Blogs
Swarming Across Distance Posted at InfoQ
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 05/21/2012
I have an article posted at InfoQ, Swarming Across Distance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. You have to think about how to swarm. It’s not always intuitively obvious. Enjoy! more »
Programs and Technical Debt
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 05/15/2012
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always separated by function and time zone. So, my nice example of a collocated team in Thoughts on Infrastructure, Technical Debt, and Automated Test Framework, rarely...more »
Graphs in the Cloud: Spring + Neo4j on Heroku
Posted by: James Ward on 05/14/2012
Last week I hosted a webinar about running Java apps on Heroku that use the Spring Framework and the Neo4j graph database. Here is the recording of that webinar: In the webinar I began by deploying a copy of the Spring MVC + Hibernate template app from heroku.com/java on Heroku. Then I made a few modifications to the app to switch the persistence from Hibernate / JPA to Neo4j. You can get the full source code on GitHub. Here is a quick recap of what I did to switch the template app to use...more »
Management Myth #3 and #4 Posted at Techwell
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 05/09/2012
I’ve been writing a series of management myths this year. I didn’t realize when myth #3 went live and #4 went live yesterday. Management Myth #3: We Must Treat Everyone the Same Way and Management Myth #4: I Don’t Need One-on-Ones are up. Please leave comments over at Techwell. more »
From now on, I’m calling it GroovyString
Posted by: Kenneth Kousen on 05/09/2012
I’ve been doing a lot of introductory Groovy presentations lately, and an issue keeps coming up that I feel I have to address. I’ve had to think hard about how to do this, though, because I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m probably going to fumble it a bit, so please forgive me if I ramble. Lately there have been several episodes in the IT industry of boys behaving badly. A recent article in Mother Jones has a good summary. In short, a few guys in this industry have...more »
Why Does Management Care About Velocity?
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 05/08/2012
I’ve been talking to people whose management cares about their velocity. “My management wants us to double our velocity.” Or, “My management wants us to do more in a sprint.” Or, “My management wants to know when we will be a hyper-performing team, so they want to know when we will get 12x velocity like Scrum promised.” “Double Your Velocity” is an agile schedule game. It’s easy to manage–you double the points you assign to your...more »
Play 2 Java Tutorial
Posted by: James Ward on 05/08/2012
I’ve created a Play 2 Tutorial and posted it on GitHub! The tutorial covers how to: Create a Play App Set up an IDE Start the Play Server Routes Test a Route Update a Controller Test a Controller Update a View Test a View Deploy your app on the Cloud with Heroku Create a Model Create UI for Adding Tasks Get Tasks as JSON Display the Tasks via CoffeeScript and jQuery Make the App Pretty with Twitter Bootstrap Add Form Validation Update the App on Heroku Each section has a corresponding...more »
Heroku, Java, Play and Neo4j Presos: Denver JUG, Atlanta JUG, London Flash UG & Webinar
Posted by: James Ward on 05/07/2012
Over the next couple weeks I’ll be doing two Java User Group presentations, a Flash Platform User Group presentation and one Webinar. Hope to see you at one of these events: Wednesday May 9 – Denver Java User Group: Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps in the Cloud Thursday May 10 – Webinar hosted by Neo4j: Graphs in the Cloud: Neo4j and Heroku Tuesday May 15 – Atlanta Java User Group: Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps on the Cloud Thursday May 24 – London Flash...more »
Pragmatic Managers Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 05/04/2012
I have posted my two most recent Pragmatic Manager email newsletters: Building Rapport Distributed? Yes. Alone? No. If you think you subscribe, but you are not receiving your own personal copy, email me. We’ll discern what is going on with your subscription and fix it. If you don’t already subscribe, and you would like your own subscription, either sign up using the handy-dandy form on the right, or email me, and I can add you myself. more »
Heroku Presos: Denver Open Source UG and Future Insights Live
Posted by: James Ward on 04/30/2012
This week I’ll be doing two presentation about Heroku: Tuesday May 1 – 5:30 PM at the Denver Open Source Users Group:Heroku Cloud Computing Platform Thursday May 3 – 12:25pm at Future Insights Live (Las Vegas):Client/Server Apps with HTML5 and Java Hope to see you there!more »
WebJars in Spring MVC
Posted by: James Ward on 04/30/2012
Last week I announced the WebJars project that allows you to specify your web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as dependencies in your Java web applications. With some help from Jeremy Grelle I was able to get a simple WebJars Spring MVC example working. First you will need to add the WebJars repository to your build. For Maven, just add the following to your “pom.xml” build file: <repositories> <repository> <id>webjars</id> ...more »
Introducing WebJars – Web Libraries as Managed Dependencies
Posted by: James Ward on 04/25/2012
Update: I’ve created a Spring MVC WebJars example. Our web apps are using more and more web libraries like jQuery, Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap. The traditional way to use those libraries is to locate & download the JavaScript and CSS source then just copy it into a project. To me this resembles how we used to just copy JAR files into a project’s WEB-INF/lib dir. But why not do with web libraries like we now do with Java libraries and specify them as managed...more »
Great Recollections from the Geographically Distributed Teams Workshop
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 04/25/2012
Shane and the participants and I had a great time at the Geographically Distributed Agile Teams workshop last week. We ran a couple of simulations, and here are some of the emails the teams had: Do you have something for us to test yet? We have completed the card Hi again. I didn’t hear back from you yesterday on this. We’ve already lost a day of status. Please find some time today to send us your status. Hurry. I need to test! Hi guys and gals, in the standup you mentioned that you...more »
Heroku for Java, Scala & Play at the Houston JUG and NFJS Virginia
Posted by: James Ward on 04/24/2012
This week I will be presenting about Running Java, Scala, and Play apps on Heroku at the Houston JUG and at No Fluff Just Stuff in Reston, VA: Houston JUG – Wednesday April 25 at 6:30pmRunning Java and Play! Apps on the Cloud NFJS – Reston, VA – Saturday April 28 at 3:15pmRunning Java and Scala Apps on Heroku Hope to see you there!more »
Overcoming Perfection Rules
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 04/24/2012
I have a tough time with my perfection rules. I want to be perfect. I’m not, of course. I want to be. So using leanpub and publishing early and often pushes me way out of my comfort zone. Which is why you haven’t heard anything from me about my book under development up until now. Yesterday, I announced the beta of my newest book Manage Your Job Search: Reduce Your Overwhelm, Focus Your Search, and Get Your Next Job! I couldn’t just push the button and publish. Oh no, no, no. I...more »
MockHttpServer for Testing Android HTTP Client
Posted by: Vladimir Vivien on 04/22/2012
While developing an Android project, I needed to test an HTTP client service layer running in my application. I wanted to ensure I unit tested features such as ability to send/receive headers, request http resources, and deal with HTTP response codes properly. However, I did not want to run my JUnit tests using an external HTTP server. This would create a dependency on yet another technology that I would have to launch with Maven. Furthermore, using an external server would make it difficult to...more »
Yet More Spock Magic: Mocks
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 04/20/2012
Spock's built-in mock object capabilities are just a dream to use ... unlike other systems I've used, it doesn't get in your way, or force you to think backwards or inside out. Once again, some listings. These are for tests of Tapestry IoC's AspectDecorator service, which is used to create a wrapper interceptor around some other object. The test below shows how a supplied MethodAdvice callback object is invoked by the interceptor, if the advice is associated with the invoked method. TestNG...more »
Yet Another Bit of Spock Love
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 04/19/2012
I'm gradually converting a back-log of existing tests to Spock ... and some of them convert so beautifully, it hurts. Here's an example: Before (Java and TestNG) After (Spock) What a difference; the data-driven power of the where: block makes this stuff a bit of a snap, and you can see in once place, at a glance, what's going on. IDEA even lines up all the pipe characters automatically (wow!). It's obvious how the tests execute, and easy to see how to add new tests for new cases. By...more »
Roll Your Own Posted on Gantthead.com
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 04/11/2012
My column, Roll Your Own, about how to organize for teamwork for a geographically distributed agile project team is up. Please leave comments there. Enjoy! Oh, and I am just about to send the logistics email for our workshop next week on geographically distributed agile teams next week in Pleasanton, CA. I am sure we will discuss issues such as these. Have questions? Still want to participate? Email me. more »
Jmx-Cli: A Command-Line Console to JMX
Posted by: Vladimir Vivien on 04/10/2012
One of the reasons I created the Clamshell-Cli Framework originally was to develop a text-based console for JMX. Well, it is here. Introducing Jmx-Cli: Jmx-Cli a command-line interface console for JMX. It was developed using the Clamshell-Cli framework (http://code.google.com/p/clamshell-cli/) to prove that the framework was flexible enough to create a useful tool. Installing Jmx-Cli Download the current distribution from https://github.com/vladimirvivien/jmx-cli/downloads. Unzip at the...more »
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NFJS, the Magazine
May Issue Now AvailableClient-Side MVC with Spine.js, Part 1
by Craig WallsOn Prototypal Inheritance, Part 2
by Raju GandhiMaking use of Scala Lazy Collections
by Venkat SubramaniamIntegration Testing Web Applications Using Gradle
by Kenneth Kousen


