Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

The Apache Maven project just announced the next version (2.7) of the Maven Eclipse plugin. This is the plugin that generates the .classpath and .project files.

All well and good. Except that version 2.6 introduced at least one new massive bug – it puts the JRE at the end of the project classpath, instead of at the start. This means that, due to some projects out there doing stupid shit liking including JDK classes, you can get code breakages (e.g. you use generic collections, but this bug causes you to compile against the 1.4 Collection API). This bug is rated as ‘CRITICAL’ on their own issue tracker. It was caused by a patch for a ‘MINOR’ issue.

This bug is not fixed in the new 2.7 version.

Why, Maven developers? Why? Why are you releasing any new versions yet? According to your JIRA instance, you have 1 BLOCKER – introduced in 2.6 – and 14 CRITICAL bugs, going back as far as 2.0. In 2.7, you “fixed” one CRITICAL bug – by calling it a duplicate of a bug that was only MAJOR.

I know, I know – it’s open source, it’s free, and you get what you pay for. But there is no excuse for this. Those priority levels are meant to reflect the urgency felt by the project team. If they really feel an issue is a BLOCKER, they shouldn’t release. If they feel an issue is CRITICAL, they shouldn’t be working on trivial issues. If they don’t feel that these issues are CRITICAL, they should change the status.

And, in the meantime, I’m staying on 2.5.1.

Tags: maven sucks bug issuetracking

It appears that my favourite technical publishers, The Pragmatic Programmers now offer their books in specialised formats for mobile devices, in addition to the PDF format.

This means that I can download my PragProg books to my iPhone and read them conveniently (using the Stanza e-book reader). Best of all – if you’ve bought a PDF edition before, the mobile formats are free. Thanks, Andy and Dave!

Not all of the books have been converted yet – out of the 12 eBooks I’ve bought, 5 have been converted so far – but the rest will come over time.

Downloading the books is easy: if you’ve got Stanza on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you simply go to pragprog.com on your iPhone/iPod Touch, login, and download your books (they may need to be regenerated first). Then you read them in Stanza. And I have to say that the conversion looks pretty darn good.

Tags: ebook, iphone, pragprog

We’ve been getting more interested in using RESTful web services and AJAX based applications recently. One of the tools we’ve been using with that is Jersey – the JAX-RS (JSR-331) reference implementation. I’ve been using it in anger for about a month now, and thought I’d write up some thoughts I had about it.
(more…)

Tags: Java, jersey, json, jsr311, rest, web app

I’m trying to learn the quirks of developing web apps targeted at the iPhone, so I’m mucking around trying to learn how best to use the space available. Everything is going fine using the iPhone simulator (which is part of the SDK), but when i pull out my real iPhone, it looks like I’ve only got about 75% of the space!
(more…)

Tags: doh, iphone, web design

I’ve long been interested in decent ways of expressing tests in a human-readable format. Not just any humans, but BAs and business reps in particular – the kind of people who will not be interested in slugging through piles of language syntax. I tried Fit sometime ago, and was impressed, but when I came back and revisited it recently, it looked a lot like the community had kind of faded away. Accordingly, I looked around at what else was available, and stumbled across RSpec Now, I want to test Java code, and RSpec is for Ruby (as the R kind of hints), but I was able to get this going under JRuby fairly easily. I couldn’t find any examples of other people doing that, so I thought I’d write it up.

(more…)

Tags: bdd, rspec, Ruby, story testing, testing

Hibernate has long had a feature known as “query caches” – you can run a query, cache the result, and thus avoid running it repeatedly. The only problem is that it doesn’t do what you think it does.

(more…)

Tags: Hibernate

I’ve spent most of the last year involved in an intensive project that really drained me – hence the lack of blogging. I want to blog in a positive fashion this year, so I’ll start by getting a lot of gripes off my chest. :) Call it things that suck.

Here’s a short list, before I define what I mean by “suck”:

• Maven2
• EJB3 Persistence
• Hibernate, caches, and the way they can kill your database.
• Maven2 (it just sucks a lot!)
• No Java 6 on the Mac
• No “next/previous word” keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal
• Mac Firefox, drop-down boxes, and tabbing

and I’m sure that there’s more that will come to me. Today, I’m doing Maven – the rest will come later.

(more…)

Tags: gripes, maven, wotif

9 months of intense development later, our first big integration project with Tourico Holidays, went live today, with an additional 1000-odd hotels appearing on our site (with more to come). A good example is Texas where we had only a few hotels outside of the major cities and we now have about 90 (plus more inside the major cities, of course).
(more…)

Tags: integration, tourico, wotif

Sheesh… it seems like every man and his dog is jumping on the latestTIOBE index figures showing a very> small dip in the popularity of Ruby. Talk about lies, damned lies, and statistics…

(more…)

Tags: chicken little, Java, Ruby, tiobe

Mike Cannon-Brookes asks Is Atlassian still a startup? And when is a startup not a startup anymore? Well, Mike, the answer’s simple. If it still feels like a startup, it’s a startup.

(more…)

Tags: atlassian, culture, wotif