Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Book Review: Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Mastering Open Source Tools including Ant, JUnit and Cactus by Richard Hightower, Nicholas Lesiecki I've seen this book a few times in bookstores, and have thumbed through it a couple of times. My immediate impression was that it didn't cover anything that we weren't already doing, so I left it on the shelf. I ended up reading it as part of a "previous work" review for a paper that's been submitted to XP Universe. In general, my initial impressions were correct: there's not much in here about Ant and JUnit (including HttpUnit) that we're not already using. The book gives a good introduction to each of these tools (and XP), but doesn't go into enough depth to teach us anything new. Reviewing these chapters might be good for a new hire before being assigned to a project, but it's nothing he/she wouldn't pick up soon enough. The chapters on Cactus, JMeter and JUnitPerf were more interesting for me, because I haven't used these tools. Cactus, at least according to the description and examples in the book, might be immediately useful to some project teams - it's a J2EE testing framework that tests servlets, tags, filters and other components. JMeter and JUnitPerf test code execution time and load handling, respectively. The last quarter of the book is documentation of the API of these tools, which is basically a waste of paper since it's all available online. This book is well-suited to people who are completely new to these tools, but it won't allow you to master them, no matter what the title says. Most of the book will just be a review of well-known principles for the developers here, but it might be worth reading the chapters on Cactus or the other tools before jumping in and trying to use them. [ss] 3:32:25 PM

See "Anti-Trustworthy computing" article reference below.  Here's today's example of just exactly how far Microsoft has to go. [gtb] 3:24:14 PM

"Anti-Trustworthy computing" Salon article. Although the tone of the article is anti-Microsoft (based on their track record) reading it made me realize that by setting the bar high for their own folks via the famous internal "Trustworthy Computing" e-mail, Bill Gates has articulated a pretty clear vision.  And an essential one -- for Microsoft in particular. [gtb] 3:19:02 PM

Tripped over this great history of the Web on the w3.org site.   Tim Berners Lee:  "I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)". The NeXT environment is another example of a great technology that didn't win.  It's at least good to know that it was used to create a technology that did. [gtb] 3:07:59 PM

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