In the first installment, I outlined a simple web application. In this post, I will be turning that application into two parts – an OSGi bundle, with a client web app.
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I’m going to be spending some time over the next couple of weeks learning about OSGi – there is an application at work that we want to try and make more modular. In particular, we’d like to be able to share the back tier with more front end clients. The more conventional modularisation techniques, such as EJBs, have been tried and didn’t work fairly well. Simply creating more deployments is prohibitive, due to hardward And before someone asks “why not just stick a web service on it and share that way” – some of the front end clients will be those web services. To cut a long story short, one of the options we want to check out is OSGi.
The only problem is that there isn’t much in the way written up on the web about writing OSGi components – at least not without invoking magic tools (e.g. Maven plugins) that don’t work on any version of any tool developed six months later. Which is odd, because OSGi, as a spec, doesn’t look that hard to write too. So, I thought I’d write up a series describing the initial investigative spikes, starting as close to the metal as possible and working up.
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9
Sep
Why positive thinking works – in my opinion, anyway.
By Robert | Filed in Agile Development | One commentI saw an an article on Seth Godin’s blog about positive thinking. Godin makes the valid point that people who think positively tend to succeed more, in part because their confidence means they don’t second-guess themselves. You can easily waste a lot of energy debating what to do.
A point that Seth didn’t cover is that positive thinking means it’s more likely you will attempt something new: if you feel you can accomplish a task, you’re more likely to try. Sometimes, when you try something new, you will succeed. Other times you will fail. When you fail, there’s a chance you will learn – and learning makes it easier to succeed next time.
One of the key take aways of agile development for me is “experiment, and fail early”. Fail early, fail often, fail cheaply. And learn every time.
A little over two weeks ago, I succumbed and decided to see exactly what the deal with twitter was. It just didn’t seem like a wonderful tool – SMS for the web? Really? But, in the spirit of inquiry, I thought I’d give it ago. Now, a bit over two weeks later, I can say “I’m glad”.
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from Martin Fowler: Software and Obama’s Victory. I like the last org model shown; it would be very interesting to work in a company structured in such a fashion, with middle management acting as guides & facilitators, instead of intermediates, filters and superiors.
30
Jul
Warning: get off housing gravy train – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
By Robert | Filed in Politics | 4 commentsThere’s an opinion page on the ABC News page about the increasing rise in house prices (and the subsequent fall in housing affordability). The solution presented: build more housing (not necessarily houses – apartments are okay too), thus increasing the supply. Unfortunately, that won’t help.
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28
Jul
Wage growth does not automatically equate to inflationary pressure…
By Robert | Filed in Politics | 6 commentsOne of my coworkers tossed out this line today: “We can’t just increase the minimum wage, because that would cause inflation”. I said at the time that didn’t have to be the case, and I just thought I’d capture my reasoning in writing.
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Lusting over the Atlassian Connector’s support for Bamboo made me decide to check out what support there was for Hudson in Eclipse. So I checked out the Hudson Eclipse Plugin. My thoughts: not bad, but not great – a lot of potential is there, though.
In two words: pretty neat.
30
Jun
Atlassian Connector for Eclipse – Installation issues
By Robert | Filed in Java | One commentI’ve been having a problem installing the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse (which gives integration to a bunch of Atlassian and non-Atlassian tools – mostly I’m after Fisheye and JIRA). The installation constantly failed for me on this error:
Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
Software being installed: Atlassian Connector for Eclipse (recommended) 1.1.0.v20090624 (com.atlassian.connector.eclipse.feature.group 1.1.0.v20090624)
Missing requirement: Atlassian Connector for Eclipse (recommended) 1.1.0.v20090624 (com.atlassian.connector.eclipse.feature.group 1.1.0.v20090624) requires ‘org.eclipse.mylyn.jira_feature.feature.group [3.2.0.I20090529,3.3.0)' but it could not be found
Today I found this issue in Atlassian's issue system: [#PLE-393] Installation error – Atlassian Projects. What it comes down to is that one of the update sites shipped with Eclipse is disabled in some of the distros (the JavaEE one, in my case).
The issue has the instructions, but for anyone too lazy to follow the link:
The problem seems to be that the Mylyn update sites (which has JIRA) is not enabled in your copies of Eclipse. There is a bug in Eclipse that these sites may not be automatically enabled even though we specify that we require them for installation. To enable this site:
1. open Help > Software Updates…
2. switch to the “Available Software” tab
3. click on “Manage Sites…”
4. look for either the Mylyn Extras update site or a url that looks like: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/extras and check make sure that it is checked
5. look for either the Mylyn For Eclipse 3.4 update site or a url that looks like: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4 and make sure that it is checked
6. try to install the Atlassian Eclipse Connector again
And with that, I get my JIRA integraton to Mylyn working again! Joy and happiness abounds.
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