QCon San Francisco 2009 - Part 1

I had a chance to attend the QCon conference in SF this week. I'll try to publish my notes from the talks.

Last year I managed to only publish one article! Ouch, not too impressive. This year I'm hoping to do better because my notes are already (mostly) in a digital form, thanks to FreeMind and a Mac.

So, without further ado, here's the first installment.

Intro

• Overall observations
  

  • I have to say that last year seemed a little more interesting. Perhaps it's just because it was my first QCon.
    

    But there was at least the Un-conference, which there isn't this year. Too bad. Last year it had to compete with highly interesting sessions with high-profile speakers, so I only found time to attend one or two sessions.
    

    However, this year, I would have attended at least two just in the first day.
    

    I still think the conference is very interesting and useful, but it's not quite the same.
    
    

  
  


• Corporate Opensource
  
  • This year seems to be a year of corporate opensource. Or maybe it's opensourced corporativeness?
    
    • Not sure how to say it right.
      
      
  • Exhibit 1: SpringSource
    

    • SpringSource, which was actually purchased this summer by VMWare.
      

      • The whole thing about the VMWare acquisition seems odd.
        
      
      
      • + -
        I had a chance to talk with some of the falks from Spring and they spin it like this:
        

        • VMWare needed development community to compete with Microsoft (on the cloud offering presumeably)
          

          • I guess if MS builds Azure support in the Visual Studio / .NET, then it will lead to natural use of MS products instead of VMWare's.
            I guess. So what, does VMWare propose to build VMWare support into Spring? What exactly to Spring applications need to know about VMWare? Isn't the whole point of VMWare to be transparent?
            
            The only angle would be with some kind of cloud management / deployment tools. That must be it.
            
            
            

          Second point they make is that it's actually good that there is no overlap between VMWare's core expertise and the Spring's. Right...
          

          • The argument goes that this way Spring can continue doing what they do without interference form VMWare.
            

            And yet, Rod is no longer a CEO but has some strange title along the lines of "VP of the Middle Tier" or something.
            
            

          Third point they make is that now that they are part of a large company with actual revenue, they can feel free-er to spend their time on the opensource work.
          

          • Ok, so that sounds like they ran out of money.
            

          I don't know. I'm sure I'm missing something, but it looks a lot like eBay and Skype.
          

      Spring is huge. It's the new Java EE. It's the new standard library for Java.
      
      On the bright side, they are building great stuff and it tends to really solve real problems and be really useful.
      

      It is also trully opensourced. So we do get all of the code and we are free to make changes and build it and distributed it, etc. It's Apache licened.
      

      So if SpringSource decided to go crazy and build something silly or try to move the project away from usefulness, there are planty of other projects that will be able to pick apart the codebase and take what's useful (not to say anything about the actual userbase which could also control their own destiny).
      

      However, they are pushing ahead at a break-neck speed. Perhaps it's just me, but I'm still not sure of all the pieces that are in Spring 2.5, which was released last year, let alone having had an opportunity to have used them.
      

      This year - Spring 3.0 comes out. And it has a lot more cool stuff that looks very interesting.
      

      As a user, I'm finding it hard to keep up with them. As an opensource developer, it's not possible to compete with the full-time staff of SpringSource building the Spring platform.
      
      

  • Exhibit 2: Terracotta
    

    • Terracotta, which has just acquired ehcache this summer.
      

      I don't have as much to say about them, except that it's yet another open source project that has a community but not is a community.
      

      They are not as well established as Spring yet. But they have made significant changes since I looked at them last.
      

      • They apparently have a better clustering story. To the point where clients no longer stall and crash when there is a problem on the server.
        

        They also now position themselves as a Hibernate plugin that simply does better caching than ehcache. This makes for a straight (and fully opensourced) upgrade path from Hibernate with nothing, to Hibernate with ehcache, to Hibernate with Terracotta.
        

        • Sounds a lot better than what I remember from before. I believe that before you had to write to their API directly or else it was a different VM that had to be used? Not sure.
          

  • Exhibit N: Google with it's many projects
    
    • Firefox
      
    • Android
      
    • Chrome / Chromium
      
    • etc
      
      
  • Is this bad?
    

    • If there is no free lunch, it follows that somehow we are paying for all of this.
      

      Is that bad? Probably not. But it's good to be aware of the motives of those paying for the pizza.
      

      I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand, I find that it's still open source and it's still good, even if it's not quite the kind of (maybe fictional?) opensource that we are used to.
      

      On the other hand, there seems to be something sinister about the whole thing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but basically these corporations are giving out free stuff (code, products) in order to cause developers to behave in certain ways (i.e. use the products), which somehow leads into the company's business model.
      

      But on the whole, I think this model still leads to better software being built, code being open and available for learning and improvement, engineers having a free hand in what they use, and business success of these companies being more closely tied to the actual value they deliver.
      

      So on the whole - I think we are good.
      
      

Canonical releases source code for Launchpad | Ubuntu

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canonical-open-sources-launchpad

Very interesting. I think platforms like this should find their way into more of the corporate development landscapes. Especially when distributed teams are becoming the norm.

Automated Acceptance Tests - Myth or Reality? Useful or not so much?

• InfoQ: Automated Acceptance Tests - Theoretical or Practical

  tags: tdd

  • Are automated acceptance tests written at the beginning of each iteration just a theoretical assertion that have been proven ineffective by the lack of adoption?
  • why don’t we just make the tests on a white board, have the programmers implement them one at a time, checking them manually even showing them to the product owner manually and when we are done with it, why not just erase it and forget it?
    • The hope is that they will catch regressions. If not - no need to automate. - post by dserebren
  • Now, consider if the tests written by the QA department are written before the development begins. 
    • How could tests be possibly be written before the software is written? It seems that at best they can be written at the same time as the software (in a TDD way). - post by dserebren
  • One of the things that come out when watching Brian Marick's interview, is that there are many teams doing just fine with unit testing for regressions and manual QA Testing for acceptance tests (ad-hoc).
  • ThoughtWorks is building Twist to give QA and test automators the right kind of tool support to make functional test automation work.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

InfoQ: Stop and Refactor?

• InfoQ: Stop and Refactor?

  tags: no_tag

  • So what can we conclude, comparing just these two? First, not refactoring provides MORE feature value until some time after refactoring ceases. Second, to know when refactoring starts to win we need to know some numbers: how long will refactoring take, and what will be its impact on velocity? And, how long will it be until the code gets crufty again, which will bring the numbers back down?
  • So what can we conclude, comparing just these two? First, not refactoring provides MORE feature value until some time after refactoring ceases. Second, to know when refactoring starts to win we need to know some numbers: how long will refactoring take, and what will be its impact on velocity? And, how long will it be until the code gets crufty again, which will bring the numbers back down?
    • This is like discussing when to clean up the kitchen and how that impacts delivery of new food. We are comparing stopping to clean now (and therefore food delivery will slow for a while) to not cleaning and therefore keeping the food delivery unchanged. It strikes me that this discussion somehow entirely misses the main point - that it currently stinks in the kitchen. Your cooks do not like it. Your customers do not like it. The food being prepared is being compromised by the garbage around it. As all cooks know, there is only one answer - clean as you go. And if you find that you didn't - stop, clean, then continue. - post by dserebren
  • Now, if we set the Refactoring Accelerator above x, RA > x, what happens? Can we go faster, or do we always slow down? We know that at one point, RA = 1.0, we do slow down, to zero (but we can speed up later).
    • Seems like in addition to the "feature injection rate" and "defect injection rate" we need to also measure "garbage injection rate". We can reason about the garbage injection rate very similarly to the defect rate, but the two are different and should be tracked separately. One can have defect injection without garbage injection and vice versa. Different stakeholders are in position to measure these - QA/Users vs. the developers. - post by dserebren

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

InfoQ: Augmented Reality with Flash

• InfoQ: Augmented Reality with Flash

  Wow! This is a completely new direction for applications.

  tags: flex, augmented-reality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Yoxos

It turns out that Yoxos can be configured as a simple Eclipse update site. So here's my new best practice:

- setup eclipse from a stock download from eclipse.org

- add http://update1.yoxos.com as update site

- use normal Eclipse update management to get Mousefeed, AnyEdit, TestNG, Subclipse, etc. from Yoxos

AnandTech: NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Blu-ray Investigation

(This is really just a test post from Diigo. But the ION platform is interesting.)

• AnandTech: NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Blu-ray Investigation

  tags: no_tag

  • Intel never intended for Atom to be compared to modern day processors; the core will eventually compete against ARM processors, nothing from the x86 world. It’s being heavily used in netbooks today simply because it’s not small enough or low power enough to be used in anything significantly more svelte.

    

  • For the Ion review I was playing unencrypted Blu-ray content
    • Interesting. What about encrypted? - post by dserebren

Ah, very nice! Diigo posts have pictures!

Gnome Applets

Just found a few useful applets in Gnome:

* gnome-blog - post blog entries on many blog services right from the gnome pannel (this is actually a test of this applet)

* Gimmie - looks really cool. Document-centric desktop organization that seems to actually work.

* file-browser-applet - browse file system from the Gnome pannel. Like KDE. Finally. But not yet in Ubuntu distro (as of Hardy). So need to download manually.

Hacking on FlexUnit Ant Task

I am working with FlexUnit Ant task by Peter Martin (great work, Peter!).
One thing was missing though - under Linux I found that the default gflashplayer executable didn't exist. Instead, we have a different flash player available as part of the project tree. But there was no way to override the default used by the FlexUnit's launcher class and changing PATH variable in Ant is just a bear.

So, to make a long story short, I added ability to specify flashPlayerCmdPattern argument to the flexunit ant task. In the process, I created a GenericLauncher class based on the MacSWFLauncher (which looks to be generic enough and the most up to date).

Works like a charm. One possible enhancement for someone who knows Ant better - ability to specify the flash player as inner task element (with the <env> and <argument> tags and whatnot). But this worked well enough for me.

Here's the patch that goes with FlexAntTasks-src.zip from 2008-02-18. Enjoy!

Index: src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitLauncher.java
===================================================================
--- src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitLauncher.java (revision 38987)
+++ src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitLauncher.java (working copy)
@@ -8,24 +8,12 @@
    private static final String WINDOWS_OS = "Windows";
    private static final String MAC_OS_X = "Mac OS X";
      
- /**
-  * Run the SWF that contains the FlexUnit tests.
-  * @param swf the name of the SWF
-  * @throws Exception if there is an error launching the tests.
-  */
- public void runTests( String swf ) throws Exception
- { 
-      SWFLauncher launcher = createSWFLauncher();
-      
-      launcher.launch( swf );
-   }
-   
    /**
     * Creates a SWF launcher suitable for the OS.
     * 
     * @return a new SWF launcher
     */
-   private SWFLauncher createSWFLauncher()
+   public static SWFLauncher createSWFLauncher()
    {
       SWFLauncher launcher = null;
       
Index: src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitTask.java
===================================================================
--- src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitTask.java (revision 38987)
+++ src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/FlexUnitTask.java (working copy)
@@ -61,7 +61,23 @@
    private String failureProperty = "flexunit.failed";
    private String swf;
    private File reportDir;
+   private String flashPlayerCmdPattern = null;
 
+   public String getFlashPlayerCmdPattern() {
+    return flashPlayerCmdPattern;
+   }
+   
+   /** Set flash player command line pattern. If set to a non-empty string, 
+    *  will use an OS-independent launcher based on this command line.
+    *  Otherwise, will try to guess an OS-specific command line to use.
+    *  Use MessageFormat syntax. Argument {0} is replaced with swf file.
+    *  
+    * @param flashPlayerCmdPattern
+    */
+   public void setFlashPlayerCmdPattern(String flashPlayerCmdPattern) {
+    this.flashPlayerCmdPattern = flashPlayerCmdPattern;
+   }
+   
    /**
     * Set the port to receive the test results on.
     * 
@@ -183,11 +199,17 @@
 
    private void launchTestSuite()
    {
-      final FlexUnitLauncher browser = new FlexUnitLauncher();
+      SWFLauncher launcher;
+      if (flashPlayerCmdPattern != null && flashPlayerCmdPattern.trim().length() > 0) 
+      {
+       launcher = new GenericLauncher(flashPlayerCmdPattern);
+      } else {
+       launcher = FlexUnitLauncher.createSWFLauncher();
+      }
 
       try
       {
-         browser.runTests( swf );
+       launcher.launch( swf );
       }
       catch ( Exception e )
       {
Index: src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/GenericLauncher.java
===================================================================
--- src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/GenericLauncher.java (revision 0)
+++ src/com/adobe/ac/ant/tasks/GenericLauncher.java (revision 0)
@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+package com.adobe.ac.ant.tasks;
+
+import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
+import java.io.InputStream;
+import java.text.MessageFormat;
+
+/** Launch flash player generically.
+ *  Takes a command line pattern, where argument {0} is
+ *  replaced with the swf file name.
+ * 
+ * @author dmitry
+ */
+public class GenericLauncher implements SWFLauncher 
+{
+   private String commandLinePattern;
+ 
+
+   public GenericLauncher(String flashPlayerCmdPattern) {
+    this.commandLinePattern = flashPlayerCmdPattern;
+   }
+
+   public void launch( String swf ) throws Exception
+   {
+   String cmd = createCommandLine(swf);
+    
+      Process process = null;
+
+      try
+      {
+         System.out.println( "Generic Launcher: " + cmd );
+         process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( cmd );
+      }
+      catch ( Exception e )
+      {
+         throw e;
+      }
+
+      String error = readStream( process.getErrorStream() );
+
+      if ( error.length() > 0 )
+      {
+         throw new Exception( error );
+      }
+   }
+
+   private String createCommandLine(String swf) {
+    if (commandLinePattern == null) {
+     throw new IllegalArgumentException("CommandLinePattern must not be null");
+    }
+    
+    MessageFormat f = new MessageFormat(commandLinePattern);
+    String cmd = f.format(new String[] { swf });
+    return cmd;
+   }
+
+/**
+    * Reads all the data available from an input stream and converts it into a
+    * String.
+    * 
+    * @param input input stream to read
+    * @return converted string
+    * @throws Exception if an error occurs while reading from the stream
+    */
+   private String readStream( final InputStream input ) throws Exception
+   {
+      final ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
+
+      int i;
+
+      while ( ( i = input.read() ) != -1 )
+      {
+         output.write( i );
+      }
+
+      return new String( output.toByteArray() );
+   }
+
+   /** Set command line pattern. Use MessagePattern syntax.
+    *  Argument {0} is replaced with the swf file name.
+    *  
+    * @param commandLinePattern
+    */
+ public void setCommandLinePattern(String commandLinePattern) {
+  this.commandLinePattern = commandLinePattern;
+ }
+
+ public String getCommandLinePattern() {
+  return commandLinePattern;
+ }
+}

Advantures in Eclipse - Yoxos

Yoxos
Once again, I was looking to update my Eclipse installation and I remembered Yoxos. It's a really great service and it turns out it's been greatly improved since the last time I looked. The list of plugins is much larger and it is not littered with trial and shareware versions. Everything shown seems to be the open source stuff that you'd want to have. There may be a few pay-for packages, but I haven't run into them yet.

You can also create "profiles" which are groups of features. Then you can create a download list by selecting either features individually or with profiles (yours or created by others). Downloading this list creates a single archive (.tar.gz) that contains a fully configured eclipse directory. Just unpack and use.

One problem though appears to be that you can't remove individual features from the eclipse installation created in this way. The standard eclipse update facility is installed but the Uninstall button seems to be disabled on everything but the "Eclipse Platform" feature. One can download additional features from Yoxos from inside Eclipse. But they too cannot be uninstalled. The only way to undo changes is by reverting the entire configuration. So you can back up a step but you can't remove things out of order. This lack of Uninstall support is strange. I can only assume that it is required for Yoxos to do its magic. But it is not explained anywhere that I've seen.

There seems to be a few new features that I haven't tried yet. You can publish your workspace configuration, team project sets, mylyn queries, and other things. This allows sharing your setup between multiple computers - something that I constantly need to do between my work desktop and laptop.

All in all - Yoxos is a wonderful service for eclipse users. I highly recommend it. In fact, I'd say never download Eclipse from the main site any more. Yoxos is the way!

Or, just use the Yoxos update site in a stock Eclipse. For example, enter the following as an update site:
http://update1.yoxos.com/dist/3.4.1.081002/site.xml