Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

I did a silly thing last week. I've been avoiding being given a task for the last nine months, and then all of a sudden I ended up volunteering to do it, for all sorts of reasons. The task: work out how to use WebLogic Workshop as a real tool, in conjunction with our other standard practices (like, oh, source control, unit tests, command-line builds, and daily/continuous builds). And I'm realizing why I tried so hard to avoid it.

It just makes things break!!

(Followup at end)

I figured out why the web app I was trying to build before broken when I used the exported build script. Turns out that you need to run a setup script to get your environment "just right" before running the build.

That's the title for my blog, and it's a philosophy I believe in 100%. Software, like many other areas of life, is not a place to cut corners (at least, certain corners). There are certain expenses you have to be willing to pay if you want a quality product that will stand the test of time; avoiding them simply pushes immediate cost now to bigger nastier costs later.

I was reading Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk recently. Quite an interesting article.

I'm now working on my second project with Hibernate, having delivered the first, and I'm playing with some of the features I didn't have time to figure out last time. And I have to say: named queries rock, big time.