Archive for April, 2007

Stop using processes?

April 8th, 2007

Ivar Jacobson, one of the inventors of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) has published an article in DDJ where he argues that we ought to stop using processes, and concentrate on practices instead. This has caused some irritation. My comment was:

“Brendon, I think to be fair one should mention that the RUP authors have always said that RUP was a framework that needed to be adopted to whatever the requirements of the project. They’ve also stated time and again that the discipline’s workflows are *basic* workflows, and that rarely every activity needed to be worked, nor is every artifact to be completed in all projects. Also, from day 1, the RUP stated that what’s most important is to build executable software rather than to document every step of the way. However, interestingly enough, organisations wouldn’t listen, and started to follow every single step the RUP ever described, getting overwhelmed by so much process overdose. Probably, with hindsight, it was a blunder to call UP a process. It should have been Unified Practices.

So in essense, IMHO Jacobson hasn’t really come up with a new concept, rather he’s finally found another approach where people would listen. But the meaning of what he says seems mostly unchanged.”

EasyEclipse

April 7th, 2007

If you need to get up to speed with a complete development environment, you may want to check out EasyEclipse. The site provides ready-made distributions of Eclipse for Java, J2EE, PHP, Python and Ruby development. It also has a good section on how to set up required servers etc.

I’m currently working on a server-side distribution, called Arthur, that will include a ready-to-run debian image with trac, subversion and trax installed. It will enable plug & run for PHP, Perl and GCC development. And best of all, it will fit on a 1-2GB USB stick, so you can take it with you and are ready to go wherever you are. I’m currently thinking of integrating EasyEclipse so it will be even more useful.

How to clean your mighty mouse

April 7th, 2007

There’s a good instruction on how to clean your mighty mouse. It worked for me, despite the outer ring now looks a bit dashed, but never mind. After the procedure, the mouse worked just fine again.

model-as-you-code

April 2nd, 2007

model-first is not necessarily a good idea
code-only neither
but if you can write your classes directly without modelling first, and still come up with a well-modeled solution. why not? everything else is a productivity-hinderer
ergo: what we need is *seamless* code/model transformation.
assumption: the code and the model are different sides of the same coin.

we also need collaberative modeling. i.e. joint-whiteboards for modelling. eclipse plugin: collaberative modeling perspective

interesting links:
http://lightuml.sourceforge.net/
http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/umlgraph/
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/UmlSketchingTools.html