~pperalta

Today has been a busy day thus far at TSE 2005. The talk by Keith and Christian was not so much about Agile as it was about the Spring build environment. Instead of having one monolithic build, they are moving towards a more modular approach where each component of the project (such as core, aop, dao, etc) has its own build file. They are also setting up common build targets that are shared across the various build files for each module. Jar file dependency is handled by a project called Ivy. Previously I had known of only Maven that handled this sort of thing. However Ivy is focused strictly towards jar dependencies, whereas Maven has a larger scope.

Christian is one of the main developers for the Spring IDE project which is an Eclipse plugin for managing Spring projects. It performs validation for Spring XML files, including format (making sure the file conforms to the DTD) and content (by making sure the various classes and properties exist. It also generates a graphical representation of the application context configuration. One nice feature of this project is the graphical editor for Spring Web Flow. Since SWF is a moving target, the IDE does not have support for the latest and greatest, but it should be catching up as soon as SWF goes 1.0.

Next I attended a talk by the always entertaining Matt Raible on TDD with Spring and Hibernate. This talk was mostly in the context of App Fuse, which I had heard him talk about previously at the Orlando JUG. He mentioned a class that is provided by Spring that makes it easier to test DAOs. It wraps a transaction around a test method and performs a rollback when the method has executed, which allows testing with a real database (as opposed to using mocks) but prevents polluting the database with test data. Right now I have a test DAO layer where the transaction boundaries are defined at the DAO method layer. Even though I do have a test database that I can pretty much trash, it would be nice to not have to. I think I’ll give this test class a closer look.

Tip for those at TSE 2005

If you’re having trouble with the wireless network in the hotel, I have had success by running:

ipconfig /release

and

ipconfig /renew

I find that I have to do this every few minutes, otherwise I loose connectivity. Running ipconfig /renew by itself did not help; I also had to release the IP.

For the next few days I will be attending The Spring Experience in south Florida. Jim Moore and I will be presenting a case study on how we use Spring for our call tracking application in Symantec. Yesterday we had dinner and a keynote by Rod Johnson and some of the core developers. Much of the talk was about the history of Spring and the release of Spring 2.0 M1. Some of the new features include

• XML schema to simplify configurations such as JNDI, AOP
• Webflow enhancements
• Improved integration with AspectJ, including the use of the AspectJ pointcut language to declare Spring AOP pointcuts
• Message driven POJOs

I just attended the talk on Spring, Mule, and the ESB. It was a nice introduction to ESB (enterprise service bus) and Mule, the open source ESB implementation. In a nustshell, Mule is used for a decentralized messaging system. It appears to be a well thought out system, especially because of how decoupled the architecture is. It does not just rely on JMS; message endpoints can be set up using many different technologies such as EJB, SOAP, SMTP, FTP, etc. It provides a mechanism to transform data to and from the various message formats. It is also very POJO based, which makes it a great candidate to be integrated and configured with Spring.

Next I’ll be attending a talk on Spring in an agile environment with Keith Donald and Christian Dupuis. More to come later.

In the meanwhile, you can see a much more extensive description of the keynote on Matt Raible’s site.

Today JBoss announced that it has acquired transaction management technology from Arjuna Technologies and HP. They plan on releasing it as open source and integrating it into the application server by the end of Q1 2006.

This is an interesting development because one of the areas where JBoss has always lagged behind the commercial offerings has been distributed transaction management. In particular, the JBoss transaction manager does not perform logging. Distributed XA transactions can still be done, but the lack of logging could lead to data loss if the application server or one of the transactional resources goes down (which kind of defeats the purpose of XA). If this integration works well it could open up opportunities for JBoss in sectors where a commercial app server was the only option.

I saw this article in the Orlando Sentinel, and chuckled at some of the suggestions:

• Orlando: Overdeveloped and growing
• Orlando: Where motorists and imagination meet
• Cleveland, without the glitter
• R skools werks good
• Home of the $7-an-hour employees
• We killed a charming town for you, so get your butt down here and have some fun!
• Big city growth, small town minds
• Gone to the dogs, led by a mouse
• Dyer Straits
• Orlando: The mayor’s your Buddy, and everyone else is your friend.