Lightweight talk appears on InfoQ

This caught me a little by surprise.

A while back Floyd from InfoQ.com mentioned that they had some video footage of my presentation on JavaPolis, but I never imagined it would appear this december.

Nevertheless, even though the frameworks put in use have been updated since then, I think the architectural issues are still valid.

BTW. I was informed by my esteemed colleagues at Nordija, that searching for yourself on the web is referred to as "Google Wanking".

Oh well.

James O. Coplien joins Nordija

This annoncement was made ealier today and it is great news. Nordija has been active on the agile development scene since late ninetees but this is a great leap forward.

In the past Nordija have done many agile projects for customers and also with customers on board passing knowledge while lifting part of the development weight. We have even done agile transformation, which by the way doesn't have a humane ring to it, with somewhat success. With Jim, I believe the organisational and communication issues in IT businesses can be even better addressed.

Check out the new Organizational Agility Program which I believe will help unleash the software development potential in IT shops and businesses.

Jim's background is well documented through various books and websites, amoung other his own.

This is indeed interesting times. Welcome aboard Jim.

Can Maven 2 poms rot?

I'm using maven 2 to build many projects for my employer, but quite often I have to deal with open source pom's pointing out dependencies that either no longer exist or pointed at a temporary version that has been replaced.

It would seem that many open source poms rot away, and in many cases I struggle with pom's from codehaus.org. This could be because I'm pointing at the wrong repositories but I've looked at http://www.mavenregistry.com and it seems that I'm doing it right.

For example, I'm depending on xfire and using spring this is what I need to depend on:

<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.xfire</groupid>
<artifactid>xfire-java5</artifactid>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupid>javax.mail</groupid>
<artifactid>mail</artifactid>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.xfire</groupid>
<artifactid>xfire-spring</artifactid>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.xfire</groupid>
<artifactid>xfire-jaxb2</artifactid>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

But it turns out that xfire-jaxb2's pom depends on jaxb-api-2.0-ea3 which can't be found. Looking at the various repositories, I can deduct that jaxb-api-2.0 is the closest version. Now, how do I pursuade maven 2 to use that particular version instead of the other?

After paddling around trying to make a direct dependency and excluding the wrong version, I came up empty handed. Using mavenrepository.com I found out that a new version of the xfire libraries was released, lo and behold the problem went away.

I guess that dependency was fixed but what if I needed the old version! I think we need a report broken pom service somewhere.

Presenting at TheServerSide Java Symposium

I'm am thrilled to be invited to talk about agile software development at the european TheServerSide Java Symposium 2006 in Barcelona (yes Spain).

I like that the Apple on the front on my laptop has light in it, but unfortunately it is not the only thing "light" about my powerbook. Running WebLogic 9 with Java 5, and deploying a small size (14 Mb) webapplication brings it to it's knees. And the festivities does not stop there - after redeployment of my application WebLogic stops working. Not even CTRL-C in the console works. The same application can be redeployed many times in Tomcat and JBoss+Tomcat before they too barf and run out of Perm Space memory. Running Intellij Idea is tolerable but it needs to be restartet from time to time.
In total Mac OSX doesn't perform well enough to do Java development and I seem to recall that Steve Jobs told me at JavaOne 2001, that OSX would become the best platform for Java....

Reviewing slides

After having read Matt Raible‘s comment on his presentations and the need for less slides more talk, I found Aaron Dignans note on branding very interesting.

Aaron writes that no shampoo producer mentions that their shampoo makes the hair cleaner than others, but instead they all focus on the chemistry content.

When I review my own presentations (last on the serverside 2005 in Vegas) I can see Aarons point. Technical talks quickly dives into details an quite often, I find, that I forget to state the (for me) obvious point: “this works better, easier, faster, higher and cheaper”.

Matt links to Stop your presentation before it kills again! where presentations like that are to be killed. Going through Kathys “Do My Slides Suck” test will be part of my future presentation review process – that is, if I had one….