Loosely Coupled

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...

My work had focused on web application development for so long, I had to pause when I was asked to develop a desktop application. I had little idea where to begin. I started searching for application frameworks that met the following criteria: I could write the application in Java The resulting application would be cross platform with a native look and feel. The framework was mature, easy to use, and widely adopted. I quickly narrowed the field down to 2 choices Eclipse RCP and NetBeans . Both met the criteria I was looking for. Either would have been a reasonable choice, and I chose Eclipse. First of all, I was comfortable developing in the Eclipse IDE. Second, Eclipse had a larger installed base and an avid community following, with over 1200 commercial plugins available. I was happy with my choice. Since I had been coding with JSF for some time, the leap to an event based system was not that large. The Forms plugin allowed me to easily create an attractive interfac...