Another post today on the maven users list about an exception hidden inside stack traces inside of others etc.

That the exception was allowed to bubble out so far is a testament to the complete evilness of throws Exception. I

I saw an interesting article on The Register today. Maybe the litigation will die a natural death.

See this technote for details on diagnosing problems like An error has occurred.

(update: Apparently the TechNotes on the WSAD support page are the best place to look for issues, along with the README file of the released product.)

In the last month, as part of automating our build process, I've raised 4 bug reports on the ejbdeploy tool of WebSphere Application Server, Advanced Edition (For the interested, PMRs 49750, 55301, 55386, 55930).

49750 - opened 2004-02-19 and closed on 2004-03-05 ('corrupt' metadata files)
55301 - opened 2004-03-05 and closed on 2004-03-24 ('cmp ejb cant have a cmp field called 'value')
55386 - opened 2004-03-08 and closed on 2004-03-10 ('corrupt' metadata files)
55930 - opened 2004-03-23 (ejbdeploy doesn't include RMIC code if an ejbModule directory exists)

All of these are problems with the tool where it either fails to run to completion successfully, or runs successfully but doesn't create a correct jar.

The code can be successfully exported out of IBM WebSphere Studio AD in each case, so there's an inconsistency between the development and deployment environments.

The response from IBM on 55301 when I enquired if these would be fixed in an upcoming release was

Potential fixes for problems in WSAS 4.0.x would be evaluated and several factors will help us to make decision whether or not fixes for it would be
developed such as its prevalence, workaround availability, and if the newer releases already have fixes for them. For this particular problem we would not work on a fix for WSAS 4.0.

The end result? I've wasted days on these issues with a decision from IBM that these issues will be not be fixed in a later release.

The decision to not fix these issues mean that any other poor sucker on WAS 4.0.x is going to have to go through the same pain as I did.

It also doesn't give me a good feeling about other bugs we may pick up on the way, if they're already known about (by IBM) and I then spend days trying to work around them.

It would be much better if the list of issues and workarounds were documented so that we could easily find them, and in the case of calling a CMP field 'value' steer clear of them altogether.

Surely this would make the support team's job easier too.

Elliot Rusty Harold slams the Colorado Software Summit because they allegedly ' have a reputation on being stingy when it comes to paying speakers'.

As someone who's been paid for speaking there, I found it very rewarding. Not only did I get paid for talking about technical topics, but I also got to attend a conference where I learnt a lot from people who know what they're talking about.

And I fly from Australia to go there.

I needed to set up a cheap DNS server on windows today to service intranet requests.

Man, there are some real shockers out there. Finding a binary download for bind for windows is a joke.

I ended up using posadis

Good docs, easy to get going. A breeze!

If you're looking for a place to bash Maven, go join them at
The Server Side.

We all love to bitch and moan don't we?

I've been working with Jira today trying to organise maven issues into a roadmap.

It's been tedious and time consuming as there's no easy way to 'batch edit' a whole swag of issues and mark them for a given release.

This single feature would make Jira a load easier to use...

Someone mentioned that Jira has a RoadMap feature that shows what versions the user thinks things should be fixed in.

The report that's there for Maven doesn't currently reflect what we have planned :-)

Just going through the thrills of getting a consistent, accessible set of documentation for a set of projects we're working on at the moment and it's been thrilling to see how creative people can be with Word (tm etc).

There really needs to be an easier way to get documentation done than the free for all word processing style.

I'd be so happy if Maven's xdoc or html2xdoc could do it easily for me. Maybe I should seriously look into the 'plain' html side of things.

What do you do for project doco?