Continuous Integration

As the first deployment has gone to it’s dot O pains I had some time to setup a nice continious integration environment. As the application I redesigned had been working for a couple of years, and mine probably will 2 continious integration is almost a must.

In the past I already had read some books on this matter, and in those cases they mostly opted for cruiscontrol , an opensource framework (ffcourse). So yesterday I did the setup, except setting up the automatic checkout from CVS everything wen’t flawless. Except some usecases that weren’t up to date with the data in the db. (I know, I can use dbunit for doing that, but don’t think that’s necessary).

Today I’ll be fixing my testcases, as I only ran the fast ones for a while (as the whole testsuite took much to long). Well with this in place I can sleep more safely 🙂 Now subscribe to the RSS feed and off we go! I forgot how nice it is to have an environmnt in your back that checks everything you ever wrote. So for you peepz who don’t know what I’m talking about, go read up on it!!!

PS as On my work I’m on a win machine, I’m giving flock a go, this is blogged using flock so i’m rather interested in the result 🙂

Blogged with Flock

A screenshot :

cruisecontrol

audio vs video

A couple a days ago I was talking to freax about doing a vidcast. why, well it sounded great but also because I want to give something back to the community. I had the idea of doing a podcast about programming, not the things you see on most of the show but actually going rather deep into it.
Some of the ideas about subjects I head were ie doing a podcast on hibernate, so not just telling you what it is but showing you in an IDE an example and building a real world example I would be using on my own website/intranet.
Another Idea was to build an application using a Service Oriented Architecture. And then show some of the benefits that came from doing it this way.
I wanted freax to join and tell his stories about using design patterns in C. Showing some of the neat tricks he used in his day to day work.

While I was explaining this to him, he told me someone had asked him to write a book about design patterns in C. Now a book sounds great, and looks good on your CV, but then I told him, imagine Robert Love had not written his book on kernel programming, but made an iptv show on it. Okay it would have taken several hours but you can do so much more with visual things and movement than static content.

Today I read werners blog, he had a nice comparison chart in there of how much you learn from several mediums. Now in this chart audio/video are the same, but for me that’s certainly not true. My mind more easily stores visual information than audio information.

I’m still thinking about doing such an iptv show, but haven’t got the details figured out yet. I think the release time would be every month or so. But If I start this I want to have a schedule planned out for at least 10 episodes. I’m still thinking about good subjects. Java,Mono and C are already in there, but what precise subject I haven’t figured out yet.

doing client appz

In my day job, I mostly do enterprise java applications. Now I don’t know why, but the most enterprise java jobs I’ve done are all web based. Almost always using the MVC design pattern.

In my spare time, I also write appz both client and web applications. Because I know the most important design patterns, and I know how to implement them in a webapp, it’s rather easy to do a webapp. But for client appz I was always puzzled.

Let me give an example, in the webapp you have certain states where you can store objects that you access. You have the pageContext to store objects that should be only available for the lifetime of that page, request is from you receive the request till you flush your response,your session, as long as the user stays connected,…

But how do you do this in a client app? You only have 1 state, at least in the default appz, I think there maybe some out there where you have more, but lets forget about them.

Here are some design patters for the client (blog by J Aaron) , I’ve done MVC in client programs but not the way he describes them, I’m surely gonna do the next project using one of the described patterns, and the next will start this eveing :), forgot to make an applicatoin for somebody.

Hey I’m a pattern freak 2 🙂 (how many discussion we’ve already got about patterns, it’s really uncountable!) Check out his latest blogs, you’ll see what I mean 😉