2008 Resolutions

Making resolutions is tradition on New Year's Eve.... evaluate areas you'd like to improve (or new skills you'd like to acquire), and set goals to improve in those areas. Here are two work-related resolutions I'm going to focus on entering 2008.

Make JCAPS Usable

If you've been following my posts, you're aware that I've been frustrated with Sun's JCAPS product. The tool is simply not ready for prime time and it's hurting my productivity. In addition to the problems I've already outlined, developing in JCAPS' eDesigner makes me "feel dirty". You need to go outside to tool to create modules of shared code (jars). This limitation makes it hard to implement classes that follow even the simplest design patterns or integrate with third party frameworks, like Spring. I feel myself falling into bad coding habits.

I'd like to find a compromise. What I'd like to do, is move my code out of the JCAPS JCD and into a separate web service that runs directly on the shared JCAPS application server. The JCD would call this module to do all the heavy lifting, then return to the JCAPS JCD. JCAPS would be used primarily for mapping TCP, MQ, or FTP requests to the web service.

Practice Agile Development

The past year introduced me to many new technologies and ways of thinking. Two I've been most excited about are Ruby and Agile Software Development. Since I'm currently not using either in my "real work", I'm going to use these tools to create a relatively simple and lightweight podcatcher. I'll outline my requirements, approach, and progress in the weeks to follow. I'll be using the Poppendieck's Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit as my guide to an Agile approach and the Rspec framework to define and test the behavior of the application. It should be fun and give me some great experience!

Happy New Year!

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