XPDays 2007

The XPDays Germany 2007 will take place November, 23th in Karlsruhe. It is the leading conference in Germany dealing with agile topics and the sister of other XPDays in other countries. This year I'm part of the program committee and currently evaluating the submissions.

BTW: have a look on my Wikipedia article about Extreme Programming. I wrote the article last summer with the help of a hand full censors. As I started the article it was something like a draft, some few sentences. After my editing it received the predicate "worth reading" and is a very verbose german essay on the topic -- I did not see any other article until now which is free as well and contains a similar complex discussion.

It was really helpful to get feedback by people who normally work in totally other disciplines. I remember a lot of nightly discussions with people who do not have any technical skills at all. Thanks Wikipedia.

Further gold plating ....

Today I had a workshop with my lector. We commited on doing some further adjustments and gold plating. There was a good proposal submitted by one censor which I include definitely. As a consequence there will be one further, new chapter ...

Finishing the book to be published in August (the current schedule) could be tough under these conditions, so expect it a bit later. Quality over time.

JavaSpektrum 4.2007 JavaOne 2007 article: Redux

The current JavaSpektrum issue No. 4 2007 contains a report from my JavaOne trip this year to San Francisco. I was invited by Sun Microsystems and glady accepted the invitation to lead a BOF.

So time goes on and meanwhile the article is a bit obsolete in one point. There is an Eclipse plugin for JavaFX now. So you are not fixed to NetBeans if you wonna try JavaFX. The quality of the plugin is ok ... you know, the whole technology is pretty new.

An update on a second point: Germany will host a Sun Tech Day in 2007. This is a big honour and success for the german Java community. Actually I was the first one who was informed about that by Sun's director of Technology Outreach personally. The Sun Tech Day will take place December 5-7, 2007 in Frankfurt.

You can find the PDF version of the article here.

Enjoy the article. :-)

TeamCity

Recently I wrote an article for the german Javamagazin about JetBrains' leading Continuous Integration server TeamCity. It is the second article in the series after I wrote about IntelliJ IDEA 6 some months ago. The TeamCity article will be published soon.

I started with describing the needs for Continuous Integration. Based on a common build scenario which I used in production on CruiseControl I discussed the typical steps for setting up TeamCity and customizing it for processing the Ant scripts. Beside TeamCity 2.1 my scenario includes Subversion 1.4.2, Ant 1.7.0, JUnit 4.1, EMMA 2.0.5312 and IntelliJ IDEA 7M1. The last part is pretty interesting.

I used the TeamCity plugin for connecting IDEA with TeamCity. This way I can start new builds from out of the IDE or take responsibility for broken builds. A nice features is also the "remote run" functionality. You can put your local changes to TeamCity which includes them into the target build. TeamCity then builds the software -- a personal build just for you.

Optionally TeamCity can commit your local changes to the VCS after the successful build. Isn't this great? Your personal build has no impact on your desktop, and you can go home after triggering it. If the tests went through the artifacts will be commited automatically. If not .. you get a pointer next morning.

My Javamagazin article does include a full-fledged description of setting up the server, gives hints and an evaluation of TeamCity, the IDE integration and the build migration from CruiseControl to TeamCity.

My book, final spurt ...

I'm currently doing some last adjustments on my book "Agile Softwareentwicklung in der Praxis". Recently I received some further feedback from censors and my lector. Beside that during my seminar on "Agile testing of Java Swing applications" in-house last week I got a very helpful suggestion I want to include into the book, too. The book will be published end of August. It took me about one year of writing ... I think I will write a different post about my experiences, why I wrote this book and my long journey of writing and finishing it.

03.07.: IDE Bash with NetBeans, JetBrains, Oracle and Eclipse

On July, 3rd, the big IDE Shootout of the JUGC took place with the official representatives of JetBrains, Oracle, Eclipse und NetBeans. The event was sponsored by theserverside.com with drinks and pizza. Every IDE had a speaking slot of 30 minutes before a panel discussion ended the happening. The event was the first one world-wide where the leading Java IDEs joined one session and even Eclipse was part of it.
Details on jugcologne.org.


f.l.t.r: Wayne Beaton (Eclipse Evangelist, Eclipse Foundation, Ottawa, Canada), Ann Oreshnikova (Marketing Director JetBrains, St. Petersburg), Michael Hüttermann (JUGC/host), Roman Strobl (NetBeans Evangelist, Sun Microsystems, Prague), Frank Nimphius (Principal Product Manager Oracle/JDeveloper, Germany), Maxim Shafirov (JetBrains, Responsible for IntelliJ IDEA, St. Petersburg), Mike Aizatsky (JetBrains, Responsible for Web Development IntelliJ IDEA, St. Petersburg).