A month ago I volunteered to give a presentation at Ninjava (a Java User Group in Tokyo). At first it looked easy - the topic was "Java Project Lifecycle" and that's something I've been doing for the last two years, so I should have a lot to say, right? Well, this actually turned to be my first problem - after putting my thoughts on paper, I realized that there are too many things and there is no way that I can fit the whole talk in one hour.
Since everything looked relevant to the main topic and everything looked important, I figured that I needed to tighten the scope. I thought that I can focus on a minimal process and how we can use tools to automate the chores like building, releasing and configuration management. In the end, I put together this plan to build a small application, starting with a domain layer (actually that might be too big of a word for a class multiplying two BigDecimals), test, add command-line interface, release, add simple GUI, release, show how the whole thing can be split into 3 modules and packaged in different configs - GUI only, CLI only or both. Finally I was going to add a feature on the head and backport it to a stable branch. I planned to use the following tools:
- Subversion - version control system similar to CVS.
- Maven2 - project automation tool from Apache. The tool is build around the POM (Project Object Model). The POM is an abstract model, but in practice, it is usually an XML document which describes information about the project. The POM does not describe what actions can be performed on a project.
- Artifactory - repository management server for Maven2. Usually it's configured as caching proxy in front of the internet repository, sindicating its contents with the internal repo. The deployment can be done either through WebDAV, HTTP PUT or a convenient web UI for manual deployment.
- TeamCity (check out the EAP for the 3.0 release)- a continuous integration (CI) server from JetBrains. Apart from the usual watch-and-build functionality, it also features some interesting stuff like conditional commit (send the changes to the server which will commit them only if the build passes), duplicates analyzer and static analysis tool working on AST level, plugins for many different IDEs, etc.
- Jira - an issue tracker. Actually I should clarify - the best issue tracker I've used (especially with the Green Hopper plugin and the JIRA Client GUI)
- Confluence - a damn good wiki. In our department it also doubles as reporting tool.
- Fisheye + Crucible - a server indexing your version control system, with web interface for browsing changesets, files, revisions, filtering by committer and full text search. Crucible is an add-on to Fisheye, that lets you select a bunch of files and create a code review ticket, adding inline notes. Multiple people can collaborate, posting replies to the notes and proposing changes until the ticket is resolved.
The main factor for choosing these tools was that I am currently using them either at work of in the development of the Mule JMX Transport (BTW, all of them have free licenses for open-source). The first rehearsal was one evening when I stayed after work and went through all the steps on my workstation - it took me about 40. Perhaps 10 mins I spent looking up documentation on the internet, so I thought it was not too bad. On the presentation day I took a day-off from work, so I can have the time to set up Daniela's laptop as my primary demonstration machine (as I had already installed all the server apps on my poor Kohjinsha) and everything was going fine, until I started the dress rehearsal. After I chased Daniela out of the apartment, I went through the already familiar steps this time talking as I would on the presentation. Oops... it turned out that 15 minutes were gone and I was still at the very beginning (and I didn't even manage in detail explain what I was doing). Attempt #2 - this time I consciously tried to only say what I am doing and not what I am achieving or why I was doing it. This time the speed was much better, but I found out that I was getting these ~30 sec pauses when switching active files or when searching for symbol, which were ruining the whole flow.
A quick look in Sysinternals' ProcessExplorer and ProcessMonitor showed that the working set of java.exe is 300mb and it's paging like crazy. I stopped some services, closed JiraClient and all the other applications and tried again. This time it was better - it was also clear that this is not going to work. I was at step 13 and I was well past 1 hour in the presentation... The wall-clock was showing 4pm... It was to late to change the scope, so the only thing that seemed to make sense was to just go out, start talking and try to provoke questions, which will help me focus on something.
I showed up at Cerego around 7:30 (after meeting Nikolay at Shibuya station) and while I was thinking which kind of excuse should I use, when Peter proposed that I could use one of the machines in the conference room. There was nothing to lose, so I settled to set up an environment in the remaining 30 mins - I downloaded Maven, IDEA, JiraClient, JDK, set up environment variables and just in case checked out the JMX Connector. I tried to set up Jira Client against the JIRA instance running on the Kohjinsha, but for some reason it didn't resolve the host name, so I decided not to bother. By the time I finished there were about 10-15 people in the room.
I started talking the usual stuff about how some tools work well in some situations and suck in others (except SourceSafe, which sucks in every situation); how the primary criterion in choosing a is that they should help us get the job done in less time/risk and blah, blah.. (more about this in a latter post) and then I moved on to my current environment and to Maven. Then Curt had a question about the POM, then another and then just one more... well, I guess I have to thank him for this. Overall, we talked a lot about Maven, went quickly through TeamCity, just mentioned Crucible and didn't even touch most of the other stuff.
Now I realize that even my cut-down scope was huge and it was impossible to cover everything in one hour with enough detail. The other fundamental problem was that I started the presentaion without having "something to sell". That's why the whole talk was lacking direction, so only when I started "selling" Maven it started taking shape. It would have been better if I had picked Maven from the very beginning, so I could prepare more examples and not waste time with general stuff. In the end, people said they liked it and may be some really did.
Yesterday it came too me that a blog would probably be a much better place for all the ramblings I wanted to share, so here we are. This is the first post I'll try to publish at least one post weekly (hopefully this time I won't lose interest after the first few weeks)
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