June 2003 Archives

Characteristics of the Agile SCM Solution by Appleton, Berczuk and Konieczka (should we call them the gang of three?) continues the analysis of SCM within an agile environment.

Around the turn of the Century, (year 2k), we began seeing software projects that were attempting to try a new development approach called Agile. Most were implementing Extreme Programming, and their reasons were to reduce cost, improve software quality, better manage project risk, and to offer the business quicker functionality in the form of frequent releases incorporating smaller sets of change.

Scott Sanders has issued a humourous and informative press release entitled Jaxen executes (not so) hostile takeover of SaxPath. The Jaxen project is much indebted to Scott for his recent activity trying to get Jaxen to a 1.1 release.

Today, the surprising hostile takover by Jaxen of SaxPath was announced and executed. The code formerly in the org.saxpath.* namespace will now live in the org.jaxen.saxpath.* namespace. Jaxen 1.1 beta2 will soon be released to include this functionality. If you are currently using SaxPath for something else and want to upgrade, you just need to change the package name, as everything else is the same.

Robin: Remote XUL Desktop seems like a really cool hack.

Randall Knutson has released the first prototype for a remote desktop using XUL. Point your Mozilla XUL browser (e.g. Firebird) @ http://robin.sourceforge.net to call up a fresh desktop with a startup menu and play XulMine, Mozteroids, Pagman, Snake, Xultris, MozInvaders and more. What is Robin? Here's the "official" blurb from the sourceforge project site: Remote Operating System Build in Netscape (Robin) is a window manager using DHTML, Javascript, XUL and some crazy hacks.

You may now notice that I'm participating in Google AdSense. Anything for a buck, eh?

Google AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality. AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages --- and Google pays you.

BookCrossing seems like a cool idea. It's sort of a catch-and-release program for books. Even seems pretty active in my backwards part of Georgia.

You've come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers' community. What is BookCrossing, you ask? It's a global book club that crosses time and space. It's a reading group that knows no geographical boundaries. Do you like free books? How about free book clubs?. Well, the books our members leave in the wild are free... but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing. Book trading has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind.

On a recent project, I've decided to take a lateral step from test-driven development towards documentation-driven test-driven development, or d²td².

Basically, I write the docs so I have the requirements, which allows me to write the tests, which then help write the code itself. Things that make sense while writing the tests or code start looking goofy sometimes when you have to describe them in prose documentation. So, if you feel like an ass trying to describe how to use a component, that's a code smell that means you probably need to refactor.

So, I'd like to solicit experiences from others if you've used this type of development before. Most everywhere I've worked, either commercially or on open-source, documentation was an afterthought. Drop a comment or email bob@werken.com.

Antlraux has been announced by Enrique Jos� Garc�a Cota. Seems to be quite the useful collection of accessories for antlr.

draft-harold-jmxp-00.txt describes a remote protocol for Java Management Extension over BEEP channels.

JMXP is an application protocol that provides access to information about a JMX Agent's MBeanServer and the MBeans registered with that MBeanServer. JMXP also provides a mechanism for transmitting the Notifications emitted by a JMX Agent's MBeans to remote clients.

Last night, had the extreme pleasure of meeting and chatting with Peter Royal and his wife. Peter's one of the apache-avalon hackers and has recently taken the lead on blissed. We originally crossed paths when he adapted jaxen to his application's non-XML object-model.

Anyhow, a night shooting the breeze on a variety of topics with a guru was certainly more edifying and enjoyable than spending time at the JUG. I also, once again, learned why I like to stay out of downtown Atlanta. Crowds, one-way streets, turn-only lanes. Yum.

Just my bi-annual reminder that CiteSeer rocks. I'm currently studying up on consensus algorithms and protocols for my current gig. I'll probably summarize in a few days with links to various papers I've found to be useful. It's days like these that I wake up and I'm heartily glad I'm not working on yet-another web-based CRUD system.

CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library that aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature, and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness.

Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeer provides algorithms, techniques, and software that can be used in other digital libraries. CiteSeer indexes Postscript and PDF research articles on the Web, and provides the following features.

InfoWorld is reporting (as are some ex-cow-orkers of mine) that Baan will be sold to a US investor group.

I used to work for CAPS Logistics, which was owned by Baan, which was owned by Invensys. CAPS was my only foray into large corporate empires where the org chart is so large it stops making any sort of sense.

A U.S. investment group has agreed to buy Baan a Dutch business software company, from Invensys and merge the unit with another software company in a move to broaden the product and customer base of the new venture.

Invensys has sold Baan to the U.S. private investment group, consisting of Cerberus Capital Management and General Atlantic Partners, for $135 million, the London company said Tuesday in a statement.

The deal comes several weeks after Invensys said it wanted to put Baan up for sale.

The Carbon Component Framework seems to be somewhat a mix between Avalon and JBoss.

Carbon is a light-weight component model that serves as the foundation for a services based architecture. Carbon has the following objectives:

* Create a more flexible architecture via a decoupled, metadata-centric system
* Reduce complexity by providing access to services as small replaceable components
* Encourage the separation of concerns, resulting in code assets that are easier to maintain, adapt and reuse in a complex and dynamic operating environment

The JBoss Group forks and takes some developers with it.

8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects".

The JBoss Group has been forked. And I'm here in San Francisco to tell you about it.

Haystack calls itself the universal information client.

Our research seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling place for users to interact with their information. Haystack looks into the use of artificial intelligence techniques for analyzing unstructured information and providing more accurate retrieval. We also deal with the modeling, management, and display of user data in more natural and useful ways.

AI Depot seems to be a pretty robust collection of stuff about, well, artificial intelligence.

If you're interested in AI, you've come to the right place! The Artificial Intelligence Depot is a site purely dedicated to AI bringing you daily news and regular features, providing you with community interaction as well as an ever growing database of knowledge resources. Whether you are a complete beginner, experienced programmer, computer games hacker or academic researcher, you will find something to suit your needs here.