full fathom five: Tag development

Cenqua: here I come

Michael Studman — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:29:59 -0500

The rumours are true, come the new year I’ll be starting with Cenqua - the creators of Fisheye, Clover & Crucible. I’ll be working remotely for them from my little corner of north London or to put it another way, I’ll be their premier UK employee. ;) My task will be to design, develop and support new and existing software development tools you will actually use.

This move has been a long time in the making - I first interviewed with them (a beer in hand, if I recall) back in the middle of the dot-com crash when they were transitioning from a service company to a product company. Unfortunately, like many, they’d just laid off staff and weren’t in a position to take me on. More recently this year I did some work for them but found my 9-5 racket was proving too exhausting to deliver anything substantial or on-time. Now the timing seems right for me to come on board full time.

You gotta love a company that calls its head office the “Central Command” and describes my role as “Senior Software Engineer / Architect / Code Poet”.

Matt, Conor, Brendan and Pete - thanks for giving me the chance to work on some great products! I can’t wait!

Handling Java exceptions in JRuby

Michael Studman — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 19:54:00 -0400

At my enterprisey day job I’m finding the JRuby platform to be the perfect glue for bringing together a (sadly necessary) slew of Java libraries and middleware (3rd-party Ant tasks, Jakarta VFS, ServiceMix, Maven, Weblogic) to solve a complex problem crucial to our enterprise. Stellar support for exception handling is obviously important when integrating so many libraries and middleware so how well does JRuby help with this? Is it just a Java fair-weather friend?

Java snippet: Debugging a Java library used from Ant

Michael Studman — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:05:02 -0400

I recently needed to debug a library which seemed to be misbehaving when used within Ant. After a bit of research here’s the best way I found to debug within Ant that doesn’t require sprinkling your bin/ant or bin\ant.bat with temporary JPDA pixy dust.

Ant doesn’t directly accept the -X arguments needed to set up the JPDA settings so the question is: how do you pass these from a shell or command line? In this, the ANT_OPTS environment variable is your friend. Its contents will be directly passed to the Java process Ant calls.

So here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Set ANT_OPTS to the debug options appropriate for your JVM:

for Java 1.4:

>> export ANT_OPTS=-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=8453

for Java 1.5:

>> export ANT_OPTS=-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=8453

Step 2: Run ant like normal:

  
>> ant

Step 3: Set your breakpoints.

Step 4: Now attach your debugger.

There might be better ways to do this but this was the least invasive route for me.

Challenges - knowing when to say no

Michael Studman — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:15:00 -0400

Many dynamic and energetic developers I have known share a characteristic of reflexively accepting the challenges put to them by their organisation. I think many people are just wired that way - they are presented with a challenge and their sense of self worth or their desire to please or whatever it is compels them to accept it; and beat it.

What do you do when the challenges are nonsensical, not worth doing or based on clearly broken assumptions. In a ‘can do’ culture that places a high value on ‘being pro-active’ a challenge can often take on mystical properties that make it unasailable and immune to rational questioning or discourse. If it was uttered thus must it be worthwhile.

It takes a lot of guts to say to someone (especially someone you report to or someone in a position of substantial power) “your challenge doesn’t make sense, I refuse to accept it”. In such organisations rejecting a challenge is often worse than failing the challenge itself and you may run the risk of being labeled a recalcitrant, nay-sayer, lazy or worse.

If a friend came to you and challenged you to invent a perpetual motion machine, would you accept or reject the challenge? Kooks aside, most of us would reject it and we wouldn’t judge ourselves by the standards of the challenger - we’re not failures because we refuse to invent a perpetual motion machine. We know it’s sheer folly.

Organisations should do the same when they’re forced to into a Mythical Man Month scheduling ‘challenge’ by overzealous upper management eager to make their mark. Adding manpower to a late (or tight) project will just make it later (or tighter) and we shouldn’t be afraid to rebuff a challenge to come up with aggressive project plans based on the assumption that “men and month are interchangeable”. This, too, we know is sheer folly.

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