This weekend I attended the Groovy and Grails Experience (2GX) conference. I had done some Groovy scripting and had played with Grails a little. However, this was a good chance to dive into some more advanced topics like Groovy metaprogramming and Grail’s GORM.
My favorite talk was Glen Smith’s overview of Grails plugins for Rich UI support, search, Ajax and more. It was a very informative and fun presentation.
The speaker’s panel discussion was one of the best I’ve seen. One of the most controversial questions was about Groovy, JRuby and the relative impedance mismatch with the Java Platform. Neil Ford of Thoughtworks initially took the position that there was no impedance mismatch with JRuby. Graeme Rocher and others listed numerous examples of where JRuby was less integrated with Java compared to Groovy. Graeme commented that although JRuby can access compiled Java classes, it is much more difficult (impossible?) for Java to use JRuby classes. Groovy classes are Java classes and so they can be used relatively transparently in Java programs.
Speaking from experience, I’ve tried to use Java libraries (QuickFIX/J) using JRuby and it has proven much more difficult than with Groovy. One issue was insufficient (and somewhat outdated) documentation about how to integrate JRuby with Java classes outside the “java.*” packages. This was a few months ago so maybe the documentation has improved. However, with Groovy I was able to use the Java libraries within a few minutes.
I agreed with a point that Neil made that having some competition in the JVM dynamic language arena helps everyone. I highly respect the work the JRuby team is doing although I believe that Groovy is a better and more pragmatic dynamic language choice for Java developers.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference. We discussed the extent that the financial technology community had embraced open source. Other members of the panel were Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, James Altucher who founded StockPickr and Graham Miller of Marketcetera. I was representing free financial open source software developers in my role as founder and project lead for the QuickFIX/J project.
There’s no question that open source technology is used widely in financial applications, especially for middle components. However, there was also a discussion about how willing the financial companies are to open source their own technology (where “technology” might include algorithms and research rather than just software).
I don’t believe any company intends to sacrifice a competitive advantage by converting their technology to open source. For that reason, I doubt that we’ll see financial companies releasing algorithms or proprietary research. However, financial companies are involved in open source in a variety of roles. The user role is probably most common today, but a few financial companies have contributed to open source. One example is the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) effort started by JP Morgan and others. This technology benefits financial software (and software from other domains) by provides a programming language-independent and vendor-independent wire protocol for message queues. For this technology to be successful it must be widely used. An open source strategy has a clear advantage here.
Another example is the Open Financial Market Platform (OFMP) which has recently become an Eclipse Foundation project. In this case, I’m not so clear about the benefits to the company contributing the initial code. Maybe someone from the project will comment.
Tim O’Reilly closed the panel with a suggestion that open source developers consider projects that make it easier to capture and process the vast amounts of unstructured data available on the net.
A recent article on InfoQ (Boost your Java Test with Ruby and JtestR) described a new framework for doing Java testing using JRuby. The article includes the following test case to highlight it’s features.
import java.util.HashMap
describe "An empty", HashMap do
before :each do
@hash_map = HashMap.new
end
it "should be able to add an entry to it" do
@hash_map.put "foo", "bar"
@hash_map.get("foo").should == "bar"
end
it "should return a keyset iterator that throws an exception on next" do
proc do
@hash_map.key_set.iterator.next
end.should raise_error(java.util.NoSuchElementException)
end
end
What is the point of this example? Is there really a significant difference between this example and the following JUnit4 test class?
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JUnitFactory is an automated unit test generation service from Agitar Software Labs. This article describes my initial experiences and impressions from using the tool to generate unit tests.
Installation
You can use JUnitFactory through a web interface or as an Eclipse plugin. I have only used the Eclipse plugin . It was very easy to install using the JUnitFactory Eclipse update site (more info). You can also download a file if you prefer manual installation. The JUnitFactory plugin is currently only available for Eclipse, but may be available for other IDEs in the future.
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Disclaimer: I’m not a CSM.
There’s been intense online discussion recently about ScrumMaster certification. The opponents claim it is damaging the agile community and they are pressuring the Scrum Alliance to eliminate it. Although the CSM certification is clearly described on the Scrum web site, some people believe the word ‘certification’ is misleading and will cause managers to make false assumptions about the significance of being a certified ScrumMaster. This is a reasonable concern. However, the certification opponents have not shown that this is actually a widespread problem. Certification has benefits and potential risks, but no one has shown any net damage to the agile community. The most evidence they have currently produced to support their position are a few anecdotal stories of busy, misinformed managers who thought ScrumMaster certification meant something different than it does.
As an outside observer, I see no reason why the Scrum Alliance would change their position on certification based on the unsubstantiated claims by certification opponents. Continue Reading »
