in Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep, Dave Thomas talks about the problems of treating developers as interchangeable cogs (or fungible resources, as the project management crowd would say). Some great ideas for bringing new team members up to speed quickly (about 18 minutes in);
in The Top 10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Scalability and Reliability, Cameron Purdy of Oracle talks about scaling Java. Obviously it’s not an impartial view but his points are good ones and it’s an interesting talk;
in Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture, Mat Wall and Nik Silver talk about their experiences applying DDD at the Guardian’s web site, it covers why they selected DDD as a method as well as the benefits that they feel it brought. I’ve heard them talk about this before, on SE Radio, and to be honest, it worked better in that format I thought - the written version here needs to be edited down to about half it’s current length;
finally, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talks about the benefits of, and problems of conducting, architectural reviews. I’ve listened to some of this before as Rebecca did an interview with SE Radio a while back, but this is good for people who haven’t heard her talk before.
It’s pretty neat and is exactly the type of thing that Wil Shipley is talking about here when he mentions adding features to your apps that constantly surprise users in a good way (I’ve seen designers from BMW talk about the same thing in the context of styling their car interiors).
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then going to my local U.K. based Amazon page to place an order and,
well, what the fuck is that all about exactly? Check out the conversion rates…
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 28.79 British Pound = 57.526 US Dollar 28.79 US Dollar (USD) = 14.991 British Pound (GBP) Interbank rate +/- 2%
That’s getting on for sixty bucks! almost twice the price of the US site. That’s just fucking ridiculous.
]]>All is not lost however, to disable this behaviour simple open up a command prompt and run the following command:
regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
And, should you want to restore the original settings, just run the same command without the ‘u’ switch.
]]>Update: I forgot to mention this, but the error message in the validator is “*MISSING: Invalid java custom function..message”. Should help out searching via the Goog.
]]>Well, I did not know that.
]]>Added an option to republish records to different connections.
Added actions to export and import records to a binary file format (the records are stored in a ZIP based file, they are stored as wire format messages with some additional metadata).
Added an action to remove connections from the list; also, added some options to the connection list context menu to access the recent connections list.
Added a dialog to allow the user to configure different record types. The underlying code to support this was present in the 1.5 release, but there was no way to access it short of editing the saved project file by hand.
The build system no longer strips out unused classes from the included libraries. This increases the size of the download but in some cases the licenses of included libraries require this, and it simplifies the build process, which is a Good Thing.
Started to use the Commons Lang and Commons IO libraries from Apache instead of the utility classes that I had written myself. The next step is to start using Commons Logging instead of my own custom logger.
A full list of features can be found in the plan file in the RvSnoop Subversion repository, but some of the big ones that will impact the overall architecture of RvSnoop are…
I’m going to migrate the record ledger to being persistent, there are a couple of options here as to how this will be handled: flat files, a combination of flat files and Lucene based indexes, or some kind of JDBC backed store.
One option would be to make the persistence mechanism plug-able, this would also ease the use of an all-in-memory storage system, like the one that is currently used (which is useful when you just want to use RvSnoop as a graphical replacement for tibrvlisten).
I’d like to add the ability to run RvSnoop without the UI, this would be based on loading a pre-configured project. Combining this feature with a JDBC backed store this could be really useful for auditing and logging messages.
I registered the emssnoop.org domain at the same time as rvsnoop.org, and there has been a project on SourceForge for a while, even if it hasn’t had anything checked in to it yet! An open question is whether to try for generic JMS support or just work with EMS directly.
It would be nice to be able to cleanly extend RvSnoop if required, without going back and modifying the main code base.
All (well, most) of these features point to a need for an extensible plug-in system, Eclipse has shown that a good way of architecting a desktop application (or any application, for that matter) is to build it entirely from plug-ins wrapped around a small core.
So, the upshot of this is that I’m planning on migrating to a managed runtime, probably OSGi, for the 2.0 release. I’ll talk about this more in another post. In particular, what’s the cost/benefit ratio of using this type of runtime; and which runtimes are good?
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