Travelling while moving

2011-06-01T12:56:00+01:00

Last week I went to Fulda in Germany to attend the OpenNMS European User Conference. OpenNMS is an open source network management system which we make fairly heavy use of at work. The conference was an opportunity to catch up on developments in the project and get a sense of how it was being used. It was also an chance to make personal contact with a number of the developers. While open source development is typically conducted via faceless email and IRC it does help to put a face to the name every now and again.

Mindful of my experiences last year when my work trip to South Africa was affected by a certain Icelandic volcano I opted for an entirely overland trip this time. I left my house at around 10.30 in the morning and arrived in Frankfurt by 21.30. The journey was lengthened somewhat by a 2 hour wait at Brussels for the Deutsche Bhan train to Frankfurt. However I was able to find a suitably WiFi enabled place to sit down and continue work.

So while being a long journey it was considerably less hassle than going via plane. The amount of interruption to stuff I needed to do was limited to walking between platforms. As soon as I boarded the train I was able to open up my laptop and get on with some work. In fact I probably had one of the most productive days of hacking for some time as I was mercifully free of the distractions a typical day on the office throws at me.

There is a difference between the EuroStar and the DB trains though. The EuroStar trains are getting on a bit and the upholstery is a little tatty although the ride is still very smooth. In contrast the German trains are very well cared for, clean and with a silky smooth ride. I'm certainly looking forward to when DB over direct services to Holland and Germany from St Pancras. When those services start running I'll be able to the same journey door to door in around 6 and half hours which will be much more competitive time wise with those ash-prone planes.

Thoughts on Java

2010-02-12T11:18:00+00:00

I've been spending the last week hacking around in Java. One of the components of the product I develop is the open source OpenNMS. As I've mentioned before it's been lightly modified by myself to blend in better with our code mainly in the JSP department for it's web interface. Last week I discovered I needed to make a slightly deeper change to the code to export some more data to it's scripting interface.

While I was exploring the code base and scratching my head at some of the exceptions being thrown I thought I'd have yet another go at making my Java development environment a little more integrated than binding the build script to "C-c c".

So far I have a couple of observations about Java code. The first is that it never seems to do very much. As you navigate the code base you tend to find a lot of simple skeleton classes, usually working as simple adaptors between one framework and the next. Thanks to Java's strong support for generics and interfaces you often find yourself looking at a class wondering what else it might do. None of this is helped by Java's standard/deep/directory/naming/strategy/of/doom. My usual tools of a decent programmers editor and grep start to show their limitations. Java is a language that is designed to be serviced by a full IDE to help you make sense of the whole system.

Having previously tried and failed to get JDEE working I thought I would capitulate and try Eclipse. I blithely thought that given the fact it's the standard Java developers tool with a long development history it would Just Work (tm). I was to be sorely disappointed.

I tried several different versions on both my home Gentoo machine as well as various PPA based versions on my work Ubuntu setup. A lot of times it failed to start up due to some Mozilla dependency issues and when I did finally get it started I couldn't get any of the plugins to install. The entire Eclipse stack is designed around the concept of plugins and it seems every Java framework comes with it's own additional plugin for Eclipse. Without the plugins I wasn't able to get a working build or any sort of source level debugging. Eventually I had to concede defeat and bin the IDE approach and return to some tedious grep work and piece together the structure of the software by hand so I could finally crank out what in the end was a fairly simple patch. I doubt I shall return to Eclipse.

I did have a brief tinker with JDEE which at least installed better from it's SVN repo (needing a one line patch). However the documentation is a little sparse on how to import an existing large project into it's view of the world. Annoyingly potentially useful links like the FAQ referenced on the main site lead to dead ends. I never got to the point of seeing if I had a working Java GUD integration. I hope to revisit JDEE in the future when I'm a little less pressed for time at work. It's hard to work up the enthusiasm for plumbing in support for a language you never intend to use for fun in your own time.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - opennms

Travelling while moving

Thoughts on Java