Small victories

I’ve read a while back the famous Getting Real from 37signals. And I certainly liked the way they approach software building as something made by humans.

For a example, take the essay “Seek and Celebrate Small Victories“.

Well, I found that interesting. And I had a glimpse of the real benefit a while back, when I was able to divide a project into small, less-than-a-day tasks. So every day, we could go home by having finished at least one thing. An small (and quick) victory.

My small victory for today was just finishing teaching the first day of a course in the scheduled time and without problems, after some hard weeks preparing the materials. I left the classroom quite happy of the result.

So, if you have the chance/power to do so… schedule small victories for your team as frequently as you can.

Now with the AppFuse look… Candy for AppFuse 0.2.0

The new version of Candy for AppFuse is on the update site for those wanting to give it a spin.

New on this version:

• Use a classpath container for warpath dependencies. This also means that warpath jar files now come with source code.
• Progress indicator on the project creation wizard.
• Validate-as-you-type for the information provided in the wizard.

…and…

• using the AppFuse logo in the UI (blatantly stolen from their site ).

Grab the new version and report any issues you encounter. Ideas for enhancement are also welcome!

 

Never forget plugin.xml

I’ve spent half day trying to figure out what was happening with a the new Warpath Classpath Container plugin for Candy for Appfuse. It worked like a charm when launched inside the PDE, but when installed on a clean Eclipse install, it just won’t work.

I won’t tell you all the things I’ve done to try to narrow the source of the problem. All you need to know is that you really, really, really need to include plugin.xml in the binary build of your plug-in.

I think it is checked by default, but I seem to have removed the tick.

Candy for Appfuse 0.1.2

Although a preliminary 0.1.2 version has been on the update site for days now, I’ve made some last changes (organizing and cleaning up code) and announcing it today.

Some ideas floating around:

• Better Warpath dependency handling, hopefully with source code linking.
• Better error handling and reporting.
• Go beyond the archetype parameters and allow some more selections during project creation.
• UI for launching the web application (either through the jetty:run-war or integrating with WTP).

I still need some research to narrow down the scope of each task.
Also, Sarat Pediredla has shown interest in developing a wizard for creating all the classes/view files supporting CRUD. That would take you through the AppFuse tutorial in a few mouse clicks.

Finally, thanks to Matt for providing the link and to everyone coming and trying Candy for AppFuse. It’s on a really early stage and any feedback received (in this blog or in this SF tracker) would be very useful.