Category programming-java, everything about programming-java

DRb and Rinda for Distributed Computation Prototyping

Posted by Eric Stewart Tue, 29 Aug 2006 03:51:00 GMT

Earlier this year I ventured back from a very enjoyable year building and deploying a project in Ruby on Rails into the familiar territory of Java. Ruby has become cemented as a valuable tool that will certainly remain near the top of my tool box, ready for use.

Right now, however, I’m working on problems that are outside the realm of where Ruby shines (though I’m certain it’ll catch up soon enough). In particular, I recently had the need to research some ideas on creating a solution for a problem that lends itself to distributed computation.

Did somebody pull the plug?

Posted by Eric Stewart Fri, 17 Feb 2006 04:06:00 GMT

Is Alexander Muse right? In Brain Drain for Austin he muses that Austin is losing ground to our neighbor up the road, Dallas.

Another hi-tech company has given up the ghost and decided to leave Austin for the Dallas suburb of Plano. General Bandwidth, …

This loss follows several high profile losses for the city including Tyco’s departure last year. And one of several big wins for Dallas including Wednesdays announcement of QI System’s move to the city from Canada. I think we are witnessing a gravitational shift from Austin to Dallas – Austin will still be important, but the resources (human and otherwise) available in Dallas will irresistable for companies seeking a place to live.

Certainly Dallas is a much bigger city, but Austin has always had a strong tech presence including big players like IBM, Motorola (now Freescale), AMD, and National Instruments just to name a few. Not to mention the multitude of smaller players and startups. In fact, Austin just recently won out in a battle over the new future headquarters of Freescale. There is a ton of talent here.

Or is there?

By far, most of the jobs I see listed in the Austin market are for generic J2EE web/enterprise shops. I know there are companies with other software/hardware products out there. Has Austin’s talent pool become too heavy in one area? Are there just not enough tech workers? Or is it just the usual tax incentives game?

Maybe Alexander is jumping the gun. I hope not. If so, what can be done to attract more companies?

I’m not really sure either, but can someone check the plug just to be safe?

Posted in Austin, Software Development, Java, Misc., Technology | Tags industry, jobs, software, tech, technology | no comments

More Fun With Job Trends

Posted by Eric Stewart Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:33:00 GMT

My last post was so much fun, I couldn’t stop.

Fun With Job Trends

Posted by Eric Stewart Sat, 21 Jan 2006 18:28:00 GMT

This morning I had some fun creating job trend graphs using Indeed.

It’s not terribly scientific, and I knew what the results would be, but still fun.

Ruby, Maven 2, and software project management

Posted by Eric Stewart Wed, 28 Dec 2005 19:00:00 GMT

It was less than 2 years that I was managing a team of software developers that were responsible for maintaining a slew of internal projects. This was a Java shop, and not only did my team have challenges, every development team in the company struggled with build scripts (this meant Ant), project layouts, dependency management, documentation, publishing builds, etc.

In an effort to help my group (and those we interacted with), I was pushing for a uniform solution for our projects and preferably for all company projects. At the time the most buzz was around an Apache project called Maven that was created to address just the pains we were experiencing. We never got the approval to go ahead with its adoption, and suffered the same pains till the end.

Fast forward to present day.

I have been doing Rails development for the past 7 months, and most of those pains don’t exist. Much of this is because:

Rails projects have a standard layout and structure (again convention, where Maven would offer configuration)
Rails’ default Rake tasks do very good things for generating documentation, running, tests, etc.
throw in Switchtower and publishing your Rails app is a piece of cake!

Now Maven is useful for just about any Java development effort, while my examples are kind of Rails specific. If you’re doing generic Ruby development (or development in any other language) you have more work on your hands.

The point of my little tale is to point out that Maven has now been recreated as Maven 2, an effort to shed some of the warts of the original Maven implementation. An especially interesting development is the creation of a Ruby Mojo Support for Maven 2 which allows using Ruby to write Maven tasks.

The author of the Ruby Mojo plugin claims that Jelly (the xml based scripting language used for Maven 2) was no good at all, and the pure Java tasks of Maven 2 are better but often not the best way to implement build system tasks. I would agree that Ruby is probably a much better language for build system tasks.

All I can say is that this sounds like a huge step in the right direction for the right type of environment. We would have killed for this several years back in the environment we were in. I’d say this combination of Java and Ruby could by a killer project management solution for Java shops (and possibly many other platform environments).

What I want to know, though, is when a simpler more general Maven equivalent will be written in Ruby.

Technorati Tags: build systems, java, maven, ruby

Posted in Software Development, Ruby, Java, Ruby On Rails | Tags build, java, maven, ruby | 1 comment