After reading Mike Clark’s amazing book on Automation, I’ve been pumped to take a look at Continuous integration with CruiseControl. We’ve been using Anthill for our build process, so that’ll give me a benchmark to compare. First of all, my experience with Anthill has been pretty sensational. Its got a very smick UI and seems to work pretty well as spec’d on the tin. The install is a matter of dragging the war file into [...]

And it’s not about software development…. directly… but it has helped my productivity more than any other title I’ve read in my career. It’s called Take Back Your Life and it’s a book on using Outlook to get your world it order. Don’t be put off by the Outlook thing, the ideas work in any software package that offers categorised tasks, calendar and contacts, so Evolution would work great too. The ideas in this book [...]

ejbRemove() doesn’t *always* get called, at least on WebSphere 5.0. Well… it’s shocking truth to me, but probably to none of you guys, and I’m not sure that it even should. I don’t know why I assumed that it did, it just *seemed* that it would given that it’s a lifecycle method. I’ve been using a strategy where I register a JMX object in ejbCreate() and unregister it in ejbRemove(). Seemed pretty reasonable thing to [...]

I’ve spent the last month getting to know SWT, and I’ve gotta say that I’ve written my last Swing app. After spending far too long messing with Swing MVC pattern and writing modeller code for my damn combo boxes, that’s it. I’ve had it. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not smart enough to grok Swing. But I was still missing a decent sized SWT app that would prove me to that humans [...]