Java

Some Thoughts in General

I have been kind of lazy writing this blog lately. After keeping it up pretty okay during summer, the pace has now slowed to a minimum. I think it can be partly explained by the fact that I have been using Twitter for some of the stuff I used to write here and that my new HTC Hero Android phone made tweeting more convenient than ever…

My intentions are to use this blog for subjects that cannot easily be said in 140 characters and twitter for the short, more daily stuff…

Well, so what has happened since last time. Since I have solely been using NetBeans the last couple of years for Java development, I decided to give Eclipse Gallileo a chance. It took me an hour of frustration to conclude that it still sucks for Maven based projects. Why it should be so hard is beyond my comprehension! In NetBeans, you just choose open project, selects the pom.xml file and everything is fine. Dependencies are resolved as they are defined in Maven, no stupid .classpath, .project and .settings rubbish created that makes Eclipse to totally hick-up if a dependency is changed.

Apart from my unsuccessful flirt with Eclipse, I have continued development of KanbanFX. It has been converted to a maven project and besided the information on Kenai, I have created a page for it here where you can try it out. Kanban is increasing in popularity, @henrikkniberg had 300 people on his Kanban vs Scrum session at JAOO this week.

KanbanFX

I really like the simplicity in Kanban. It should be enough for most small projects, and especially AO teams. Even though all you really need as tool support is a white-board and a couple of post-it notes, larger organizations often require you to hook into existing tools for requirement management, issue tracking etc.

I have not been able to find any tool fulfilling this need, so I decided to create on myself. Thereby, KanbanFX was born!

KanbanFX is a JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board. Source code and a very limited demo version is available on Kenai:

http://kenai.com/projects/kanbanfx.

Please join the project if you want to contribute. I am pretty sure that I will need help with at least the graphical elements when we get to that…

NetBeans 6.8

NetBeans 6.8 M1 is available for download. According to the roadmap, the final release is scheduled to be released Autumn 2009.

Usually, I am pretty fast installing the absolute latest version, but this time I think I will wait at least form the M2. It has not been that long since the 6.7 and 6.7.1 releases and I am pretty satisfied. The only thing annoying me is Bug 161416. Hopefully it will be fixed in 6.8…

JUnit Max did not survive

I wrote about JUnit Max in a previous post. In that post I commented that I was not sure if people were willing to pay $2/month for it. It turned out that I was right. Kent Beck just announced that he has deadpooled JUnit Max.

It is kind of sad that it seems impossible to sell such a great product, but I guess we have got used to that all tools are free. If I look at myself, I would rather have to pay one-time license fee for it than a $2/month subscription. Too much hassle filing expense reports every month for such a small amount.

That said, I actually never tried it since it was not available for NetBeans. Please remember us NetBeans folks next time! Maybe we are easier to get money from than the Eclipse guys… 😉

cuke4duke

I came over a cool tool called Cucumber the other day. Cucumber is a tool for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) that focuses on the communication between stakeholders and developers. It looks kind of cool, it works with Java and is written by Aslak Hellsøy, a former colleague of mine. So I gave it a try.

First I just ran the examples in plain ruby, then I tried it with JRuby (did not get the colors to work there…) and lastly I found cuke4duke which basically is Cucumber packaged in a Jar file. It has  a maven plugin and annotation support for writing the steps defined in the features. I am definitely going to lab some more with it and see if I can apply it on a project. Me like 🙂

Aslak will present Cucumber at Öredev in November.

Was 2009 the last JavaOne

Usually, there has always been a sign on the top of the escalator in Moscone North with the dates of the next JavaOne Conference. This year, the sign said “Thanks for joining us this year.”.

Was this the last JavaOne

I am absolutely sure there will be some sort of large java conference, but it will be up to Oracle to decide on the format and if they want to continue running the JavaOne conferences. I surely hope they will! This was my tenth JavaOne and I hope to be adding to that number…

JavaOne 2009 Wrap-up

The 2009 JavaOne Conference is over. As always, Sun manages to pull offf a great show even if it was not very much new stuff presented. The focus was on JavaFX and The Cloud and I think these are things we are going to be hearing a lot of in the future as well.

The JavaFX platform is getting more mature and tools supporting it are popping up everywhere. It has never been easier to create great user interfaces. Let’s just hope we developers let the designers do their job and focus on the logic behind…

The cloud is hotter than ever and there are some great products out there. Take a look at the Sun Cloud Computing web site for an overview.

JavaOne 2009 – Day 4

The keynote on the last day of JavaOne is all about toys. James Gosling presented a wide array of projects and products that have used the power of java in all sorts of ways.

I spent the rest of the day attending technical sessions. The most interesting one was an introduction to Google Guice. I am definitely going to take a closer look at that. Guice will probably form the foundation for JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java, so it should not be too much of an effort migrating over to this standard from Guice in the future if that is desirable.