Monthly Archives: November 2007

A New Gig

software, work, ,

I recently took a new job at kink.com (warning: not safe for work) to manage the software development team.  I had managed a software development group in the past but for the last few years I was really more into just building software and staying heads down.  If there’s any constant in the software field, though, it’s that things always change.  The change for me was that I wanted to get back into leading a software group and working more with other groups inside a company.  Just building the software wasn’t enough for me anymore.  I’ll probably write about this more at another time but I’ll just leave it there for now.

One interesting aspect about working at a company like this is that the place has an amazingly positive vibe to it.  People just don’t go and work at companies in this industry unless they want to be here so I think that is one of the things that really contributes to it.

We’re also hiring so send me a resume if you can work in San Francisco, know Java well, work with and like Hibernate (we run it as our EJB3 entity provider) and have some usable XHTML/CSS/JavaScript skills you might be a good fit.  You have to take the quality of your work as a matter of personal pride to do well in this group, also.  We tend to mostly run on Macs and you’ll usually have a 30″ monitor to work on.  I can also pretty much guarantee that we have one of the most unique work environments you’ll ever experience.

Why Maven Drives Me Crazy

eclipse, software, , ,

Step 1. Create a maven project with war packaging

Step 2. Run mvn eclipse:eclipse

Step 3. Open Eclipse. It’s not a dynamic web project.

Step 4. Yell.

Step 5. Look things up on Google.

Step 6. Try some of the things you find on Google.

Step 7. Yell some more.

Step 8. Create a dynamic web project and configure all your libraries by hand.

Step 9. Run web app on server within Eclipse.

Step 10. Go back to Ant and get things done.

I mean seriously, I can’t believe it’s this hard to take a web project and have the eclipse:eclipse task build out an Eclipse project (Eclipse 3.3) that will deploy into a Server instance to make it easier to run/debug.

I’m sure some people have it running but if it’s not relatively simple or documented more clearly or findable on Google within the first page or two then I’m sure I’m not the only one that has thrown up their arms with Maven and use within Eclipse.

On top of all that, just try learning this thing and using it with a Hibernate based project and having to go out and hunt down all the plug-ins you need to make your project do what you want it to do. Any project that makes me do this much hunting around to get it to do relatively simple things that I can do in Ant really quickly is just not going to succeed. The sad thing is that most of the initial impression problems are solvable but no one that is a Maven fan seems to be doing anything about it. Just take the ten or so most popular open source projects, throw a cookbook style doc out there that tells you how to quickly integrate the plug-ins for those projects and do common tasks and you’ll get people that will spend more time trying to use it. As of now, virtually none of the developers I know will use Maven.

(note:  I wrote this up about a month ago and just got around to publishing it so maybe it’s been fixed, maybe it hasn’t but I’m tired of trying to make it work for other reasons as well)

Spring 2.5 Released

software, spring, unit testing, , ,

It looks like Spring 2.5 was released today. I’ve already been using the annotations for both service definition and web controller definition to greatly reduce the size of my configuration files. These are a great addition and I’m sure that I’ll be exploring them a lot in the future.

The other area that grabbed my interest was new integration test classes that support TestNG since previously they didn’t really seem to support TestNG with their test framework.