I have been a Java developer for over 10 years, during which I have used Maven or one of it’s successors (Gradle or Ant+Ivy) for build and dependency management. It was obvious to me early on that Maven’s dependency management was its killer feature. I began evangelizing Maven and converting teams to use it. The days of… [Read more…]
March 4, 2011
Last week, I was asked to give my opinion on Application Lifecycle Management or ALM. Specifically, I was asked how can teams effectively manage their design, development, test and deploy processes as well as pick the right tools for the job. Here is the answer I gave: The cornerstone of a strong ALM process is based… [Read more…]
February 9, 2011
I wanted to share a method for enabling a Maven Build Profile in the absense of a system property. I did not see this approach documented in the current version of the Maven Build Profile documentation, so I thought I would share it. I find this approach particularly useful for turning off build features whenever… [Read more…]
September 9, 2010
I have encountered more than one development team who takes the approach of building their application from source for every environment they plan on deploying to. While this approach works (and depending on the technology, may be necessary), it introduces numerous opportunities for errors and makes debugging a failed deployment increasingly difficult. By migrating to a Build Once, Deploy Many approach, your team can simplify their deployment process, by making it repeatable and easier to debug.
May 7, 2010
Last year I was asked to give a 1 day workshop on how to write unit tests. I put together a presentation and workshop format and it was a huge success. The team quickly took to not only writing unit tests but was able to quickly utilize mock frameworks and other testing tools. Code coverage for the application quickly jumped and management was pleased. I recently took another look at this presentation to see if I wanted to revise anything and I thought that I might want to share some of the thoughts here. These guidelines are intended to get somebody started with unit testing quickly, but could be a welcome refresher for somebody who has been writing tests for a while.
February 16, 2010
I was impressed last year when I found that the M2eclipse Eclipse plugin handled multi-module projects checked out of Subversion using Subclipse with ease. Eclipse does not natively support a nested multi-module project structure recommended by Maven, and getting the two to work well together has historically been a pain. M2eclipse has solved this by… [Read more…]
December 17, 2011
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