Bruce Eckel's tour de force on typing

What an essay! Bruce Eckel writes on typing in Java, Python, C++ and other languages.

Automate everything

A lesson from J2EE development that is widely ignored, especially in corporate environments, is automate everything. In particular, Carlos Perez notes the phenomenal productivity of this approach in Mildly Complex Webapp in 2 Man Months!?.

Pallada: IntelliJ IDEA 4.1 (build 2002)

I just downloaded the latest EAP build from IntelliJ of IDEA 4.1 (build 2002)—4.0.2 is the current stable release—and am quite pleased with it. My subjective impression is that it is rather faster than 4.0 for my most common task: opening classes and files by name (C-n and S-C-n, respectively) and browsing classes from within source (C-Mouse-1). It seems to be about the same with memory usage for a largish project I work on most times. So far, I'm quite pleased and am looking forward to trying out the new JDK 1.5 support features on Wisk.

(See §B.5 of the GNU Emacs Manual for an explanation of notation for key bindings.)

UPDATE: I am having trouble with C-Space not working when there is a declaration of an as yet unimported class. Back to 4.0.2 for a while.

UPDATE: It turns out that C-Space does work, it just doesn't work the same as it used to. You need to now move the mouse over the type needing import, and 4.0.2 is the same. It used to work if the mouse was simply nearby.

Implements broken

Brian McCallister posted a clever idea: mark your borken objects with the Broken interface to support testing for known bugs. When the test fails, you know the bug was unexpectedly fixed:

Where it came up was in a discussion about my practice of writing test cases that are designed to pass if a known-bug which is not going to be fixed yet is allowed to stay in a source tree. The test passes if the bug still exists, fails if the bug has been fixed (so that we know -- this is typically done to document bugs in 3rd party libraries). The benefits of doing this compared to maintaining a seperate src/bugs set of tests which are known to fail wre under discussion (and being determined to be a hack). Instead the suggestion to use a tag to indicate the test is a known and acceptable bug is preferred -- hence implements Broken.

The guantlet

An outstanding challenge from Leo Simons:

The open source community is giving you a choice: either we all work together, and you release a complete JVM under an open source and/or free software license, or we're going to do things on our own. In the latter case the java community will split and the linux desktop community will fragment further as well. There's a big chance microsoft will win as a result. And like before, you'll have only yourself to blame. In the former case, there's a big chance microsoft will lose, open source will win, and you'll reap the profits.

May the powers be listening.

Us thoughtworks assholes with shitty boring jobs

Wowie, zowie! I'm not even sure I like Groovy (I'm a Perl guy myself and Python has a lot of appeal to us Linux hackers), but this time, it's personal:

Whimsy has its place, it's known as perl and other such hacky toys. Leave java to the professionals. If you thoughtworks assholes have shitty boring jobs where you're forced to code in java, don't foist your crap onto the rest of us. Go be perl, ruby, or python monkeys or something suitably hacky that is more egofondlefriendly.

Actually, I find the entire thing rather amusing. The fellow has his point: why is Groovy part of a JSR? Let Groovy be Groovy, not an appendage of Java. That it is built on top of Java is nice and all, but it should be its own thing as much as Perl, Python or Ruby are. I really like that Groovy shares a byte-code interpreter and environment with Java, but that isn't enough to make Groovy a JSR. If that were enough, why not beautiful, elegant Jython? Now that has some groove in it.

Geek envy

I too am a very creative individual; I am a very competent programmer; I too need project management skills. Where's my software architect job? :-)

The success of crap

Charles Miller writes about good projects failing and bad ones succeeding. I also learned what IKIFNI means. I think he left a word out.

Wither wisk?

Wisk is my current SoureForge project. Wisk is The Web Starter Kit, a straight-forward base project for staring Java web projects with a current toolset: Maven, Hibernate, XDoclet and their ilk. However, it also has toy examples of designing enterprise web applications based on my projects at ThoughtWorks. I work with a very bright group, and try to absorb from them as much as I can: it's like grad school for real-world programming. I've discovered that I should have read Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture earlier—what a book! (And that's not just bootlicking.) So I'm looking to gear my toy examples in Wisk towards the terminology and practises in PoEAA. Hopefully that will make Wisk more useful.

Already Wisk helps shave Iteration 0 down quite a bit since one needn't setup the build environment from scratch but can start with a working, tested build and immediately begin developing. Qapla'!

Bruce Eckel on 1.5 suckiness

Bruce Eckel has some tart but accurate complaints against 1.5.

A great discussion on hiring great open-source developers

TheServerSide.COM has a great ongoing discussion on how to hire great open-source developers. This is exactly the sort of internal discussion we frequently have at my company. We are filled with top-quality staff and take only the toughest assignments; without open-source our company would be dead, or at least missing most its staff.

Value objects

What is the correct design for value objects? I'm not talking EJB, but general user types for any kind of large application which takes external input. Some points I think on:

• In a language like Java, should value objects be the equivalent of typedefs, that is, embody no knowledge?
• If a value object has integrity checks in the constructor, what should it do on bad input?
• In Java, if the value object constructor throws on bad input, should it throw a checked or an unchecked exception?
• When mapping value objects to persistent storage, should the mapping match the underlying native type or should it also reflect input restrictions?

Colleagues and I have been discussing this since I joined my current project, and we settled on the most restrictive options: in Java, throw checked exceptions for bad input and in the persistence mapping use the most restricted storage type with integrity checks when possible. I understand the conservative thinking behind these decisions, but I also see that it leads to greater maintenance costs.

Was this the right thing to do?

All hail YAGNI

Wading into the YAGNI discussion, my current client would be much better served by YAGNI than "plan for the future". Why? Who knows the future at a Fortune 100 business? Buyouts. Changing requirements. New management, sometimes several times during the same year. Changed IT environments. Trying to plan for that is a guarantee that you will discard a large amount of expensive work. It is cheaper and better engineered to refactor and design iteratively than to spend large chunks of the front of your project on planning and heavy design. Worry not about change, but about ever making it to delivery. Did I mention cancelled projects among the risks?

If you are stuck in hostile territory and cannot refactor freely, you are forced to increase risk even further and plan up front as much as possible—you only get one swing at the ball when this happens to you, so you have to aim for the bleachers each time. Of course, this means you strike out far more often than need be, but a client opposed to refactoring gets what's coming to them.

External constructors

A nice trick from Brian Slesinsky: put your factory methods anywhere.

Wedding cake

A great discussion started by Rober Martin on layering in web applications.

LambdaMOO

During the past week I rediscovered my enjoyment of LambdaMOO. Porting to Cygwin was straight-forward, and cygrunsrv makes it a snap to run a MOO on my laptop as a service (I'm using JHCore). I've not programmed an object in ages, but it'll be a relaxing task to take up when I'm back in the hotel needing a break from client code. I'm looking forward to making a duck.

Immortality at a price

A nice article in the current Overload (issue 59, February 2004) on the bogosity of garbage collection in Java. Memory is just one resource; the lack of destructors in Java is a large hurdle to managing other resources such as network and database connections. And finalize() is just plain broken. All is not lost, but there's more work to managing resources (including memory) than just "code and forget", the most common practice I see in Java.

The next project

The next J2EE which comes around, I am definitely looking hard into an alternative to Struts and JSPs. Reasonable alternatives (to read the accounts of others) seem to exist such as WebWork and Velocity. Getting away from compiling JSPs and the difficulty of maintaining a Struts/Tiles configuration (althought @xdoclet does help) will be worth the transistion costs.

Good programming day

I must have coded around -600 LOC today. A good day, to be sure.

The right way to sell software

<1060> Research sells software the right way: open-source if you are open-source, commercial if you are commercial, fixed-rate schedules. Beautiful! It feeds the open-source world and encourages novel uses, it feeds the developers and keeps the revenues coming, it removes the risk of negotiating the wrong price. I wish more companies understood all of this. I quote from the products page:

Licenses

NetKernel may be used at no charge under an obligatory open source model, see license - this license requires that all applications developed and executed on 1060 NetKernel be released as open-source. We offer commercial licenses that permit the use of closed source applications. Commercial licenses start from 450 UKP.

Please contact license@1060research.com for commercial licensing terms.

1060 NetKernel embeddable REST microkernel

The 1060 NetKernel microkernel is suitable as an embeddable Internet server. We are happy to offer embedded licensing terms and to customize bespoke system configurations for embedded systems.

Please contact sales@1060research.com to discuss your requirements.

Support

We offer a flexible selection of support options which range from one-off packages ideal for installation/getting-started assistance through to multiple incident packages suitable for production applications.

All support tiers include a dedicated support email address direct to the 1060 NetKernel development team and dedicated support telephone number. For ongoing support incidents we can provide direct email-to-SMS to a support contact.

Tier	Priority Units	Support Hours	Price
Install	1	1	350 UKP
Bronze	2	4	950 UKP
Silver	4	16	2950 UKP
Gold	8	40	4950 UKP

Support usage is calculated from a combination of Priority Units and Support Hours as follows

• A Priority Unit is a single support incident requiring a guaranteed 48hr response. The response will give an analysis of the issue and all reasonable efforts to provide a fix. Time taken solving the issue will be debited from the support hours credits.
• Any number of non-urgent support requests may be raised. A first response is guaranteed within 5 working days and demand permitting we endeavour to provide a more rapid turnaround. The time required to handle a support request will be debited from the support time allocation. Support hours may be used in any way you wish,for example you could ask our developers a specific question, get assistance architecting solutions, have our developers debug your code or even ask a developer to produce custom code. For larger projects or custom solutions you may prefer to contract with our professional services team.

Notes:

• Code developed as part of a support package will be open-sourced. To have our developers work on closed source you may require a commercial 1060 NetKernel license.
• Telephone support may be directed to voicemail during non-office hours. Voicemail is checked at regular intervals.

Please contact sales@1060research.com to purchase support packages.

For Jetty specific support please contact our friends at Mortbay.

Bringing down the haus

I haven't met Joe Walnes yet, but I'd like to: QDox rocks. I'm glad the new version of XDoclet uses it.

The web in Java

An interesting project on SourceForge: JXWB and WWE. WWE is an HTML4/CSS2-compliant HTML renderer kit for Java. The description of WWE:

This is the final release of WWE 1.0. It is an implementation of an HTML editor pane and kit providing Java Swing developers with an HTML renderer/editor that supports W3C's latest specifications for HTML and CSS. This release is slightly premature in that it has been repackaged from a commerical project and as such isn't as clean as can be expected. Another release will be forth coming addressing this issue as well as providing documentation.

Found here.

WARS pattern

The guys at Shocks have an interesting article: The WARS Architectural Style. In my current project we wind up doing something that is not horribly far away, but is much more informed by the Service Locator model.

Optimization: Your Worst Enemy

Nail-Tinted Glasses notes this amusing essay on optimization from someone who really knows what they are talking about.

Now there's a title to grab your attention! But I'm serious!

First, a little background on me: my PhD was one of the earliest on the automatic creation of optimizing compilers from formal machine descriptions ("Machine-Independent Generation of Optimal Local Code", CMU Computer Science Department, 1975). After my PhD, I spent three years at CMU as a senior researcher on the C.mmp multiprocessor computer system which used our home-grown Hydra operating system, a secure, capability-based operating system. I then went back to compiler research on the PQCC (Production Quality Compiler-Compiler) project, which ultimately led to the formation of Tartan Laboratories (later, just Tartan, and now absorbed by Texas Instruments), a compiler company, where I was part of the tooling group. I spent a decade-and-a-half writing and using performance measurement tooling.

This essay has several parts and represents much of my own experience. The stories I tell are true. The names have not been changed, although a couple are carefully omitted.