Jacopo Malanti has recently released an excellent plugin for eclipse that allows the user to identify areas for improvement in large code-bases. It is called X-Ray. It draws two styles of diagram:

Bookmark/Search this post with:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Mustafa Isik has produced a system where two people can edit the same file in a chat like way. Conflict are resolved in real time. This, Real-Time Shared Editing, allows people to work together over the network, this could be a really good technology for when teams work from different sites on the same project. Technologies like these might allow teams to be worldwide, making the most of talent globally on the same software.

Since the Hamcrest matching library has been taken out of jmock and placed in its own package it looks to be generally useful for the application developer.  Hamcrest support has now gone into the new version of junit4.4, along with some other interesting features. 

The assertThat assertion now takes a matcher which provides a better alternative to assertTrue improving the error report when a test does fail.  Here are some examples:

Moving back to working with C++ in visual studio can often be painful after working with Java. I find myself cursing the missing refactoring functions and code navigation that you take for granted in Java. Jetbrains resharper might be really good for VB and C# but where does that leave C++. Well recently we've started to use Visual Assist X which, dispite it's name, is a real lifeline and works like a dream.

I've recently been working in an environment supporting legacy webservices. What has surprised me here and elsewhere is how much or a black art TCP is. Seasoned system admins don't always know the weaknesses in the protocol, and often developers don't realise.

Send delays on small packets

Technorati have an interesting wiki for developers. It contains information on some of the APIs useful for blogging and information about Technorati's own API--- with a number of implementations.

I've been playing with SA4J a Structural Analysis Package for Java by IBM. This package helps with the analysis and maintenance of legacy systems, as well as helping to improve existing designs.

One real benefit of the package it helps unroll complex inter-dependancies between objects. Sometimes these "tangles" are not always easily noticable looking at the code. Just over time the system does not scale.

It identifies structural patterns in the system that hinder maintenance over time:

Tangled

A tangle is a large group of objects whose relationships are so interconnected that a change in any one of them could affect all of the others. Long tangles are a major cause of instability in large systems.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•