The Eclipse Project is home to a quite reasonable amount of sub projects, the list keeps growing every year, so to help the end-user the Eclipse Foundation arranges a simultaneous yearly release of Eclipse and all sub projects. Ganymede is the 2008 release, following Europa in 2007 and Callisto in 2006, and it contains Eclipse’s latest version (3.4).

Eclipse Ganymede

James Carr has compiled a pretty little list of Test Driven Development Anti-Patterns and posted it some time ago in his blog. I have to admit I’ve done some of them once or twice.

TDD Anti-Patterns [via ISerializable]

Technorati Tags: tdd, test driven development, unit testing

InfoQ has an interesting article gathering several thoughts and rants regarding the usefulness of Maven as a build tool, despite having used Maven with some success I must agree with some of the referred problems.
Maven has a declarative approach to a project, rather than the procedural approach of Ant, which makes it easier to move around from one project to another, something that doesn’t happen in Ant; and not to forget the dependency management, which is indeed is a killer feature (although I admit I’ve never tried Ivy). But the documentation still is poor and sparse and it requires the team and build process do adjust to the Maven philosophy and structure.

Debate: Is Maven the right tool for builds?

Technorati Tags: maven, ant, ivy, build

A new year is now beginning and that usually means New Years Resolutions, so here are mine, just the geek oriented and in no particular order:

• Finish TemujinPhoto, finally I’m working on it and in a few weeks I hope to have a working beta.
• Probably this is the year I’ll take a certification, most likely a Microsoft Certified Professional. Probably…
• Take photos.
• Must dive into .Net 3.5 and LINQ.
• Been thinking about creating a desktop client for Remember The Milk in WPF, I’m needing one and the guys at RTM have a neat API (WPF is for learning something new).
• Must buy a tripod, need to do night shots.
• Get a taste of EJB 3.0 and the Spring 2.5, just a small taste to check what I’ve been missing on the Java world.
• Put my reading up to date, I still haven’t read this one (no need to buy me a copy, I already own one and it has been gathering dust for some time).
• Take more photos: night photos, motion photos, street photos, concept photos and all kinds of photos I haven’t been doing lately.
• There has been some ideas to make a few short movies, I sure hope we can turn them real. Another reason to buy a tripod…
• Probably dump Windows on my laptop completely, I’m getting happier with Ubuntu everyday.

There’s nothing like turning your New Year resolutions public, or at least part of them…

Many has been written about Android, Google’s new platform for mobile applications, lately and the Java community is no exception. To catch up here’s a small reading list, most of it regarding Dalvik, Google’s tweaked Java virtual machine used in Android:

• The first week of the Android SDK [The Server Side]
• Android: First Impressions. [OnJava]
• Android is out: First Looks [Javalobby]
• Is Google the New Microsoft? [Javalobby]
• Google’s Android for the server-side please [Javalobby]
• Dalvik - Google’s tweaked, non-standard JVM for Android!!!! [OnJava]
• Google Android: Initial Impressions and Criticism [Javalobby]
• Google Android, Now 100% Java-Free! [Neil’s point-free blog]
• Google’s Android SDK Bypasses Java ME in Favor of Java Lite and Apache Harmony [InfoQ]

Technorati Tags: google, android, dalvik

Martin Fowler has posted an interesting post on how changing an interface can be seen as a refactoring: 

Is Changing Interfaces Refactoring?

The answer to this question is pretty simple - changing an interface is a refactoring providing you change all the callers too

Sometimes you can’t change the callers for the simple reason you don’t know all of them. That’s why most of the times changing an interface really isn’t a refactoring.

Technorati Tags: refactoring

Rockford Lhotka in his latest post writes about being a better developer, and there’s one point that caught my eye:

Keep my head above water

Microsoft has recently, and continues into the foreseeable future, to come out with new technology releases at a ridiculous pace. By “head above water” all I really mean is that I want, at least, to have a general clue about the purpose and real capabilities of all the stuff they are throwing at us. Not just the marketing hype, but what it really means.

I’ve been suffering this for some time, for the last year and a half I’ve been working in a project with cutting edge technology: .Net 3.0 when WCF still was called Indigo specially WCF. Although it has been a long project I still fell I have some ground to cover here and there, and I’m already ruling out all those presentation based technologies (like ASP.Net AJAX, WPF or Silverlight) that I know I wont use in th forthcoming future. But right in front of me already lies things like LINQ and C# 3.0, and all of this just in Microsoft world: I haven’t had an opportunity to get decent a decent glimpse of EJB 3.0.

I guess the trick is to try to keep the head above the water, at least to know what’s out there and that may hit you one of these days…

Inbar Gazit in his latest MSDN Magazine article “Collections Best Practices” makes a interesting question: when to create a custom collection?
My answer for this one is simple: hardly never! Speaking for myself, it has been a few years since I’ve created a custom collection in any of the projects I’ve been working, both in .Net and in Java. With the variety of collection types available and introduction of Generics there are few reasons that justify the implementation of a custom collection, and in most of the cases if someone’s thinking in creating a custom collection the chances are that a collection isn’t needed at all.

The latest release of my favorite web service testing tool has a really interesting feature:

Support for Mocking of Web Services directly from within soapUI. Mock Services can be run either from inside soapUI or with one of the IDE/Maven/CommandLine plugins.

In a service oriented architecture is usual, and desirable, to have contract definition (i.e. the web service WSDL and schema) before the service implementation is available or, at least, is robust enough for testing. Having such a tool makes the development of clients for such services much faster and removes the part of the pressure of service implementators.

Mocking web services along with other nice features like unit testing or load testing makes SoapUI probably the best tool for web service testing around, it was the only Java tool I was able to push in the Microsoft-based environment I’m working at.
 

Web Service Mocking [via SoapUI Documentation]

Technorati Tags: soapui

Yet another Dependency Injection framework, just like Spring or Pico Container, has been released:

Guice is a new open-source Dependency Injection framework for Java 5 that is closing in on a 1.0 release.

…but this time brought to you by Google. Must see what’s new over there one of these days.

InfoQ - Guice: Fast and Light Dependency Injection Container

Technorati Tags: spring framework, google, pico container, guice