Learn IDE key mappings while pair programming

I'm a big believer in keeping the hands on the keyboard and minimizing the amount of mouse use when coding. Therefore, I tend to spend some time learning the keymappings for the IDE I am using. I'm most proficient with IntelliJ IDEA but I've also learned a good portion of the keymappings in Eclipse and Visual Studio+ReSharper.

I've been doing a fair amount of pair programming lately on my current gig, a good thing. One behavior that we have been practicing while pair programming is gently forcing the driver of the pair to use keymappings to activate various actions within the IDE. Neal Ford describes this in his book The Productive Programmer. Practicing this behavior while pair programming has proven very valuable to increasing our productivity while in the code base. Neal mentions the KeyPromoter plugin for IntelliJ; I've tried this plugin and I haven't become a big fan of it. Much easier if your navigator keeps you honest.

I've done this before with pair programming while working at Identix in 2004 with Hans Loedolff. Hans knew all the IntelliJ keymappings and could type at about 90 words per minute. He was an excellent pair programmmer.

nmon performance monitoring tool

One of the takeaways from yesterday's Tomcat Expert Series seminar was the use of nmon (Nigel's monitor), a curses-based performance monitoring tool. I had never heard of nmon before yesterday, so I was curious why I missed this tool in my IT travels. Seems the tool has originated out of IBM, originally on IBM's AIX Unix variant. The tool has been ported to Linux. More information here. If you're deploying onto Linux or AIX, it might be worthwhile to take a look at this tool and add it to your systems. Unfortunately it does not look like there's a version for Mac OS X yet. Hey, OS X is Unix too ;-)

Tomcat Expert Series here in Minneapolis

Attended the SpringSource Tomcat Expert Series seminar here in Minneapolis this morning at the Hyatt Regency. Filip Hanik of SpringSource presented. Filip is a major committer to the Apache Tomcat project. Excellent technical presentations on Tomcat and JVM performance tuning tips and debugging JVM memory and thread issues. Lots of good information around Sun's generational heap and garbage collecting the heap, If you get a chance to take this presentation in, you won't regret it. $75 USD for 3.5 hours and a nice lunch. Seemed like a nice turn out, probably 120 or so attendees. SpringSource seems to be picking up momentum in the JVM space with recent acquisitions of G2One (Groovy and Grails consulting and development) and Hyperic (web application monitoring and management tooling). Could be well positioned when the economy comes out of this funk it's currently in.

Adding GNOME to Ubuntu Server

I needed to add in an Xserver to my Ubuntu Server--Oracle 11g installer is graphical. I didn't want to play the redirecting of the X display back to OS X, so I did some searching and found this discussion. I'll reproduce the steps that I took. The forum posting has many different solutions.

Update your package system.

sudo apt-get update

Install the Ubuntu desktop package. This package seems to be a super package containing many package dependencies. It literally downloaded about 1.7 GB of software. Gdm is part of this install, so you don't have to do an individual install of that after the fact.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Gdm automatically starts the X system during bootup. To configure it to start, do the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

You may need to reconfigure your video card, keyboard, etc. To do so, do the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Server

I'm brining up an Oracle 11g install on Ubuntu Server here at home, and I had a need to install VMware Tools on the server installation before I got hot and heavy into the Oracle installation. Here are some great instructions on how to do just that. I'm using VMware Fusion 2.0.4 on a Mac OS X 10.5.6 host system. Seems VMware has released the source for VMware Tools and you can now get it from an Ubuntu apt repository.

Excellent Digg Dialogg with Trent Reznor

Excellent video with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Kevin Rose of Digg hosts and the questions are from the community, voted up on Digg. Excellent content around Trent's efforts on alternative music distributions and business models. He also mentions his interactions with id Software and John Carmack. Has some nice comments about the programming profession. Well worth watching.

Embedded domain components in Grails

The embedded component feature of Grails is not documented very well, in my opinion. Therefore, I thought I would create a blog entry so others don't have to spend the time trying to experiment with it to get it to work.

I recently spent some time working on a home project that I have implemented in Grails 1.1. Grails has a feature for embedding domain components into other domain classes. An embedded component participates in the domain class mapping to a database table; there is no join to an child embedded component table. In my domain object model, a TimeRecord is a domain component suitable for embedding. It doesn't live on its own, but is meant to be embedded as a reusable component throughout my domain object model. Grails has first-class support for embedded components, though it took me a bit of time to figure out how to get it to work. First the definition of the TimeRecord class:

class TimeRecord {
  TimeRecordUnits units
  BigDecimal value
 
  static constraints = {
    units(nullable: false)
    value(nullable: false)
  }
}

Nothing earth-shattering here. The reference to TimeRecordUnits is a Groovy enum. The TimeRecord class is not meant to be mapped to its own table in the database; it will become part of any domain object's table mapping whenever it is embedded in that domain object class. Thus, the TimeRecord class definition needs to reside inside some other domain object's Groovy file. Strange behavior, even for convention over configuration, but it does work.

Now embed the TimeRecord in another domain object class and that domain object's table mapping will also have TimeRecord properties mapped to it. Here is my Story class that has a TimeRecord contained in it:

class Story {

  TimeRecord estimate

  static embedded = ['estimate']

}

I've removed other Story properties to focus on the embedded component mapping. Grails has a static property named embedded that specifies the component object property that should participate as an embedded association. That's it. I put the TimeRecord definition in the Story.groovy file, directly after the Story definition. Everything maps correctly to the database and I don't get an extraneous time_record table being generated by GORM. Pretty cool.

I must say that domain object modeling in Grails is much, MUCH faster than it is in Java with Hibernate. I'm at least an order of magnitude faster with GORM in Grails than I was in Java and Hibernate. I'm hooked on Grails convention over configuration theme.

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Grails domain object modeling with Groovy enums

I had a need to use enumerations within my object model in my Grails app today. I wrote up a Google Sites page about my solution. I am using Grails 1.1 for this solution.

Having another look at Grails

It's been a while since I've really worked with Grails. I used it in 2007 for about 7 months, but we really didn't use it in a typical fashion, as the front end was done in Adobe Flex. 2007 was also fairly early in the life of Grails; I remember using version 0.5.6 when I started at the client.

I'm now building a sample application in Grails 1.0.4 and doing all the AJAX stuff in jQuery. I'm really impressed with Grails now! It's so much more productive than I remember it. Also, I have a couple of books that have been absolutely essential to getting me going with Grails again: The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition and Groovy and Grails Recipes. I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 8.1 for all my development and its Groovy and Grails support is much better than I remember it. JetBrains really makes it easy to give them money every year for a personal license upgrade for IntelliJ.

I haven't been super pleased with the Grails documentation on the Grails site and hopefully SpringSource has a positive effect on this issue in the near future. My development has been plowing ahead very nicely. I really like that I don't have to restart the application server for every little change. That saves a ton of time and has a positive effect on your ability to stay focused on job at hand. Very impressed with Grails this time around.

The amazing effect of Apple's iPhone platform and the App Store

Michael Tyson has a very relevant post about the amazing effect that Apple's App Store has been having on creative individuals who are driven enough to build applications for the iPhone platform. I'm around quite a few people who have iPhones. It's amazing to see and hear their enthusiasm for this great platform. Michael's post is a great testament that software development can be very rewarding. Great encouragement for those interested in looking at Objective-C and Cocoa Touch.

IntelliJ's support for @AspectJ pointcuts in Spring 2.x AOP

I came across a really nice feature in IntelliJ IDEA 8.1 (it may be in earlier versions, but I'm using 8.1). I've been doing some AOP work within Spring Framework 2.5.6, using the excellent @AspectJ pointcut annotations. Once you have everything configured in your Spring application context, IntelliJ will start to annotate where pointcuts are being applied within your code. The annotation/emblem shows up in the left hand gutter of the editor window, right next to the line numbers. Clicking on the emblem will cause a popup listing of all the advices that are applied at that particular join point. You can even navigate directly to the advice from the popup. Very cool. Eclipse has something similar with their AspectJ development tools (AJDT), but this is the first time I've seen something like this in IntelliJ, my preferred Java editor.

Versions, a native Mac OS X Subversion client

Just bought a license for Versions, a native Mac OS X Subversion client. I've been playing around with Versions in pre-release form and really liked it. I did have some troubles with previous releases reading my 1.5-based working copy, but that seems to be fixed in the 1.0.3 version of the Versions client. I really like the responsiveness of Versions and they have a very clean and uncluttered UI. Previously, I was using SmartSVN. Check it out, I think you'll like what you see.

Google Sync for the iPhone

Just came across a new feature of Google Calendar today, Google Sync for your iPhone...

http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

I immediately set this up on my iPhone and it works great.

Interesting Microsoft Research paper on the efficiency and effectiveness of TDD

From cLabs Blogki:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/esm/nagappan_tdd.pdf

Case studies done on 4 development teams (three at Microsoft, one at IBM) that have adopted TDD. Results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects tha tdid not use the TDD practice. The teams subjectively said that they experienced a 15-35% increase in initial development time after adopting TDD. Very interesting paper.

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TED iPhone app is very cool

I seemed to have missed the release of the TED iPhone application. If you're into TED, the iPhone app is done very well and the video quality is great. You can download it from the App Store.

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jQuery resources, tutorials, tips

If you're into jQuery, this blog entry has a plethora of jQuery resources, tips, tricks, and tutorials.

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Great jQuery documentation site

If you're using jQuery, check out Visual jQuery.  Nicely done. 

Managing stories electronically

I've been involved in this agile project at my client for some time and for the past three months or so I've been working in a group that favors a low fidelity mechanism for managing their stories--Post-It notes on a board. The stories, tasks, and acceptance tests are all written on Post-It notes. We are required to keep the stories and tasks in Team Foundation Server (TFS) also, but the group manages the iteration's work from the Post-It notes. The TFS eScrum template is not a particular good system for managing stories and tasks, so we tend to stick to the low fidelity method.

I really dislike this behavior. The Post-It notes are difficult to keep stuck to anything for the entire iteration. They drop off the board and mysteriously get lost. The Post-It notes are typically written in many different handwritings. There's no consistency in display of stories and tasks. Some of the Post-It notes are almost unreadable. The format of the Post-It notes is not consistent. It's difficult to write much on a single Post-It note. Reporting, well...

I'm a big believer in managing your stories and tasks electronically. Use the Post-It notes during iteration planning to facilitate teamwork and collaboration, but don't leave the stories, acceptance tests and tasks in that form for any amount of time. Get them into a tracking system that allows you to easily manage the stories and tasks for the iteration. I'm a big believer of a dashboard view that gives you a high level overview of all the iterations stories and their progress in a single view.

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Follow up on keeping fake objects simple

The Google Testing Blog has an a very timely article about keeping your fake object implemenations simple. I previously blogged about this issue. It's nice to see others have seen similar issues with the fake object test double.

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Programming vibration on the iPhone

Erica Sadun has a timely blog posting about how to get your iPhone to vibrate from within your iPhone applications. I've been working on an educational app for the iPhone and wanted to use vibration for user feedback. And now I know how to.