rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Wednesday, 11 September 2002

Thought for the day. Linking JUnit test cases with your bug tracker. I wonder how easy this would be to do with JIRA and a Maven plugin? Should be pretty damn simple. I chatted to Jason a while back about writing a JIRA Service to read the POM and automatically generate projects / versions within JIRA. That would be wicked! (and should only take someone who knows the Maven internals an hour to do!). As for your CVS integration idea (taking the CVS log and files changed, and linking directly to the JIRA bug) that is much improved in 1.4 too! (details here)  As for generating JIRA bugs directly from a Maven test run, that's a little more tricky but still simple. KISS eh? A good way to do this is to get Maven to write a log file somewhere of the failing tests (with any detail you want). Then write a MessageHandler (new in JIRA 1.4) hooked up to the bundled FileService that handles the message (ie here it would parse the log file and create issues from it!). That's very easy to do. The cool thing about this method (besides the fact it uses a lot of custom JIRA stuff! :)) is that you could also parse this log file (XSLT for an XML log file?) to generate a simple HTML representation of the test run! (Now that I think about it - perhaps you could just get your MessageHandler to read the XML test results that Maven may be already able to generate?) If you're using Maven, it might help us figure out how to build closer integration between JIRA and Maven (and blogs) :-). Ha! Your wish is my command sir.  What other integration would you like besides the above? (which should all be easy to do!) 4:50:21 PM  comment []      Rick has more thoughts on why WebWork rocks. Another I'll add to the list, reuse of your existing actions, which Joe mentions in point 2. I've got a library full of them. If you haven't tried it out yet, ww is good stuff! Yep! Reuse is very cool. Patrick does a lot of that with his chaining I think (very fine grained actions chained together into a larger goal). Example: just yesterday I took a very ugly piece of JSP code in an old site, and replaced it with a <webwork:action> tag to use an action I had already written (used elsewhere) from within the page. It's still an ugly JSP page, but at least that little bit is clearer. Out of interest, one for the Struts experts - can ya do that with Struts? 4:28:27 PM  comment []      Lance is looking at Jelly and Swing. "I've got to spend some time getting familiar with Jelly, and all the XML to Swing flavors coming out." What did you learn? IMHO it would build be fascinating to build a simple Swing app using all of the different XML languages, and pure Java, and see what the different code bases looked like. 4:24:34 PM  comment []      David has aggregated some thoughts on Java Server Faces. A good read. I think JSF could be a very cool competitor to .Net webform controls, time will tell. 4:17:51 PM  comment []      JoeW (who is having a killer blog day today) is thinking of (already done?) replacing Velocity and JSP with "Jelly". He even remembered my JSPT proposal two years ago - man, ancient stuff! I'm interested to know why JSP tags are nicer than Velocity directives though? Directives seem so neat compared to tags? 4:15:52 PM  comment []      JoeW has come to the party with his reasons for liking WebWork in a post entitled WebWrock. I like it! In summary, his reasons are very similar to mine: actions aren't coupled to the web, the power of a command (Undoable!), the inversion of control, better customisability and extensibility and the ability to easily test. (In case you hadn't noticed, Joe is more than test infected - matter of fact I think since working at ThoughtWorks he may even be one of the major hosts of the test disease ) As for extensibility, this is something I forgot - so I'll relay a little story here. At first glance WebWork's configuration system is bizarrely complicated, but it is wickedly configurable. For instance with JIRA 1.4, we introduce i18n. Now you can customise the character encoding that WebWork uses by altering the webwork.properties file. That's cool, but we want to do it dynamically so our customers only need to tweak the configuration via the web. After a little poking around, all we needed to do was extend the Webwork Configuration class so that it checks inside our own ApplicationProperties object before delegating to the default WW configuration stuff. This is awesome! We can now over ride any webwork property dynamically from within our application, and it took 5 minutes to do. Also for those interested, AP is a perfect example of the power of PropertySet's - it's a singleton Caching, Aggregate PropertySet persisted by OFBiz (yes those are all different JavaDoc links). We use it for application wide properties and settings. Trippy 4:11:20 PM  comment []      JoeW is dabbling with AltRMI and asyncronous messaging. Sounds like very ultra-nifty cool stuff. I love the idea of async RMI calls. I love how so many bloggers are working on the cutting edge of Java technology. Makes me feel excited to read my aggregator everyday, just to see what everyone's up to. I almost never bother to see what the cavemen at The ServerSide or Javalobby are saying now 2:01:17 PM  comment []      I just purchased Trillian Pro because I am such a huge user of Trillian, and a fan of the company. As I always say, I'm willing to pay for something good. Paying for IM?! *gasp* Trillian kicks so much ass over the native IM clients, I'm happy to pay them to continue it's development. Also, anyone who has donated to Trillian in the past (even $1) gets a free copy of Trillian Pro (cost $25). Now that's cool. I'll let you know how it all goes - very exciting. 1:27:10 PM  comment []      A great article on Marketing Software in todays TidBITS "You may have an application, and it might be truly useful (rather than a candidate for MacHack), but you don't necessarily have a product or, more importantly, a solution. What's the difference? A pencil is a product, but it's not a solution." A good read for anyone in the software business. Also the first time I've ever read an article and actually contacted the author to query about their services. We'll see what comes of it. 1:18:38 PM  comment []      This is a test of the emergency blog-cast system... this is my first test post via MozBlog to Radio... Mozilla may be cool, but it took me forever to get this thing working. At least I can see what I type now! Bold, italicseem to work fine. The WYSIWYG text generation is very funky. Some stuff doesn't work without moving the cursor around a lot. <ctrl><b> doesn't work for bold like I would expect. Links are interesting (just select and drag into the mozblog area). I like the 'blog as a part of the browser' concept too. 12:42:11 AM  comment []