I first came into contact with stackoverflow like many of you have by finding their posts in google searches when you need a quick programming answer. I was a little wary of the site because I thought it might be another roseindia type site. When I looked a little deeper I saw that unlike sites like experts-exchange, this site was a free community driven “question and answer” site. In addition, you can join and get badges for achieving various milestones on the site. Finally, a lot of answers are really, really good, like programming mentorship good. The Q&A’s cover the whole spectrum of programming. From specific language questions to general career questions, stackoverflow has it all. Anyway, I love participating, earning badges and answering questions. So basically stackoverflow is kinda like a foursquare except you actually do something besides show up for a badge.
Attended DevNexus 2009 in Atlanta last tuesday and wednesday and it was great. Neal Ford lit the place up in his keynote and his TDD session. Definitely one of the best bang for your buck in terms of software conferences. Most of which have not figured out there is a recession going on. At 185.00 , even a street programmer like me could attend. The Atlanta Java Users Group did a great job in setting this up.
Hey,
I love the concept. Seems a lot simpler than Amazon EMC2, which I am still having difficulty grokking. But for now only Python is supported, which seems … different. I’d love to see Java running on that bad boy. If you guys are of the same opnion, let your voice be heard: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list
Peace,
GJ
I love Maven, I like the way that it tries to define an infrastructure for building modularized applications. I love how it assumes testing is a standard part of the build process. My projects went from needing arial maps to finding config files to a nice standard layout that any many developers can understand. As a bonus, Maven also does semi-automatic dependency management for you. It’s a gift and a curse. The Ant build environment is very good for the “Constant Gardener” type of programmer that love to customize their build process to death. There an ant task for pretty much everything you want to compile, package and deploy in Ant. Maven, a newcomer, is still catching up. When I got my wsdl from Salesforce the other day, all the JAX-WS examples came with ant scripts. Somewhat broken ant scripts, but hackable enough to get working. I kinda wanted to still conform to the maven directory structure of my other projects, so I began fishing for wsimport in the maven2 world. Lo and behold, there was one. The Street was happy, I could keep it real and still “stay maven”. First time I ran the example from here, it simply failed.
Note to CodeHaus: I often find xml errors in your pom.xml examples. It's <build> </build> not <build><build>
The build failed because it could not find the jaxws-maven-plugin. This kind of error still surprises me. I can understand if a mainline < dependency/> fails but a plugin? I was kind of assuming that plugins were kept to a higher standard, at least in terms of availability. Who’s running this circus? Now that Web Services in Java is actually getting easy enough for the average blue collar programmer to work with, it’s sad that one still has to fish around for a JAX-WS based maven plugin. Did I already mention that the Ant plugin imported and generated my client classes? In other words, s*** just worked. Hours later, after pouring over mail lists, checking mvnrepository.com, going to java.net where the plugin was last seen, I finally had the plugin. It still didn’t work. Didn’t work on my wsdl or the Amazon WS example on their own site. So I’m ending up doing what I should have done in the first place, stop trying to use a screwdriver on a job where a hammer is a better option.
Refreshing my memory on the jar task as we speak.
Peace
GJ
