Walking on the Wrong Side of the Street

The first time I ever went to Sydney, Australia, I couldn't get in sidewalk sync. It seemed like every time I walked down the sidewalk, I was walking head-long into groups of people. It was almost like I was swimming upstream. Then it dawned on me: these folks are used to driving on the left-hand side of the road, so they tend to walk on the left-hand side of the sidewalk too. Suddenly, it made sense, and my sidewalking skills improved overnight.

The same thing occurred to me this morning while I was walking from my hotel to the offices in ThoughtWorks India, and I noticed that everyone here (also being a former British colony) walks and drives on the left-hand side. Which side you tend towards when walking is one of those intrinsic, automatic things that you don't even realize is part of your cultural literacy until you go somewhere where it's the opposite.

The same kind of automatic response happens when developing software. I span the Java and .NET worlds, and I think it's interesting to see the kinds of cultural ticks that programmers from specific platforms develop. For example, in the Java world, you build frameworks for everything. In the .NET world, you organize things around the limitations of namespaces and solution files in Visual Studio, because it's the only real choice when it comes to IDEs. I have an advantage because I live part time in both worlds, so I try to spot cultural eccentricities whenever I sense myself walking on the wrong side of the street. Some things make sense in both cultures (like unit testing), while others are little more than arbitrary cultural baggage.

Dynamic Typing in the Strangest Places

One of my favorite things in college was the accidental synergy that happened between the collection of classes taken in a single quarter. Sure, compiler theory and automata match one another, but it's even more interesting when a history and computer science class find ways to complement one another. I get some of the same type of cross-pollination of ideas when speaking at conferences -- some of the topics end up complementing each other in odd ways.

It happened recently in St. Louis at No Fluff, Just Stuff. Part of the weekend, I was talking about how document centric messaging in SOA avoids endpoint versioning headaches. Later in the weekend, I was talking about the flexibility afforded by dynamic languages and their loose typing. Then, it occurred to me: SOA and the document centric approach is really just another version of dynamic or loose typing. If you free the plumbing from having to know what types you are passing (in this case, just a blob of XML), you create a more flexible system, able to withstand changes more gracefully. Just like with dynamic languages.

I've been sauteing in this idea for a while: we are building the same kind of application right now on the project I'm on. And, even though it's written in .NET 2, we take advantage of loose typing in the transport layer, which ultimately makes for a more robust application. How do we handle catching version conflicts? The way you should handle all such situations: unit testing. Loose typing + unit testing provides the same security you get with strongly typed languages but much more flexibility

Finally, An Accurate Representation of My Graphical Skills

During a lunchtime conversation today, because of the specific context, I came up with a great quote about my abilities as a graphical designer:

Graphical design is like pornography: I know it when I see it, I don't want to participate in it, and you don't want to see me try it either.

'Nuff said.

A Dearth of Fluff, Significant Stuff

As my regular reader(s?) must have noticed, I've been very quiet for a while. No, I haven't given up pontificating; I've been working diligently on a new year of No Fluff, Just Stuff presentations. Every year, I cull some of my old talks from the herd and send them to the virtual glue factory and add some new, spry colts to the fold. This year, I've added about 4 new talks and killed the same number, and I've been spending the last couple of months getting them in shape. This last weekend was the debut of a couple of them (along with 5 of my existing talks).

No Fluff, Just Stuff Gateway Software Symposium occurred in St. Louis over the weekend. I gave a total of 7 talks: clean Up Your Code, Advanced Enterprise Debugging Techniques, SOA & ESB: The Future of Distributed Computing or the Return of the Son of CORBA?, Pragmatic XP, the new Testing with Selenium, the also new The Productive Programmer, and finally Language-oriented Programming and Language Workbenches. Whew! It was a long weekend, but the new talks turned out well (only requiring minor tweaks, not major overhauls). And, someone was nice enough to blog about one of my talks (always good to get feedback).

It's great to get back to No Fluff. Many of the speakers are good friends, so it's good to see them again. One of the speakers made an excellent observation that also applies to me: I have more friends that travel the country every weekend than I do at home! It's good to be back in the saddle again.

Dependency Injection in Geronimo, Part 2

As surely as Spring follows winter, the 2nd part of my depenency injection article on DeveloperWorks is now live. This version builds on the "raw" topic of dependency injection in the 1st part and shows how it applies to Geronimo. Geronimo has a very interesting architecture, and will surprise some people who think that "dependency injection" == "Spring".

My Last Borland Post Ever (I Promise!)

Those of you who follow my blog know that I post an inordinate amount of material about Borland. I have a long-standing love for Borland: my first book was on Delphi (Developing with Delphi: Object-oriented Techniques) and my second was on JBuilder (JBuilder 3 Unleashed). I learned about real software development using Borland tools. When I bought my first computer, I bought just 2 pieces of software: DOS 3.3 and Turbo Pascal 5. And I didn't need any other software for almost a year.

Borland has perpetual financial and directional problems over the years. But, like loyal fans of Saturday Night Live, most of us stuck around even when it sucked (Inprise, anyone?)

Now, though, Borland has taken the last fatal step towards irrelevance: they are in the process of divesting their entire IDE division (check out this eWeek article). Yes, that's right: the company that brought us Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Prolog (OK, maybe we didn't need that one), Delphi, and JBuilder will no longer sell a single compiler. I wonder what Anders thinks about this (or if he even noticed).

Borland is reinventing itself as a strictly ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) company, selling tools that have awesome support for Big Design Up Front (BDUF) like CaliberRM, TogetherJ, and the Segue tools they just acquired. What a great day for Waterfall projects (I wonder if they would consider sponsoring the Waterfall 2006 conference)?

For those of us with an irrational (pun intended) love of Borland, this is indeed a dark day. RIP.

Continuous Integration Conference

An interesting (free!) conference is coming to Chicago in early April this year, an Open Space event on Continuous Integration and Automated Testing. Both of these subjects are dear to my heart, so I'm hoping to help get the word out about this conference. They organizers haven't set the date yet because they need to see how many people are interested before they will know how big a space to reserve.

Support CI and AT: contact Jeffrey Fredrick (jtf@agitar.com) or Paul Julius (pj@thoughtworks.com) through the Yahoo group groups.yahoo.com/group/citcon and sign up for the mailing list.


Automation and Testing are Good Things!

Dependency Injection in Geronimo Part 1

IBM DeveloperWorks has posted the first of a two-part series on dependency injection in the Geronimo J2EE container. This article focuses on the mechanisms of DI and uses PicoContainer as the container. I did this to divorce the idea of DI from the particular implementation in Geronimo. One of the problems I see in concepts like DI revolves around how you learn it: the implementation from which you learn influences your perception of if forever. Many developers think that DI and the way Spring works are the same thing. By using the lightest weight container I could find (PicoContainer), I hope to show DI in as context-free an environment as possible. The next part of the article takes the concepts and injects (pun intended) them in to Geronimo.

SOA Under a Giant Arch

I'm flying to St. Louis tonight to speak at the Gateway JUG. I'm doing my SOA: The Future of Distributed Computing or the Return of the Son of CORBA? talk, helping to promote the upcoming No Fluff, Just Stuff Gateway Software Symposium. Because there is so much sound and fury with so little substance in most SOA discussions, I'm trying to take a pragmatic approach to building SOA, which includes the (what I consider essential) focus on agile development techniques. I feel like I can offer some insight on this subject because I've lived through a lot of distributed computing initiatives and seen a lot of failures. This talk is about how to achieve some of the lofty goals espoused by SOA advocates with a healthy dose of skepticism.

D-Cubed

I recently read about a most interesting innovation in software development methodology I've heard in a while: Defect Driven Design (D3, pronounced "D Cubed"). This methodology addresses the weak points of most other development methodologies.

Working in D3 is very simple. At the start of the project, you announce that all development is complete and the application is ready for user acceptance testing. The first thing the user will say is "Hey, I thought there was supposed to be an icon on the desktop to launch the application". That's our first defect. We implement code to put an icon on the desktop and announce again that we are done. The user clicks on the icon and nothing happens: "Where is the application?" That's our next defect. You can imagine what the rest of the development rhythm.

The brilliance in this methodology lies in the estimation power. We can estimate with absolute accuracy: 0 days. The entire lifecycle lies in maintenance, which is more realistic because useful software is never actually complete.

Conference in a Castle

It's already time for the first conference of the year. I think this is the earliest start I've ever had. I'm speaking this weekend at the Javagruppen Arskonference conference, conducted in the Hindsgavl castle in Denmark. I heard about this conference from colleagues last year -- they had a blast, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm doing 2 talks, both on Domain Specific Languages (Theory and Practice). This will be my first trip to Denmark so, given my love of traveling to new places, should prove to be a fun trip.

Can I Get Some Rails at this Boutique?

At the Newark No Fluff, Just Stuff show last year, someone from Java Boutique interviewed speakers during the course of the symposium. It was the end of the day and he was still missing some of the speakers, so he decided he would just interview us together. The hot topic of the conference was Ruby on Rails. Thus, myself and two of the people I respect most, Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland (from Relevance), talked for about 20 minutes about Ruby, Rails, and Java. The interview is just now out at the Java Boutique web site. It's sometimes interesting what you say when you are tired, hungry, and sitting next to 2 brilliant people. Upon reflection, I like the bit about the bicycle (which I made up on the spot and forgot until I re-read this interview).

Pervasive Search

One of my good friends has a great expression when he sees some really cool technology goodie that we'll get "Real Soon Now": "I want to live there!".

One of the touted features of the next version of Windows is pervasive search, or search at the operating system level. I was skeptical of the value of this feature. After all, we now have Google Desktop, right? I can search and find documents pretty quickly now.

However, what's missing from Google Desktop is the "pervasive" part. I didn't fully appreciate this missing element until I started using the Mac, because Mac OS X now has Spotlight, Apple's version of pervasive search. Spotlight has a little icon on the menubar to let you search for stuff, just like Google search. But the pervasive part is more useful to me. Check out the standard Mac save dialog:



Because search is embedded at the OS level, I can use search to save files instead of navigating my document hierarchy. When I save a file on the Mac now, I search for the folder in which I know it belongs, then I name the file. It's not like I fear or don't understand hierarchies in a file system. But why bother doing all that navigation? I know where I want to put it, and the OS should be smart enough to let me tell it without all the ceremony. That's pervasive search, and it has changed the way I use my computer. Now, I can't wait until my work OS catches up to what is one of my favorite features of my favorite OS.

Not that Spotlight is perfect yet. It's annoyingly slow, and it sometimes yields some false positives. That irritates me. But, the benefit outweighs the annoyance factor by a lot. And I doubt that the first version of pervasive search in Windows will work perfectly either. I view this as a "I want to live there" feature: I can't wait until I can stop navigating hierarchies most of the time.

Ok vs. Silence

The very origins of DOS and Windows tells you something about the way it works now. I remember reading that in the original piece of software that Microsoft was hired to write, BASIC for the original IBM PC, one of the most difficult tasks was to get the interpreter to fit into the memory they had available in the machine's ROM. We're talking very primitive hardware here, and quite the engineering feat to work within those constraints.

One of their decisions speaks volumes about the philosophy that suffuses much of Microsoft software today. Because memory was so tight, they couldn't afford the number of bytes to print the traditional "READY>" on the screen, so they chose "Ok>" instead. If any of you remember using the BASIC built-in to the original PC, you'll remember that "Ok>" prompt.

Why say anything at all? If resources were tight, why not just provide a simple prompt when everything is OK? Like ">"? This is exactly what the Unix guys did when they needed to be frugal with resources -- they invented the idea that "no news is good news".

Take this simple distinction, "Ok" vs. "Silence", and multiply it by millions of lines of code and decades of development. What you end up with is the most annoyingly chatty software you can imagine, Windows and Office. They constantly pester me about things I don't care about ("You have un-used icons on your desktop", "You're network cable is unplugged", "Let me go harvest clip-art from the Internet for you", etc.). An alternative is Mac OS X, which is sublimely quiet most of the time, and of course command-line Unix which is positively mute (until it needs to tell you something that you really need to know).

Obviously, chatty software annoys me (I've blogged about shortcuts to turn off some of the annoying balloons in Windows before). But I had never thought about why it is that way until I remembered that, when given the choice between silence and verbosity, Bill and Paul chose the latter.

Bearable Moments

Friends and family, when they discover that I've written several technical books, ask me if I ever plan to write a novel. My stock response to that is "No! -- Writing a novel would be much more difficult for me, because in technical writing you just describe stuff, whereas in a novel, you have to create an entire internally consistent universe from whole cloth.".

Which makes Christopher Judd's Bearable Moments such a remarkable achievement. I've known Chris for years, and he's written a couple of fine technical books (Pro Eclipse JST: Plug-ins for J2EE Development and Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies. Now, he's written his first children's book, Bearable Moments. One of the most daunting tasks facing any writer (no matter what the genre) is understanding and empathizing with the intended audience. To me, that makes writing a children's book one of the toughest jobs a writer can face. Hat's off to Chris -- I hope his venture into non-technical publishing garners him the accolades he deserves.

Is Struts Over?

At ApacheCon last week, I finally met some developers for whom I have great respect: Ted Husted, Craig McClanahan, and one of the original authors of WebWork (unfortunately, I didn't get his name). It was nice to finally meet these guys, even if it was during a train wreck. About the wreck in a second, but first why I can talk about said wreck. I have no small insight into the web framework world -- I did after all write a book just over 2 years ago (Art of Java Web Development) featuring Struts (the King of the Castle at that time), Tapestry, and WebWork. I think my crystal ball wasn't bad for those 3 particular frameworks. I've been giving conference talks on framework comparisons since the book came out, as well as conducting some Birds of a Feather sessions on web frameworks. All this credentializes me in the web framework space.

I bring this up for 2 reasons. First, I think the original Struts succeeded in no small part because it was simple. If you knew how request-response worked, and you knew a few design patterns, you could figure out most of Struts in about a day. Meanwhile, the competition (Tapestry, Turbine, WebWork) were a bit more complex. This is back in the day when people weren't even sure you needed a web framework -- most people were just rolling their own. Along came Struts, which managed to hit the sweet spot of solving some problems without being too big or complex. If you spend some time with them, I think that WebWork and Tapestry are better conceived frameworks (with totally opposite approaches). Note that this was a million years before Ruby on Rails was even a glint in DHH's eyes.

The second reason I bring this up was because I found myself in a Birds of a Feather session on Struts at ApacheCon. And my distinct impression was that of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. The big news of late, of course, is the merging of WebWork into Struts. But, at the same time, the Shale extension of Struts is rolling right along. There was a great deal of discussion about how to manage to reconcile these two fundamentally different paths (action framework vs. component framework). And, unfortunately, all these efforts apparently will appear under the Struts name.

I understand the software geek drive to always reach higher and further. But I think you also need objective perspective about what you've created. Based on my observations, the Struts team has completely lost that perspective. My solution? Keep Struts right where it is, a nice simple web framework with very low barrier to entry. Go ahead and enhance WebWork (and call it WebWork), and go ahead and work on Shale (and call it Shale). Trying to make Struts into an integration platform with lots of complex moving parts kills the one thing that Struts truly has going for it: simplicity in the face of ever growing complexity in the web framework space. For the polar opposite of simplicity, see Faces, JavaServer.

Ruby for Java Developers at ApacheCon

About 6 months ago, I submitted several abstracts to ApacheCon, and two were chosen. The first was cross-language Regular Expressions, which is no big surprise, given my history with that topic. The other selection surprised me: Ruby for Java Developers. This is a talk I have prepared for No Fluff, Just Stuff, but never had a chance to deliver it (you don't get to do Ruby talks when at the same conference as Dave Thomas, nor would I want to). During the interim, Ruby has gathered even more steam, so I was anxious to give this talk and see what kind of interest was present. I talked to several people over lunch about Ruby, and everyone I talked to at the conference said they were interested my talk.

The appointed time arrived, and I wasn't disappointed. They booked it in the large keynote room, and I had over 100 people for the talk. I had to rush a bit because I had too much material (I'm sure those of you who know me will be shocked by that), but the talk turned out really well. I ran up to and slightly into the afternoon coffee break, so I made the offer for people to stick around and ask questions after the talk. I had about 10 people come up and ask me about various aspects of Ruby, and everyone was interested and engaged.

I've been positioning myself both within ThoughtWorks and externally as a pragmatist on Ruby. I really like Ruby, but I'm not ready to sell the farm on more mainstream languages yet. Ruby has tremendous potential, but there are still hard problems to be solved in Ruby before it can storm the castle walls of Java and .NET. I fully believe that those problems will fall (and I think ThoughtWorks will solve many of them, just as we solved problems in Java and .NET). Of all the candidates for "Next Big Thing", Ruby is the clear, ahead of the pack contender.

Stalking Dr. Hawking

I don't really understand the weird fetishization of celebrity in the US. It seems that everyone wants to meet someone famous and get a piece of them. What's up with autographs? What does it mean that you got someone you admire to sign a piece of paper?

I understand the desire to meet and talk to the people I admire. But, going up to a famous person and being able to enter a real conversation with them is absolutely impossible. Because nuts stalk famous people, they must always be on their guard.

Because I feel this way, I have never approached anyone to shake their hand or get an autograph -- it's utterly meaningless. Besides, there are very few people in the world whos stature I would consider worthy of an autograph. I almost walked over one of them a couple of weeks ago.

During my last trip to San Francisco, my friend Terry and I went to Beethoven's opera Fidelio. Terry was calling home, so I was walking around the beautiful opera house. As I rounded a corner, I came upon a really elaborate wheel chair. I thought to myself "Wow, that's a really elaborate Stehen-Hawking-style wheel chair". Then I walked around the front and nearly bumped into...Stephen Hawking! I remembered reading that he was in town lecturing in San Jose while I was in San Francisco. Of course, even if I wanted to get something silly like an autograph, his advanced state of Lou Gerhig's disease would make it cumbersome. As much as I'm not star struck, it was a little amazing to be so close to such a great man. If ever there was someone worthy of adoration, I would vote for him long before the pop star of the week. I hope he enjoyed the opera!

A Year at the No Fluff Round Table

The last No Fluff, Just Stuff show of the year just wrapped up a few weeks ago in Denver. My travel schedule has been pretty brutal lately (in fact, I spent the week between No Fluff Dallas and No Fluff Denver at another conference in San Francisco), so in a way I'm glad that my weekend travel is winding down for the year (just one more conference for the rest of the year, ApacheCon). I was surprised, though, at how much I dreaded the end of the show in Denver. I've made real friends with speakers on the tour this year, and the propect of not seeing any of them for 3 or 4 months affected me more than I thought it would. When you do a series like this, you end up taking for granted many of the less obvious features, like when you will see your friends again. Then, the series is over for the year, and there is no upcoming event.

This has been a great year for me at No Fluff. I ended up doing 14 shows this year, several more than I had planned, but I'm certainly glad I did. I've blogged about the extraordinary level of attendees before, and they help make the weekend fly by. But the other thing that drives me from my home for a dozen+ weekends a year is the chance to get to hang out with the other speakers.

Back in the 1920's, a group of writers, actors, and other artists started gathering a few times a week at the Algonquin hotel restaurant. This group included Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx, among others (for a great movie that depicts this group and era, check out Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle). According to legend, the Algonquin Round table discussions were the wittiest in history because they had gathered the quickest wit in New York at that time, which was the best in the world. Here are a few samples:

Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: "They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part."

Dorothy Parker: "That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them."

George S. Kaufman: Once when asked by a press agent, "How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?" Kaufman replied, "Shoot her."

No Fluff has created a geek version of this same phenomenom: the speaker's dinner. On Saturday night, the speakers go somewhere and eat, and every one of those gatherings ends up being the most fascinating coversation you can imagine. All these brilliant guys, gathered to talk about what they've been thinking about all week that they can't discuss with their spouse. I've had more revelations over food during the last year than I probably had my entire life leading up to this year. So, while I'm glad to spend some time at home, I can't wait for the next gathering of the No Fluff Round Table next year -- I'm sure that we will all have several months worth of pent-up discussion just waiting.

One of the Cool Kids Now

After (literally) years of anticipation, it has finally happened: I'm one of the cool kids. I have a Mac. Yes, I bought a PowerBook a couple of weeks ago, in anticipation of the new book project I'm starting. Here is a picture of my new baby:



I almost did this about 4 months ago, until Apple announced the Intel partnership. That froze my decision, thinking that I could hold out until the Intel PowerBooks arrived. But, because of this project (which I will talk about more in a future post), I needed it sooner rather than later.


My finger was literally hovering over the green "Buy" button on the Apple web site, but my spidey sense told me not to click yet. The very next morning, I went to the site and was greeted with the "New Powerbooks" banner headline. Because I waited the extra day, I got the video card upgrade for free, a higher resolution display, and generally cheaper machine for the same configuration. I saved enough to pay for the extra 1 GB of memory from Crucial.


I've spent the last couple of weeks getting used to the Mac, and it's a joy. Unfortunately, I now travel with 2 laptops (the ThoughtWorks issued Dell Latitude 610, which I need for work, particularly .NET development) and the PowerBook for everything else. But, it's a small price to pay to hold my head up high when I'm hanging out with the other No Fluff, Just Stuff speakers (mostly Mac guys because they can). When I write Java, I'm living the dream: using IntelliJ on a PowerBook. At least for the short term, my hedonic adaptation is sated.