JLibrary is large without being too large. It has example of most of the things you'd like to do with the RCP without the weight of the Eclipse IDE. If you're interested in using the RCP then I'd suggest checking it out.]]> Java kevin 2005-01-17T11:07:59+10:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/kevin/archives/000879_back_alive_and_well.html Forgive me father it's been along time since I last blogged.

Well the last six months have seen alot of changes for me. Most significant was my partners decision to leave me, she just didn't love me any more. Life goes on.

I've now been with Sensis for almost twelve months. The move to corporate Australia has been an interesting experience. New ways of doing things. At times things seem to move very slowly and there is a lot more bureaucracy than I'm used to. At other times things need to be done with little or no time. All in all though the experience has been a good one. I'm working with a very talented group of individuals that work exceptionally well as a team, what more could you ask for.

It ran fine, and the blucurve theme made KDE and Gnome apps look the same, if not good. Updates where horrible, even using yum. Installing RPMs directly made dependencies a complete pain in the ass. So afer going through the Red Hat Linux to Fedora update and then attempting to switch 2.6 I decided that Fedora was to painful to deal with and a distro switch was in order.

I've been back running Gentoo for a couple of weeks now, it rocks! The distro is really making progress and the ability to combine stable and unstable packages is great. No I just have to figure out why I ever left. I really should have put more effort into staying in the first place :S. But eh, some days I'm just fickle

Evan does mention that someone toasted the MT on the box he is running on and I have to admint that I was that someone. F*&king bsddb libs.

So I looked at adding custom targets to my maven.xml file (effectivley duplicating a lot of the code in the plugins to reorder the dependencies), but it looked like more effort than it was worth so I decided to go back to crawling back to my old friend Ant.

My favorite thing about Maven is its jar loading. Add a dependency to your project and down comes the jar. It's added to your compile classpath and into your war lib dir, no mess, no fuss. I wanted this in Ant.

I grabbed a copy of the latest and greatest source code and built a nice fresh version. 1.6 has some nice new features the one I was really interested in was import . I'd used an early version of this when I was playing with Centipede a year or so ago.

I grabbed the dependency section out of my Maven project.xml file and stuck it into a seperate file (dependencies.xml ).

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <id>concurrent</id>
    <version>1.3.2</version>
    <url>http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/classes/EDU/oswego/cs/dl/util/concurrent/intro.html</url>
    <properties>
      <war.bundle>true</war.bundle>
    </properties>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Then I created an XSLT (dependency-targets.xslt) that created the ant targets to make the project class path and fetch each of the jars I didn't have it in my local jar repository.

All that was left was add the style and import tasks to my build.xml and make my compile target depend on the generated fetch-dependencies target.

<!-- import dependencies targets -->
<style
  basedir="${basedir}"
  out="${work.dir}/dependency-targets.xml"
  in="dependencies.xml"
  style="${src.build}/dependency-targets.xslt">

  <param name="project-name" expression="${ant.project.name}"/>
  <param name="local-repository" expression="${repository.local}"/>
  <param name="remote-repository" expression="${repository.remote}"/>
</style>

<import file="${work.dir}/dependency-targets.xml"/>

45 minutes and it was all good. Now my friend Ant and I can play together and nannys spankings are a distant and best forgotten memory.

So I talked to them about writing a few unit test. Before addressing a bug, write a test. Once it it running (and presumably failing), fix the bug. That way you slowly build up a test suite. Okay yeah, that easy, they said.

Last week I went in to see them again there where a number of new bugs so I asked to take a look at the tests. Not one had been written. I restated that it was going to be an up hill battle trying to stabilise the system if they don't start writing tests. They said that the code was too hard to write test for. So I sat down with them and wrote a test for one of the bugs. Along the way I refactored the underlying code a little to make working with the test system a little easier and fixed the bug. I then refactored the code some more to get rid of some copy and paste. Ran the test, all green, sweet. Oh, that was easy they said.

Today I got a call. Bugs had let bitten them again in areas they'd fixed two days before. Again I asked about the tests. Mine was the only one they had.

Sometimes getting developers to change their ways is more force than logic. Tommorrow I'm taking a hammer in with me :)

For example: "I have a meeting to go to." Becomes "I have a meeting to go to in my pants." Which is far funnier.

This revelation was passed on to me by the best tech writer I know, Mark (who yesterday forgot how to spell "does"). The comic genius behind "in my pants" is one Sean Cummins whom I've never met "in my pants".

The system is written on the .NET platform using visual studio. The project was the first for many of the developers (being straight out of university) and they took a look at the Microsoft tools available and said "hey this makes thing easy" and it did. For a while.

There are plenty of "organic growth" issues in the code base, but what struct me the most was the amount of infrastructure code for persistence, security etc, they'd had to develop. The sort of stuff I'd forgot about a long time ago. I realised that the reason I can be productive when creating a system is that for the majority of time I can just concentrate on the unique aspects of the system, not on the infracstruction.

I've also revamped the look of the blog. It's pretty untested on anything but Mozilla but I'm not doing anything too fancy so Internet Exploder should be able to handle it. Can you tell I don't think much of IE?