Refactoring with Appfuse
Appfuse is starting a small revolution on the projects that I work with. Through Appfuse [article] I have been able to easily brief co-developers and architect types on the latest open source ideas in J2EE. You see, the projects I have worked on are “big enterprise” J2EE - Weblogic types, and it is hard to sell these people on new ideas. So, slowly we can implement Agile ideas and methods into the archaic processes and development that exists. Xdoclet was one of the first to make it in.
Lately it has been simple things like showing CVS can replace much more expensive CM repositories. Then throwing in ideas like CVSSpam. I’m also trying a JSPWiki and Roller Weblogger, but that seems to be catching on much slower than I had hoped (although using Matt’s professional looking redman theme has helped!).
My next step is Cruise Control. After a brief comparison with Anthill, it looks like CC will be our Continuous Integration approach. (Of course both with help from appfuse - CC - anthill).
All of this because of Appfuse! A big thanks to Matt Raible for being open with his experiences and sharing the code behind his project. This has made new concepts easier to integrate with our old project, through the clean organization of his ideas.
After Continuous Integration comes an even harder sell, which may seem easy to many of you agile veterans. The sell of test-driven coding and writing unit tests for all of our code (as I have mentioned before). JUnit, DBUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, JwebUnit, Canoo Webtest, here we come!
(This leaves Hibernate and iBatis to conquer CMP on another day…)