Skip to main content

2nd day at GearConf

I was gonna post this Friday evening, but I got knocked out by a cold over the weekend. Anyhow, here's Friday's highlights from GearConf the way I remember it:

Stephan Hochdörfer did a talk on building software using generators and DSLs. The message didn't quite reach me, but the idea of generative programming was interesting enough. Some concrete examples and demos would have helped.

Afterwards, Martin Geisler presented Mercurial's Query Language (PDF link) - which was a really impressive array of features. As is obvious of this blog, I lean towards Git as a favorite SCM, but through this talk I feel I really *got* Mercurial. With bookmarks and queues, it's basically has the same firepower as Git. The only aber aber about Mercurial I find to be the GPL licensing. I reckon this will make it trickier for 3rd parties to implement tool support (example: FogBug's Kiln uses Mercurial).

Onwards to a double talk with Hans Dockter, the Gradle chief. This was another eye-opener. I always thought Gradle was something of a Maven clone in Groovy, but turns out the Gradle philosophy is a bit different: Bend and adapt to the requirements of the build, rather than imposing standards and conventions.

Now, I'm a big Maven fan, and I know the old "You're doing it wrong!" argument used facing people with Maven issues. The way I see it:

  • Many projects try to do stuff wrong because they don't know any better.
  • Some projects try to do stuff wrong because they have to. 
The problem with the Maven fundamentalists, is that they put everyone in the first category. I suspect Gradle honors all users by putting them in the first. While this is very nice, it gives validation to a lot of sub-optimal builds out there.

At the end of the day, I think most Java projects (components might be a better word) out there are very simple: Java files go in, JAR-file comes out. For these projects, Maven works great. Even for the average webapp, Maven will work fine. However, for our main product, with all its special packaging, shrink-fitting and so on, I might consider Gradle a better tool for the job.


So quickly now the last two talks:

Stefan Glase present CodeNarc, static code analysis for Groovy. I might be going a lot deeper into Groovy soon, so this was a nice tip on a tool to use for keeping my code in check.

Last presentation was Thomas Koch presenting Gerrit. I've played around with Gerrit a lot the last weeks, and it's a great tool - it deserves a lot of presentations.  However, in this talk I would have liked to see less screenshots of Gerrit, and more demoing of the software itself. Thomas did have a running Gerrit on his machine where he showed one thing and the other, so why not use through the whole presentation? Cut down on the slides, folks!

In conclusion, I really enjoyed the conference. I think it is probably a bit too small (60 attendees I reckon) for the organizers, but the content is great. Some innovation into the shape of the conference would be nice though: How bout doing a bit less of the 45 minute presentations, and more stuff like lightning talks and panel debates? Also, get active on Twitter and social websites (like SpeakerRate and Lanyrd).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config...