project in the last year, it was about time to have a look "on the other side".

First up today was the keynote speech.

Mr. James Gosling, who appears to be a famous dude in the Java world, informed us about the current state of the Java world. All in all, I didn't find it too interesting: too much lists of stuff and too little "why".
Nevermind, it's possible I just don't know enough of Java alphabet to fully appreciate this talk.

By the way: don't believe his stats about the speed of c#. When going to a Microsoft seminar, the stats prove something quite the opposite !

Next up: SOAP UI.

Full text search for Hibernate

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:37:03 GMT

I haven't been doing a lot of development myself lately, but this looked interesting nevertheless:http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/FullTextSearchForHibernateGoesFinal

Windows Workflow Foundation introduction

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:45:03 GMT

While preparing a presentation to introduce WF to our developers, I ran into the following document:

http://www.theserverside.net/tt/articles/showarticle.tss?id=ManageAppProcesses

Good stuff, although the example code didn't compile. That was fixed easily though, and it's a good first example to demonstrate in a presentation ;-)

Free XP virtual machine image for IE6 web development

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:27:38 GMT

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=36332

Google - taking over the desktop

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:35:42 GMT

Today I added my Google docs (http://docs.google.com) to my google startpage. This new feature of Google docs allows me to access my most used documents straight from my startpage.

So now I have on my startpage:

my email
my documents
a calender

Conclusion: I've got a second desktop on my PC. This time in my browser!

Transact-SQL Error handling with TRY/CATCH

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:10:36 GMT

Since SQL2005, you can use the Try/Catch mechanism for handling errors in you Transact-SQL code. This essential feature has somehow managed to avoid my attention in the past year, so I was very happy that my colleague Jurgen pointed this out to me.

Here are a few links with the detailed info:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179296.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms175976.aspx
http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid87_gci1180620,00.html

Windows Powershell

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:35:49 GMT

Somehow I seem to have missed this, but there's a new shell for windows coming our way: Powershell!

I'd love to see my JAVA colleagues compare this to the shells that are available on Linux...

You can find more info here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx

TechEd Day 4: WF usage scenario's

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:08:20 GMT

When/why use WF (Windows Workflow foundation).
Some possible cases I've encountered in last year:

Complaints management (a typical workflow process, I admit)
User/customer customized Workflow (great for sales presentations !)
Customization of UI (page navigation)
Exception management: how to handle an unusual situation your system. I'm going to propose using this for exceptions that occur in the interfacing between our new developments and the (ERP) systems we communicate with.
Article creation/phase out

As you see, there are many more possible uses than the classical 'Approval' process.
Probably Microsoft did the right thing incorporating workflow in the .Net framework : it's everywhere!

TechEd Day 4 - Session 1: CAB & SCSF

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:44:13 GMT

First up today, "Designing and Developing Smart Clients based on Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory".

I've already played around a bit with CAB, and this talk confirmed what I already knew: this is not technology for small projects. I really like the design of the thing, but unless you have right team, it will give you more headaches than solutions (it's just too smart).

So basically, I'd only use it for bigger projects (10+ developers) - the infrastructure is too extended for smaller apps. And of course, don't overengineer: only use CAB when the application needs to be composite (extensible, configurable).

The Smart Client Factory adds productivity & quality by providing guidance, but this doesn't really change the context.

TechEd Day 3 - Part 2

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:37:03 GMT

It turns out I missed the session on debugging ASP.NET Ajax because the room was full. As an alternative I went to see the last of a 6 part session on connected systems.
The topic was : The future of connected systems (@Microsoft anyway)

Although a lot of it was spiced up with 'might', 'perhaps', 'should', etc there may be a few ideas worth mentioning:

The RFID framework that will be part of BizTalk 2006 R2
Transacted filesystem and registry in Longhorn (handy for installations, etc)

My next to last session of the day featured David Chappel comparing .Net and J2EE in the coming years. Considering the fact that recently I've been involved in several Java projects this subject particularly appealed to me.
I wasn't completely satisfied with the content of the presentation though. The comparison focused mainly on .NET 3.0 (WF, WCF) compared to SCA (which are just unreleased specs for the moment).
David believes that J2EE 5 as published by Sun, isn't going to make it. I'd love to take this up with some of are Java afficionados in the company, as I don't have the background knowledge to agree/disagree with this statement.
I do think he heavily underestimates the force of opensource software (in the Java world). It's a bit of a pity that he left this part of the world out of the comparison.

The final session of the day concerned unit testing: a bit of a disappointment. I didn't learn much new tricks I didn't know about yet (if any). But then again, perhaps that just confirms I already know what unit testing is (mostly) about.

Photo Album: Geboorte Katrijn

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:33:31 GMT

Geboorte Katrijn

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Photo Album: Liesbeth 6 maand

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:50:26 GMT

Liesbeth 6 maand

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Photo Album: Liesbeth 4 maand en gedoopt

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:16:33 GMT

Liesbeth 4 maand en gedoopt

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Photo Album: Liesbeth's 2e maand

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:17:22 GMT

Liesbeth's 2e maand

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Photo Album: Geboorte Liesbeth

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 11:57:05 GMT

Geboorte Liesbeth

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Photo Album: Marriage

Tue, 24 May 2005 06:24:32 GMT

Marriage

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Blog list: Blog list

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:47:59 GMT

Book List: Book List

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:29:25 GMT

Donis Marshall: Visual C# 2005: The Language
Good reference concerning new features in C# 2005, but less appropriate for beginners.