Most interesting links of January

I’m moving to Norway and have thus little time for reading but still I’ve stumbled upon something really interesting.

• Bob C. Martin (the Clean Code guy): The Transformation Priority Premise – with TDD the code goes through a series of transformations (similar to refactorings but they change the behaviour) that “move the code from a specific form to a more generic form” (from “return 0;” to “return myFunc();”). “It also appears that these transformations have a preferred order based on complexity.” (nothing => simple code with null; null => constant; …). “It is the premise of this blog that if tests are chosen and implemented in this preferred order of transformations, then TDD impasses will be reduced or eliminated.“
  Also the article explains nicely why the practice of writting simple, wrong (i.e. too specific) code is good. 
  • Uncle Bob’s TDD excercises (katas): Prime Factors kata (as .ppt), The Bowling Game Kata (as .ppt)
• 10 Tips for Proper Application Logging – should be rather called 10 best practices for (enterprise Java) logging
• Kanban Development Oversimplified – finally an explanation of Kanban for SW development I could understand, also thanks to the comparison with other agile approaches

Goodby IBA, welcome, Norway and Iterate!

I’ve spent great and inspiring years in IBA CZ while working also with IBM Austria and I’m very thankful to all the nice people there, but it’s time to move on. I always wanted to spend couple of years abroad to broaden my views and finally our choice has fallen on Norway. So on 2/1 I’m starting to work in Oslo with Iterate AS (en), which is a very attractive company, among others thanks to their true agile development involvement. You may not hear from me for a while as I’ll be busy accommodating to the new environment and learning Norwegian but be sure that earlier or later I’ll be back with more interesting blogs.

Ha det bra!

Using Ivy with pom.xml

It’s possible to use Apache Ivy with dependencies defined in pom.xml instead of its native ivy.xml but you will need to apply some workarounds and you’re loosing access to some functionality that you might (or might not) need.

The problem is that in a POM you can provide only a subset of settings available in ivy.xml and that Ivy understands only a subset of POM’s syntax.

EMF tips: Accessing model meta data, serializing into element/attribute

Two tips for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) 2.2.1:

1. Accessing model’s meta model – accessing EClass/attribute by name – so that you can set an attribute when you only know its name and haven’t its EAttribute
2. How to force EMF to serialize an object as an XML element instead of an XML attribute

Creating dynamic EMF model from XSDs and loading its instances from XML as SDOs

This post describes how to read a dynamic EMF model from a set of XML schema files (XSDs) and how to use that model to transform XMLs to SDO DataObjects or EMF EObjects, all this in a stand-alone environment.

EMF: Reading a model from XML – how to correctly declare its namespace – variants

When you use the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) to read a model instance from an XML file, such as a webservice call message payload, it’s essential for EMF to be able to match the root XML element with the model’s “ePackage” that should be used for (re)constructing the model instance from the XML and this is done by matching the root element’s and the ePackage’s namespaces (as in XSD). So it’s very important to have proper configuration of EMF and proper content of the XML. Since there ale multiple variations of both, there are more ways to get it wrong than right. To learn what I’ve discovered regarding the valid combinations suitable at different situations, read on.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 43 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 86 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 895kb.

The busiest day of the year was December 13th with 321 views. The most popular post that day was Joshua Bloch: Performance Anxiety – on Performance Unpredictability, Its Measurement and Benchmarking.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were java.dzone.com, reddit.com, dzone.com, jroller.com, and google.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for clonezilla samba restore speed, vmware player boot from usb, @conversationscoped component in conversation scope, and eclipse create seam portlet enter project name.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Joshua Bloch: Performance Anxiety – on Performance Unpredictability, Its Measurement and Benchmarking December 2010
2 comments

2

Webservice testing with JMeter: Passing data from a response to another request June 2010
4 comments

3

Book: Real World Java EE Patterns – Rethinking Best Practices (review & digest) May 2010
1 comment

4

Booting from a USB stick in VMware Player June 2010
2 comments

5

Seam Tutorial 1.2: RichFaces and paged table (datascroller) March 2009
4 comments