When it comes to generating command-line scripts for Java applications, Maven “appassembler” plugin comes handy. Its “assemble” goal does all the maven magic, i.e. searching the dependencies used for creating the Java application, adding them into the classpath of resultant script and finally copying all relevant jars to a single place. It was all working very nicely until I stumbled across the problem of long classpaths in the Windows OS.

Irrespective of whether you use DOS prompt or cygwin, Windows limits the length of environment variables. Though there are various options to overcome this problem using Java 6 wildcard classpath, mapping the path to some drive etc, they all look like workarounds to me as problem can recur again anytime.
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Recently for our project we started using Kettle for ETL purposes. Pentaho Kettle provides UI based tool. Initially it takes quite some time to get used to Kettle UI as it becomes difficult to visualize how to orchestrate available Kettle Steps to solve a business problem. As you know how to use it, it’s all about drag and drop a step and configuring it with available UI. With our experience we observed that it’s pretty easy to design 90% stuff easily but rest 10% involves a lot of research and at the end involved some hacks which we never liked.
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Recently I got a chance to attend a 2 days architecture conference in Bangalore organized by iCMG. Some very experienced and renowned figures in software world took sessions on architecture and software development. It sounded like a conference on just software architecture but it catered various other topics which could be grouped under Software development in general. If we leave the question of whether the conference should have focused on architecture only, other topics were also quite good and relevant to software development.

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One of the key USPs of pair-programming is – it provides value which is more than simple typing. That includes ACTIVE participation in code-review, knowledge sharing on continual basis, frequent design discussions with minimal distractions etc. If you primarily focus on knowledge sharing, pair-programming essentially provides true form of knowledge sharing as instead of looking at some bulky heartless documents you sit together with a person who has already worked on the subject and can have conversations and design discussions.

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World is becoming a global village especially in form of communication and the dissemination of information. In context of current economic turmoil and lack of enough trained software professionals locally, distributed Agile is becoming a norm for software project execution.

Earlier, most of the times, entire distributed software project used to be executed completely at offshore because of time-zone differences and communication issues. Now because of communication revolution, you see a new trend where software companies like to extend their teams (augmented Agile teams) with different vendors. Recently while working in such a project from a distributed location, we realized the need of local retrospective.

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Adobe AIR is a great technology to provide platform-independent desktop RIA applications. Gone are the days when Windows operating system used to be ubiquitous in desktop market. That’s the reason why Adobe AIR is considered as the future of desktop applications. Desktop applications are here to stay as they come with the power of providing rich features in efficient/optimal way compared to browser mode.

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It was a few years back when I last worked with Javascript. Things have changed significantly in between and one of the things which we people always like is the introduction of popup-blockers in browser world. I hope you remember those old days when it was a nuisance to close all those uninvited windows. Now we are living in a relatively peaceful world. But sometimes we also want to open new windows for legitimate reasons. So when I had a task to open a new browser window on button-click, I discovered the problems posed by popup-blockers. The interesting part is – window.open() behavior can be different for different browsers and popup-blockers.

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Today JavaWorld published my article series “Automated code reviews with Checkstyle” in 2 parts.

Part 1:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 1

Part 2:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 2

This article series attempts to bridge the gap of code review with applying automated Checkstyle checks in a complete and proactive way. First goal is to make the task of custom Checkstyle rules creation so simple so that any enterprise IT team could create new custom rules suiting to their project (IT standards) needs.

Second goal is to apply these rules in PROCTIVE fashion. Instead of waiting the build to fail or waiting for rule violation reports and working on them in a reactive way, the idea is to apply these checks proactively with Checkstyle Eclipse plugin or applying them at SVN level itself. Irrespective of which IDE you are using, if your code contains some of the high severity violations, you will not be able to commit the code in SVN. You will see the same kind errors and location on SVN console as you see with Eclipse plugin. This is achieved using SVN pre-commit hooks.

As I got introduced to Flex world some times back, I started using Flex Builder as an IDE, a product from Adobe on top of Eclipse platform. I assumed that it’ll provide all the basic features available in Eclipse for Java, but I was wrong. Flex Builder is in nascent phase from tooling point of view. Just to refresh your memories, Flex Builder lacks some of the following Eclipse features.

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Flex provides means to create RIA applications in declarative fashion using MXML. Unlike Swing where you need to do the entire coding in Java, Flex hides a lot of complexity behind MXML tags like JSTL/taglibs do for JSPs. In JSP world, view level scripting is done in JavaScript and presentation layer server side code is written in Java which kind of provides a separation between client side code and server side code. If you really want to do some dynamic stuff on JSPs, either you write some Java code inside JSP (not recommended though) or you use/create taglibs to achieve the same effect. In Flex world, it’s all about ActionScript (AS). Irrespective of whether you are writing some scripting or server side code, it’s all AS code which kind of creates a confusing situation in front of a developer. It becomes very difficult to separate the scripting code from server side code. That’s one of the reasons people complain about Flex as it looks like it doesn’t provide a clear separation between scripting code and server side code.

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