I attended two sessions Thursday and both were great. First I attended ‘Demystifying Spring Security in Grails’ by Burt Beckwith. Burt created a few applications with differing security styles using Spring Security. He is a really good presenter who has an obvious understanding of, and passion for, the Groovy/Grails ecosystem. He gave me several additional things to consider when writing applications that use Groovy and Grails.

My final session was ‘Design Patterns in Java and Groovy’ with Venkat Subramaniam. What a session. Venkat is such a great presenter that it’s hard to do him justice in a blog post. He really has a lot of fun and makes the audience have a lot of fun, too. Not only was it really entertaining, but the content was great, too. He spent the session time discussion many of our favorite Java patterns and how they would be implemented in Groovy. It was really nice to see how the code was reduced a significant amount into really concise, expressive statements. I would recommend this session to anyone who has a chance to see it.

All in all, I am very pleased with SpringOne 2GX. It was a great conference. The speakers were great. The content was great. I look forward to attending again.

The first session I attended was ‘Extreme Web Productivity with Spring Roo’ with Stefan Schmidt. I am really interested in Roo. Stefan dived in to some of the web side functionality that Roo offers and I have to say it is pretty compelling.

The next session I attending was ‘RESTing Easy with Grails’ with Andrew Glover. This was a really good session. I liked seeing how Andrew’s take on REST with grails contrasted with his partner at Thirstyhead, Scott Davis.

I then attended ‘Advanced Gorm’ by Burt Beckwith. Wow. What an eye opener. Burt showed how very simple ‘tutorial following’ style of development can get you into some trouble if you don’t understand whats happening under the covers. I took away a few things that I’m going to checkout when I get back to the office to make sure we are doing the best way.

My final two sessions were about plug in development with Graeme Rocher. These were just what I needed to fill a gap I thought existed in Grails – reuse. I knew about the plugin ecosystem, but hadn’t equated it with high level reuse scenarios inside of our company. He explained in detail how plugins work and went on to demo creating a couple of twitter plugins. It was a great session.

Today is the last day and I have a few sessions lined up.

My first session of the day was ‘Clustering a Grails Application for Scalability and Availability’ by Burt Beckwith. This was a good session. It was geared towards Tomcat and MySQL which we are not using, but I still managed to get some good nuggets of information that will, no doubt, prove useful in our Grails endeavors.

My next session was ‘RESTful Grails’ with Scott Davis. I’ve seen several of Scott’s presentations and he never disappoints. He is an energetic and entertaining presenter who is really dynamic and has a great passion for the topics on which he speaks. He laid out some really great stats on RESTful APIs at Google, Amazon, and ebay that really speak to how REST is taking over. I’ll leave it to him to detail the stats.

Lunch was great. NFJS has some killer meals and today was no exception. We had some good lunch conversations with others who seemed to work for organizations very similar to the one we work for. I’ve found that most of the people I’ve talked to work for organizations in really similar Spring/Groovy/Grails adoption modes to ours. It’s nice to know we’re not alone in our discovery and struggles.

After lunch I hit the ‘Whats new in SpringSource Tool Suite’ session. This was a good session. The speaker, Christian Dupuis, talked a lot about STS’s integration with Spring 3.0 and the capabilities STS will have as far as code completion and validation.

After much anticipation I got introduced to Spring Roo in the ‘Introducing Spring Roo: Extreme Productivity in 10 Minutes’ session by Ben Alex. He did a great job giving a high level overview of Spring Roo and setting up the follow up session that will give a more in-depth view of Spring Roo. I have to say that Spring Roo is impressive. I like the loose parallels with Grails without the runtime penalties (although I’m a Grails guy). He explained how it makes sense how they both fit in the landscape without really competing. I can say that I will definitely look to use Roo on future projects where we can’t/don’t use Grails. I’ll be doing some playing around with Roo over the next few weeks.

The last session I attended today was ‘Grails for the Enterprise’ by Robert Fischer. This was billed as an introduction to Grails, which I didn’t need, but I went anyways. And I’m glad I did. Robert gave an overview of the case for Grails with some emphasis on the parts/plugins he knew well because he had either created or contributed to them. When the open questions part of the session came, Robert did a 5 minute demo on creating a plugin that, if there wasn’t already enough reason, made the whole session worthwhile for me. It was a great session for me… the kind where you get an answer to a question or two that almost makes the cost of attending the conference worth it.

After all of the sessions, dinner was served and a keynote ensued. After the keynote speech, another reception took place where I got to mingle with some more good folks.

It was definitely a great conference day. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Some Background: We’re going to offer an e-bill presentment application for our local companies’ end customers to use to view their invoices online. As mentioned above, we contracted with a software development firm to write the application for us since we have limited resources and wanted to get this out ASAP. Our contract basically has the contractors handing us WAR files as the deliverable so we have a lot of responsibility to test and assign issues to them. Since we don’t have a server administrator I get to play that role. Being the technical lead of the group who is responsible for the application I wanted to run it through it’s paces on our new Application Server infrastructure to do some load tests.

My tool of choice was JMeter because I have used it before and found it good at cranking up pure traffic to see how the servers would handle it. As a matter of fact, when we deployed our WebSphere Portal cluster close to two years ago we managed to put a hurting on our big-iron ERP system while load testing the cluster using JMeter. I tried using JMeter’s proxy to generate some tests but kept having issues with the login. Not being familiar with the application or RichFaces, I am having issues figuring out how to get JMeter to recognize session indicators and using them rather than sending ‘recorded’ traffic.

For speeds sake, I decided to look into alternative testing methods. I knew if I could do actual ‘click’ testing where it was more of a user gesture recording than pure network traffic recording I’d probably have better luck, at the expense of not being able to generate as much load.

I started with Selenium. It’s super simple and ultimately I bet it will work well. Unfortunately, I had some problems with the login again. If I manually logged in using the browser then ran the Selenium scripts it worked great. That wasn’t an option – how could we load test if a human had to get the login part over? I’m betting I’ll be able to get into the selenium scripts and/or APIs and get it to work well too, but I was in more of a ‘spike’ mode so I wanted to go with multiple options rather than spend a whole lot of time on a single option.

Enter Watir. I dig Watir. I have only toyed with Ruby, but now I can see myself using it regularly, if only for use with Watir. I downloaded the Watir examples and within an hour was ‘load testing’ the application – al least to the degree that one laptop can run Internet Explorer multiple times. I’d love to see something like this that could interpret the DOM without actually having to show the UI, but since I’m not working on a solution for it I’m not going to complain about it.

Since I have a solution using Watir (even if I have to fire it up on 5 or 6 computers simultaneously) I’m going to reverse course and head back to Selenium to see if I can get the login to work. If I can, then I’ll need to get something that’ll allow me to run the scripts in a multithreaded way to do the load part of load testing, but I suspect there’s already something like that for Selenium.

First, I really wish I could have gone to a session by Venkat Subramanian. He was one of the speakers I looked forward to seeing the most. But for one reason or another, each time he was doing a session I had enough reason to go to another session. Luckily my manager attended one of his sessions and gave me the details. My manager felt that it was a great session and agreed that Venkat is a fabulous speaker. He said he was laughing out loud at one point about a joke Venkat made that got a point across perfectly.

Second, Im super happy to have gone to all of Neal Ford’s sessions. The guy is a quote machine. He so clearly conveys his points that it is no wonder he is held in such high opinion in the industry. I also had a good chat with him about some ideas I had for our organization to adapt Use Cases to User Stories.

Third, I have a new interest in Fitness testing and Behavior-Driven Design. Thanks to Andrew Glover for his time after the session, I see a huge potential for BDD to grow into something big for design and testing over the next couple of year. I think its a little ways out, though.

Fourth… Continuous Integration is simply a must. I have skirted implementing it because, frankly, I was a consultant that dealt more on the integration side than the development side for so long that it didn’t seem to fit. Now as the lead technical person in a software development unit it is obvious that I can’t just talk about it anymore and actually need to make it happen no matter how much work it takes (Thanks to Jared Richardson for teaching me about technical debt).

Fifth and finally, attending conferences as good as this will empassion anyone with even the slightest interest in doing software development the ‘right way’ to go the agile route. I would recommend this conference highly to anyone. I have also have a new found interest in the other ‘No fluff just stuff’ conferences and really hope to get the rest of my team members to attend one soon.

Basically, we have a model that has several major components related to one another. The relationships in this model were described early as only existing from a start date, to an end date. These dates were literally java.util.Dates… each with a month a day and a year. Each relationship could start and end and then restart and end again based on (again) Dates.

After some peculiar discoveries made upon seeing some of the underlying legacy data, we determined that the real domain rule was that there weren’t really requirements for effective/expiration ‘Dates’, but more effective/expiration Year Months.

After much ado, we got reassurance from the subject matter experts that yearmonth-to-yearmonth was the real unit of measure for the effective ranges rather than date-to-date. I knew this would simplify the model a lot. There was some irritation at the late surfacing of this concept (since it was questioned a lot earlier), but we got through it. Now we had to make the changes. Since I was the primary author of the domain model classes I made the changes there. I spent about 3 hours and really felt the joy of having the unit tests to validate the changes. Over and over I’d change a test or two, run them to failure, change the code to accomodate the new concept of yearmonth, run the tests and see the wonderful green bar. Once I committed the new model to CVS, it was time to reconcile it with the 5 applications that use it. One by one we tackled them. A change here, a change there and the same comforting green bar.

I dont want to imply that it was easy. We had some heated discussions about the ramifications of the new time concept and some people downright objected to the meaning and differences between ‘isAfter’, ‘isBefore’, ‘isInRange’, etc. but we worked through those issues and we have a better model, and 5 better applications because of it. Not only that, but I think some of the team members had the light bulb turn on seeing the relative ease with which we accepted such a major change and successfully accomodated it in a very short period of time. They’re starting to understand the true meaning of ‘agile’ as it pertains to software development… this is a good thing.

There are ways around it, like creating proxy objects for the tools/frameworks, but that, too, can be a lot of work and can negate some of the productivity savings you get by using the frameworks. It’d be cool if in frameworks like Hibernate they’d offer you an option to use a factory creation method or a similar scheme. I’m not close enough to the source to know how feasible this is in Hibernate specifically, but from a generic standpoint, this could be pretty easily done and specified in configuration.

I wonder if I’m missing something on this. How do others follow the value object principle without giving in to the practical needs of tools and frameworks that they use. Take a look at the TimeAndMoney Domain Classes (Basically a reference implementation for DDD). They are loaded with rants about some methods/constructors that are only included for ORM solutions and how they break encapsulation.

There are ways around it, like creating proxy objects for the tools/frameworks, but that, too, can be a lot of work and can negate some of the productivity savings you get by using the frameworks. It’d be cool if in frameworks like Hibernate they’d offer you an option to use a factory creation method or a similar scheme. I’m not close enough to the source to know how feasible this is in Hibernate specifically, but from a generic standpoint, this could be pretty easily done and specified in configuration.

I wonder if I’m missing something on this. How do others follow the value object principle without giving in to the practical needs of tools and frameworks that they use. Take a look at the TimeAndMoney Domain Classes (Basically a reference implementation for DDD). They are loaded with rants about some methods/constructors that are only included for ORM solutions and how they break encapsulation.

In late June I’ll be heading to The Agile IT Experience. I’m pretty pumped about it. It’s been a long time since I got to go to a conference/training because I really wanted to… its more like a hobby trip than a work assignment. 

I’m not starstruck by ‘industry pros’ as I have worked directly with a couple of them that have been less than impressive in ‘real life’, but the roster of presenters at Agile ITX is filled with folks whose articles/books/podcasts I have been reading/listening to for quite a while with great interest.  The sessions look awesome.  Did I mention I’m pumped!

In late June I’ll be heading to The Agile IT Experience. I’m pretty pumped about it. It’s been a long time since I got to go to a conference/training because I really wanted to… its more like a hobby trip than a work assignment. 

I’m not starstruck by ‘industry pros’ as I have worked directly with a couple of them that have been less than impressive in ‘real life’, but the roster of presenters at Agile ITX is filled with folks whose articles/books/podcasts I have been reading/listening to for quite a while with great interest.  The sessions look awesome.  Did I mention I’m pumped!