Loosely Coupled

Things have been really hairy at work lately. I haven't had much chance to write. Here's what I've been up to. JCAPS One of my goals this year has been to make JCAPS more usable. A tall order indeed. I'm going to hit on the details of some of these items in later posts, but here's a bullet list of some of the issues I've been working through. My organization uses some non-standard x12 EDI messages. The way to get JCAPS to process these messages is by creating an OTD from an SEF file. I had no luck finding someone to help me create such a file and there are surprisingly few Java libraries that support these x12 messages. I wound up writing my own parser. It works pretty well and can be extended to support other message types. I've developed an approach that provides an automated way to test my JCAPS collaborations using JUnit. I'll describe this approach in future posts. The company I'm working for has a change control process th...

I downloaded some of the Air samples and the first thing it wants to do is install the application on my machine. I expected an Air application would be fairly lightweight (like a client-side Java application), and as long as I had the Air runtime on my machine the application would run - no administrative rights required. Not so. And too bad. Installing Eclipse is simply an unzip. There is no need to add entries to the registry or provide administrative rights. It's simple and that's the way it should be. I wonder why Adobe didn't follow this model?

I started this podcast project so I could learn some things I haven't had time to experiment with in my "real" job. Things like playing more with Ruby, trying out Behavior-Driven Development, and experimenting with Agile practices (plus I really wanted a better podcatcher program and I needed something to do over the winter). While I haven't produced much real code yet, I've created some simple prototypes and wanted to comment on some things I've been looking at. Reading an RSS feed My first prototype was a very simple Ruby program to read and parse an RSS feed. I had found some code here using the standard Ruby RSS Parser so that's where I started. At first I thought it was broken, but after about a minute and a half it returned. This wasn't going to cut it, so I started to look for alternatives and quickly found the feed-normalizer gem. Some quick coding and the total time to access the RSS feed was reduced to about 10 seconds. Not bad...

I've made embarrassingly little progress on my podcatcher so far. My plan was to entirely read Lean Software Development before getting started, but it's taking me a while to get through the book - in a good way. I seldom read more than 5 or 7 pages before I find myself reflecting on current or past projects. This knowledge could've saved me time on previous work by making the most important & well defined features a priority - delaying discussion and decisions on the "nice to have" features until later. Some of these ideas I've stumbled on by accident or heard about from others, but it's great to have them validated and expanded into this set of lean thinking tools. I'm sure this is a book I'll reread many times in the coming years. Anyway, I want to revisit my requirements list for the podcatcher, prioritize the features, and define the features for my first sprint. Here are the requirements for the podcatcher from a previous post, ro...

One of the goals I set for myself in the New Year was to gain experience with Lean/Agile software development. My test project will be a fairly simple podcatcher to manage the podcasts I listen to. Here is the initial set of requirements for this tool... Subscribe to podcasts (obviously). All of my current subscriptions are RSS , so I'll focus on this first. Once I have something functioning, I'll add support for Atom feeds. It will also support importing OPML files. This is the format exported by iTunes. I currently use iTunes to manage my podcasts and the default is to retrieve the latest podcasts on startup. This is OK if you generally listen to all episodes you subscribe to, but for some subscriptions, I like to pick and choose the shows I want to listen to. I know this behavior is generally configurable in iTunes, but I'm not sure this can be individually configured per show. The default behavior for my podcatcher will be to download only show description...

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 sep...