Turning on a sixpence - No excuses: Concept To Cash Every Week. Just saw this on InfoQ and it blew my mind. This is what I'm talking about when I mean that details matter and that there has to be a better way to deliver value to a customer. Have got to try the Pomodoro technique on my current project to see if it can improve pairing between developers (er, mostly between me and whomever is unlucky to be pairing with me)....
Writing unit tests for classes that operate on files has always been a little weird. Every developer & their dog has their own way of either abstracting themselves from the file system (ala Spring’s Resource types) or by creating some sort of a file system sandbox that is cleaned up at the end of the test - after all we don’t want to litter temp directories with files that will never be used again, do we?...
I've uploaded to GitHub (http://github.com/tomcz/pico-webapp/tree/master) the web application that I use to teach people about dependency injection (using PicoContainer), post-redirect-get browser interaction, RESTful URIs and strict template rendering (using StringTemplate). This application does not use Spring Framework by deliberate design - as soon as I introduce it to any teaching session I spend more time talking about Spring then talking about what I am usually there to accomplish. As usual, any comments, bugs or enhancement requests are very welcome....
I hate maven with an almost homicidal passion. It only works if your brain works like maven, for the rest of us in the real world its just a pain in the arse. But it does have one good idea - it provides a simple, out of the box way of creating a project structure (but so do rails, django and grails in a much better way). I've decided to publish my own example web application project/structure on GitHub - http://github....
HTTP verbs are not used to determine the route to a view method by deliberate design in Django. Sometimes I find it useful to be able to specify different methods for the same url pattern - one per HTTP verb. The Django book contains an interesting example of how this can be done using the django.conf.urls.defaults.url method to separate POST from GET processing. I’ve extended the example to provide handling to cover the standard HTTP verbs....
How can I store my list of passwords on an iPhone or iPod Touch? This is the question that I attempted to solve as I geeked out over the weekend. I know I can buy an application like 1Password and sync between a laptop and an iPhone but I already have a pretty good password manager (since I wrote the one I use years ago). After a bit of research I came up with a few possibilities: create an iPhone app to sync with my password manager, create an encrypted bookmarklet (this is the way 1Password used to export passwords to the iPhone), or create a html page which will alter its own structure after I enter a password....
If you believe that Software Craftsmanship is important then its time to nail your pants to the mast. Sign the manifesto....
A year ago I wrote a post about about writing a program to performance test web applications (see Thumper). Since I finished off the original set of python scripts, I haven't really had the time to continue developing this application further in either Java, Ruby or any other language. Fortunately there is someone out there who thinks that threaded performance tools have an inherent flaw. Enter JCrawler ... go out and try it....
I am currently working with a team that uses subversion for day-to-day development but needs to use cvs due to a corporate policy. So I suggested that we create a build on our continuous integration server to automatically merge changes from a subversion working copy to a cvs checkout. I had a quick look on the internet for something to do the merging and managed to find and play with a perl script to merge from svn to cvs, and with a java application that was supposed to do the same....
Love these videos on SQL database performance best practices - part 1, part 2 and part 3....