MikeWitters.com
My $0.02 on stuff.
OpenSource
It’s Alive!!!… the build server, that is.
Jan 1st
We were finally able to procure a build server so I spent some time over the last few days setting up Hudson for the first time. For the first project I used one of the projects we already have setup for automated building with ANT. I added the following ANT tasks and Hudson plugins: Checkstyle, FindBugs, Cobertura, PMD, Warnings, Violations, and Tasks. I tried JavaNCSS but had a few issues with it. I could get it to run using the ANT task documentation from the JavaNCSS website, but not from the javancss2ant documentation. It didn’t understand the output file attributes so it just printed the results to the console. It was probably user error on my part… I’ll try again someday soon. Read the rest of this entry »
Messing with Selenium and Watir
Nov 11th
Wow… long time since I posted. We have an application that is getting ready to go live for the customers of my customers and I wanted to do some load testing of the solution. The application was written by a contracting firm and was written using AJAX and RichFaces. The RichFaces and AJAX part adds complications to the conversation between client and server making it hard for tools to be used for automated activites. This posed a problem for me when I wanted to load test it. Read the rest of this entry »
Hibernating with WebSphere and a non-journaling DB2/400 system
Dec 4th
A few years ago, I worked as a consultant at a company that used DB2/400 as its main database platform. The company did not have journaling ‘turned on’ so their database platform did not support transactions/commit control. This did seem odd to me, but what I’ve found is that its pretty common that DB2/400 shops don’t use this feature. While this seemed like a mere oddity and an inconvenience for commit control, it actually caused a more measurable issue which was that we couldn’t use Hibernate, one of, if not the most common ORM framework. Hibernate requires transactions. This is a problem for anyone wanting to use a non-journaled DB2/400 instance… in particular me. Read the rest of this entry »
Open source application servers. A tough decision ahead for us.
Oct 21st
One of the cool things about the new job I will _officially_ be starting in November is that we are going to look to use open source tools first. The biggest choice we have to make on that front is which open source application server to use. We have the go ahead to get an environment setup and in-use for some pilot applications that are less mission-critical than most of the apps we have on our primary WebSphere servers. Now comes the time we need to decide which open source application server(s) we will use. Read the rest of this entry »
